Self-management, key to success
“There’s not enough time in my day.” As a business coach talking with hundreds of business owners, I hear that concern perhaps more than any other.
First, don’t get down on yourself. A Google search of “time management” showed 242 million hits. And that’s just one search engine. Clearly the issue is of concern to a great many.
Second, there’s nothing we can do to change the fact that we all have the same amount of it and we cannot speed it up or slow it down. Therefore, it is how we manage ourselves that separates winners and losers in business.
To put a finer point on it, the most dangerous adversary of business is poor self-management. It is also the danger that most business owners fail to recognize until things are getting out of hand.
Fortunately, there are easy and effective methods for self-management, so you will have more time to focus on the important things for your business’s success and your personal life too.
Three critical parts to managing yourself
- Planning: Many entrepreneurs think it’s gutsy to “fly by the seat of their pants”. As romantic as that sounds, it’s essential to develop a plan that assesses where you are and where you want to go. Make it for at least a year, five would be better. The goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-specific). If you have employees, create the plan with them to get input and gain buy-in. Review your plan at least monthly. While your plan is vitally important, don’t make it a complex, wordy thing. Brevity and clarity are the keys.
- Default calendar: In terms of managing your use of time, one of the most effective tools is to create a calendar of the things you should be doing during the critical hours of each day of the week in order to achieve your goals. “Default calendar” is a schedule of what you return to as quickly as you can following any unavoidable interruptions. It gets you back on track ASAP.
- Weighted Important Task System (WITS): When a conflict arises, WITS helps you separate essential from nonessential activities. Determine the priority of all your activities as one of the following:
—Urgent and important: All emergencies are urgent and important. But if you focus all your efforts on crisis management, you will take yourself away from your long-term goals.
—Not urgent and not important: Face it, if you really don’t know what is not urgent and not important in your line of work, you are very lucky or spending down your inheritance…
—Important but not urgent: These activities directly move your plan forward. They also offer you a choice: The less effort you devote to them, the less you stay focused on your own goals and future.
—Urgent but not important: You can’t ignore Email, phone calls, meetings. However, you do have a choice as to how to address them, instead of having them run your life. The more effort you devote to urgent but not important issues, the more you are like a hamster on an exercise wheel.
The choice is yours
The three steps to managing yourself are creating a SMART business plan, establishing a default calendar and keeping your WITS about you. The success of your business and life is in your hands. If you don’t manage yourself, you let others define your future and your fate. Taking responsibility for self-management gives you the power to make the best use of the time you have.
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Managing Yourself, not Your Time, is a Key to Success
“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”
-Michael Altshuler, architect, teacher
As a business coach, I have worked with hundreds of people in all sorts of businesses and professions. By far their most common complaint: “I don’t have time to get everything done.”
Yes they do.
Time is the only thing in life I can think of that we all have the same amount of. There is no way to manage time – you must manage yourself within the time you have. There are 24 hours in everyday and there is no way to manage your way out of that. So, to a great extent, how we manage our time determines whether you succeed or not.
Certainly there are a growing number of devices to help you manage your time. These include smart phones, laptops, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s) and tons of software. These are all well and good. But it is critical to understand that effective time-management comes from you-not from hardware and software and not from other external factors, like the economy or your competition.
The basis of effective time management is goal setting.
What you want to achieve should determine what you spend you time on. To be really effective, goal setting needs to be done in time spans and must be put in writing.
The first timeframe is long range, what you’d like to accomplish in three to five years. Then what do you want to achieve in the next year. Make yearly goals S.M.A.R.T.: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
The third time span involves breaking the 12-month goals down to the activities that need to be achieved over the first 90 days to be on track for the 12-month goals. And the final time increment breaks the 90-day goals down to the first week. Then measure the results from the first week and set the activities for the next week.
Repeat this process each week and at the end of first quarter, re-establish specific goals for the second quarter and repeat the disciplined setting of weekly activities and weekly reviews. Each weekly review and planning session should take about one hour Monday or Friday and should include the business owner and each direct management report to the owner.
The discipline of this process will allow the differentiation of “urgent” versus “important” activities. Important activities are those that lead to the achievement of defined goals and provide the most likely chance of achieving the desired outcomes for the business. However, many important activities are not urgent.
Pareto’s 80/20 rule applies here: 80% of the outcomes will be generated by 20% of the activities.
Unfortunately, urgent activities tend to be part of the 80 percent that only produce 20 percent of the outcomes. The process discussed in the previous paragraph will help to identify potential conflicts and crises and to make it easier to minimize the number of urgent activities.
The benefits of this disciplined approach to managing activities will be the measurable control of goal-focused activities and the actual completion of targeted goals.
This process will help make it easier to delegate activities to appropriately skilled staff and will reduce personal stress on everyone in the company from the owner down. And there will be increased productivity and profitability no matter what the external business or economic conditions.
A business owner in particular will have the feeling of being in control of his or her life and destiny. The feeling of achievement through personal discipline is very powerful.
Here are seven suggestions to achieve better management of business operations and more effective use of your time:
- Delegate activities to the staff with appropriate skills. Manage this approach through an organizational structure and individual “positional agreements” appropriate to the size of your organization.
- Prioritize your daily work by reviewing the next day’s important activities in a ‘to do list’ at the end of each day. You can maximize personal productivity by focusing on this list the next day. And don’t do what’s not on the list. Resist the urge to be distracted and to do things that you enjoy more.
- Handle each piece of paper only once and never more than twice: Don’t set aside anything without taking action.
- Clean up your desk and office shelves once a month. Categorize everything into four groups: Do it, Delegate it, Defer it and Dump it. Before getting rid of anything, ask, “What is the worst that can happen if the item was gone?” If the answer is “nothing,” dump it.
- Put your calls and personal interruptions on hold for one hour, two hours or whatever is appropriate to your task at hand. It is amazing how much work can be achieved by using this simple technique and not being distracted by a phone call or personal interruption. Most of these potential interruptions will not meet the definition of “important.”
- Learn to say “no.” This maybe the most effective way to maximize your use of time and is often the hardest word to use in business. Make sure that if you don’t say “no,” it is because the activity is important in the context of your role in the business.
- Make sure you set aside personal relaxation time during every work day. Don’t work during lunch. That’s generally counterproductive. We all need “battery recharge time.” Take vacations, particularly mini-vacations. The harder you work, the more you need to balance your leisure and exercise time.
The key to time-management is self-management, building your personal and business life around your individual needs and desired outcomes through planned and measured activities. Time management is, in fact, the ultimate in self-improvement because it is the foundation for achieving your goals in every aspect of your life.
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