Category Archives: Time Management

Turn Over My New Page

12 Sunday Mar 2017

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Walking my dog along the river is a four-times weekly opportunity to (a) moan about the fact it is supposed to be my son’s dog and (b) listen to audiobooks. Today I was re-listening to David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done, the time management classic which is one practical alternative or support to the deeper time management advice provided by Hobbs and Covey in their classics on the subject.

Today I was caught by a comment by Allen about values. He suggests that our focus on values, far from being a route to happiness as described by others, is in fact fraught with danger. It is fraught because that values-focus reminds us that we have so much ‘work’ to do in order to comply with our values – which in turn diffuses that focus and makes us feel as if we are going nowhere. He suggests, I suppose (try concentrating when your dog demands attention), that we should focus on tasks and thus comply with the values, rather than try to focus on the values themselves.

To paraphrase:

  1. Covey/Hobbs: Focus on the values and create tasks and goals that fulfil them.
  2. Allen: Focus on the tasks and hope/intend that they fulfil our values, and therefore us.

In one sense, while both have merit, neither is complete (and I believe neither of the authors would argue differently) because regardless of our values, we live in an interdependent world which won’t allow us to ‘only’ do the things that comply with our values. We have to do tons of things that we don’t w ant to do, don’t like and would avoid if we could. These things are usually known as ‘work’ in the professional sense and ‘family commitments’ in the personal sense. (“Oh, another parents’ evening – joy….”)

Which takes me back to my 26th Feb blog entry, which in a way leans slightly towards the Allen perspective. If you can’t design your life around your values – and few can – then you are compelled to identify ways in which the values you have, serve the tasks that are imposed. That way, if you have a job you don’t want to do, at least in doing it you can comply with your values of Service, Excellence, Duty, etc. This means fulfilment even though, in the first instance, you would not have thought fulfilment possible.

However, you can only know you are doing that IF you know what your values ARE. I have created a new page in which I have re-created that portion of my book which tells you how to do that. Take an hour this week to identify your personal values. It’s incredibly informative.

I very dare you.

Your Weekly Reminder.

05 Sunday Mar 2017

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All too many time management books make two mistakes. They are mistakes that quite probably result in a surprising amount of wasted time, and they are mistakes that quite possibly cause the first stress-virus injection of the of the day. The mistakes are that they:

  1. Advise that one should plan one’s day at the start of each day.
  2. Almost always focus solely on the achievement of the reader’s personal goals.

Those of us in the know have a different philosophy. We plan at the start of the week. There are a few good reasons for this. To stretch the injection metaphor further, let’s call them inoculations.

Inoculation 1. At the start of the week (or, if you are like me, at the end of the ‘old’ week), you set aside a time and place for the planning process. This means that instead of already being in work and surrounded by pressure, you are in a calm place of your own choosing.

Inoculation 2. You look at your set of written down values, your mission statement, your roles and your goals. This puts you in a frame of mind that invites the establishment not just of direction towards achieving your own goals, but also to reminding yourself that in execution of all your roles, your compliance with your personal mission/values will help you serve others in the achievement of their goals, too. Thus, you plan your week in the context of your whole life – work, family, community, etc. In other words, in a whole life perspective.

Inoculation 3. You don’t only make a list of to-dos. That is a way of creating excuses because you’ll do the easier to-dos rather than the effective to-dos. No, what you do first is you decide what goal- and work-oriented tasks you have (and I include appointments as tasks in this context), and then you decide when, in the next week, you will carry them out. You plan the appointments, of course, but you can also schedule those other important to-dos by day, or even by specific time of a specific day. If you routinely do this at the start of the day, each day, what you tend to have is a mental image of a limited amount of time to decide how you’re going to do ‘EVERYTHING!!!!’

Inoculation 4. As far as is humanly possible, do the things you decided to do, when you decided they’d be done.

Having done all of that, think about the result. You have a schedule that you designed, which tells you when you have decided things will be done. Now, of course stuff will happen to threaten the plan, but you won’t have the stress of juggling everything – in fact, you will probably know how to manage that stuff around your set priorities, because of the plan. You are in control, stuff isn’t.

To break it down into smaller parts, the plan is:

  1. Get settled, then reconnect to what’s important to you.
  2. Look at all of the roles you perform.
  3. Set goals for each of the roles you intend to perform this week.
  4. Schedule those plans.
  5. Execute the plan.

Sometimes, genuine emergencies will arise, and it is then, and only then, that you should plan every day. Plan weekly, adapt (if you have to) daily.

And at the end of a week, have a long hard look at yourself and decide if it all went as well as expected. You’ll usually find that it did.

For more, get this, HERE.

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You are NOT obliged to be stressed unless you wish to do so……

26 Sunday Feb 2017

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Let’s start with a quick agenda.

  1. Stress is self-induced. To a degree.
  2. Stress is a chosen response to stimuli.
  3. Work creates stress.
  4. We chose our work.
  5. Therefore, WE have to change to reduce stress.

The YB12 ‘Best Year Ever’ process includes, as do many training programmes of its ilk, input on overcoming stress. Like Canfield, Covey and others, we suggest that stress is often the result of our response to an event. The psychologist Dr Robert Resnick created the formula E+R=O, where E is the Event; R is our Response to the Event; and O is the Outcome. The premise is that events tend to be outside our control, while responses are wholly within our control. Maths students already see how the only way to change O, given that E is a constant, is to change the value of R.

People who suffer from stress have not, either deliberately or passively, taken control of R. There may be perfectly good reasons why that is, but there it is. It could be fear of an imagined result (as all results are imagined until manifest); or it could be a response to a real threat (although the assumption that the threat will come to pass or only have one outcome is within our power). Either we take control of it, or it takes control of us. We can decide how we face it, even if we cannot alter the course of the event. We decide, deliberately or by accident, to be stressed – or not.

Traditionally, work is the primary cause of stress, usually for the reasons given above. An unwanted consequence of ‘work’ causes tension, and we buckle at the thought of the negative consequence if we fail, don’t do enough, the results aren’t favourable, and so on. It can also be the sheer drudgery or perceived pointlessness of the work, or the repetitiveness of it.

Work, as a rule, is something we have chosen to do. We work bloody hard at getting a job, jumping through hoops in order to be posted to a role we want.

The point I am (finally) getting to is this: as we chose our work, and as we can choose our response to the ‘stresses’ (small ‘s’) of that work, we needn’t be stressed IF we look at our tasks in one of two ways. They are:

  1. Love your work.
  2. If you can’t love your work – love HOW you work.

I can best illustrate this concept by illustration. I was once tasked with some real drudgery in a role I HADN’T chosen, but one which it was felt I was magnificently competent to do. (My own fault.) I hated it for a number of reasons, which space won’t allow me to state.

But one way of overcoming the stress that resulted (and I was on the verge of collapse at one stage, I assure you – even I was surprised) was to challenge my productivity. I like measuring my productivity, so instead of ‘I have to do all this stuff’ I decided to think, ‘How much of this stuff can I do in a day?’

In the end, my record was 1,000 ‘tasks’. I admit I don’t ever want to do that again – I was knackered – but how ‘stressed’ was I when I told everyone what a lot of work I had achieved that day? Not at all. I had won, the tasks hadn’t.*

Look at the job you worked hard to obtain, but which now irks you. What about that work could you take control of so that YOU ran IT, instead of the other way around?

Do that.

 

*For more on that story, buy my book Effective Time and Life Management, available in Kindle or Paperback form from Amazon at that link.

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Values-based Time Management Means Achieving the BEST Goals.

19 Sunday Feb 2017

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“If a goal isn’t connected to a deep ‘why,’ it may be good but it usually isn’t best.” Stephen Covey

I hereby truly and solemnly declare and affirm that I want to run a marathon.

That is a true statement. Deep down I want to be able to say that I ran a marathon, that I did it in less than 4 hours, and here’s my medal on display in the cabinet with my bronze swimming certificate.*

Yes, as far as running a marathon is concerned, I really want to run one. But I am not prepared to make the effort.

The reason I am not prepared to is because such a goal is often a dream that is planted by the achievements of others, by a desire to demonstrate a high level of physical fitness when such a level is not necessary for achievement of any of my other goals, and ultimately by ego – I want to brag about it.

Let me emphasise – they would be MY motives, and if you want to do a marathon for truly personal, deeply emotional reasons you go ahead and do it, and good luck. I am not here to tread on your dreams.

The point I am making is that achieving someone else’s goals, or seeking achievement for reasons of ego, probably won’t result in the deep happiness that comes from achievement pursued for truly personal, deeply impassioned motives. On the other hand, if achieving those goals is a means to a better end and not ends in themselves, the passion for those longer-term outcomes will help you achieve the smaller steps on the road to that greater success, the success you really seek. And let’s face it, you’ll be fitter and better able to enjoy that success (provided you haven’t crocked yourself in the process). And the greater success will be the one that serves your values system.

Seeing the goal as something which serves your values is the essence of values-based time management. Selecting a goal that doesn’t dovetail your values system is futile – you won’t do it, or you will detest every moment spent in striving for it, and UN-happiness is not a normal pursuit, is it? (Masochists excepted.)

I suspect that a 10k running ability is ample for most of us who don’t enjoy sport for sport’s sake. If you can run 6 miles in an hour and have a sensible diet you’ll be fit enough for most professions. If you want to get fit enough to achieve your other goals, decide on a sensible level of fitness, pursue that, and spend the rest of the time on the actual objective.

Spend as much of your time as you can on getting the result you seek, and a sensible-but-lesser proportion of time on the ‘side-issues’ that serve that objective. Plan your time so that you maximise the likelihood of achieving the (your) Main Thing, without spending too much time on achieving side-goals that will serve the greater objective but aren’t goals in themselves.

It’s a fine balancing act and using a suitable, personal planning system will help. In that, you put your Mission and Goals to the fore, and plan to spend as much of your time not on ‘shoulds’ or ‘coulds’, but on MUSTS. The other two can be fitted in around them.

And be careful that those ‘shoulds’ and ‘coulds’ don’t become excuses for procrastination! (Next week’s subject.)

*I don’t have one of those, either. I am not a fish and if I am going two miles on water, I know people with boats.

 

For more on Values-Based Time Management, go here, or go to the Books page on this site

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Don’t learn TOO much. Find ‘The Way’ that works, then ignore alternatives.

12 Sunday Feb 2017

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I attended a talk last Monday by an excellent speaker, Jamie Denyer, whose presentation included a sobering observation. Once I got past his odd clothing choice – a bit hip-hop for a grandfather living in Swansea – I really enjoyed all of his talk, except that sobering bit. The sobering bit thrown right at me, personally. At least, I thought it was personal. I thought it was personal because the cap did fit and I had to wear it.

He described the individual who buys a personal development book, avidly reads it to the last page, then puts it down and “waits for the magic to work.” Then, when it doesn’t work because they aren’t applying it in a disciplined fashion they go out and buy the next one – and repeat. Then they repeat ad nauseum. He said that this is referred to in the trade as ‘shelf-development’, in that your book shelf gets fitter by holding up all your books.

Ouch. You should see my collection.

When I give talks on self-leadership (yes, fraudulently to some degree), one of the things I tell people is this.

  1. Choose your self-help book carefully. (I recommend The 7 Habits or Awaken the Giant Within, plus a couple of good time management books.)
  2. Apply the content religiously and don’t buy any other book!

There is a personal reason that I do this. I will sit there and read one of my books. I will then think, “This is the system I will now apply.” I will then see another book, listen to another trainer, see a new form, or just have something come to mind when I am walking the dog, and I start to think about how I will apply that instead of what I was already (supposedly) doing. As a result, instead of ‘doing’ I am perpetually ‘thinking about doing’.

The daft thing is – and Stephen Covey wrote about this in The 8th Habit – they are all saying the same thing.

  • They ALL say that taking responsibility for our thoughts is the key to a directed, patient, principled life.
  • They ALL say that having goals and a sense of direction towards a passion is key to a successful life.
  • They ALL say that relationships are important.
  • They ALL say that looking after your body enables success in the former three endeavours.

BUT they all have subtly nuanced alternatives to how to apply the philosophy to the discovery of a purpose and how to define goals.

I have suggested before that success is created by application of self to a simple philosophy.

  1. Know what you want.
  2. Manage your time accordingly.
  3. Communicate with clarity – in and out.

After that, it’s all about method, system and practices. For me, I always come back to Covey’s template because I understand it so well, teach it in schools, and absolutely believe in the systematic approach and principled teaching that it is. You could choose Canfield’s, Robbins’, Ziglars, Hobbs – whoever you like.

But just pick one. It leaves the mind clear for the important stuff. Then apply it with discipline.

Lift the fog, then you can go much faster.

05 Sunday Feb 2017

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In his audio programme, ‘What Matters Most’, author and speaker Hyrum W Smith describes the following situation. You are in your car, alone, driving along when, without warning because you weren’t paying all that much attention, you find yourself entering a thick fog. It is all-enveloping; like a pilot flying into cloud who loses all sense of up and down or right-way-up, the depth and intensity of the fog means you lose all sense of where you are. You can barely see in front of you despite your summer-time use of fog lights, and you have no reference points ahead, to the side or behind that can help you.

Immediately, you brake but still concern yourself whether what is behind will collide with you. You slow, terrified that something unidentified and ahead of you will threaten your personal safety. You are now in a dead crawl, almost stopped. Your progress is extremely limited, if it exists at all.

Suddenly the fog lifts. Now you can see where you are going, in absolute clarity. The way ahead is clear. You start to accelerate; you make headway and your mind is now free from the clutter of fear. In time, you reach your destination.

Is your life occasionally just like that?

Do you sometimes lose all sense of direction and find yourself slowing to a dead crawl, wondering what you are for, where you are supposed to be going, even convinced that even when you DO know where that is, you are never going to get there? And when the opposite applies, when you really know what you’re heading for and how to get there, doesn’t life feel great, like you have the moon on a stick and nothing can spoil things?

High self-esteem comes from knowing what you want, seeking it and acting in a fashion that is wholly congruent with what you believe. The opposite is an experience many of us have, where what we are doing is absolutely not what we want to be doing, or (worse) the values of those for whom we are expected to do it are in conflict with our own.

I know I have seem people I respect and admire start to follow a ‘political’ path that is wholly out of kilter with how I thought they were, and knowing that they were in conflict with those beliefs meant I was having to spend time challenging my own in order to work for them. Instead of working towards the vision and with the values I thought we both had, they fogged things with ‘political sensitivity’ and our attention and activity were diverted and slowed.

This was a hateful place to be. Situations like this mean you start work for pay instead of passion, when the economic realities of life are the only thing stopping you from telling your employer to stuff their hypocrisy and their job. It’s when work becomes a chore instead of a vocation.

A failure, or environment-imposed inability to act in keeping with your values and personal vision causes the worst, densest, vision-spoiling and therefore dangerous fog that could ever be.

Smith’s example illustrates just how important Vision actually is. The contents of my two books, Effective Time and Life Management and The Three Resolutions, include some serious arguments for developing your own sense of purpose. Or Google values-based time management / mission statements/ values clarification and read more.

Please. I don’t want to collide with you because of your own fog. I have enough challenges dealing with my own.

 

What you HATE can tell you what you VALUE

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

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What is important to you?

That is a question familiar with most clients of personal development programmes and coaches. It is a valid question, intended to help a client identify their governing values, the values which (should) direct their activities if they are to succeed in discovering a sense of happiness and purpose, and (from a time management perspective) where they should focus their mind and their time. Makes sense, working towards identification of what you want.

I have just returned from walking my delightful collie, Abby. Abby doesn’t visibly wear a watch, but she seems to know when she is due her daily walk so must have one on her person somewhere. However, the fact that she has started looking at me expectantly, one hour early, suggests she failed to put her watch back last October.

Anyway, I hate walking my dog. I love my dog, but I hate walking her. And it was while walking her, hatefully (can’t emphasise that enough), that I asked myself, “What if a good way of identifying what we love is to identify what we hate?”

I hate – people parking on pavements when it isn’t even necessary; dog walkers throwing their poo-bags in the river; people who don’t signal properly when driving (in fact, any poor driving standards, including limp-wristed steering); untidiness; any act of inconsideration that normal, respectful behaviour would normally counter, like NOT putting luggage on train seats to avoid the terrors of ‘being sat next to’; I hate being lied to – particularly by broadcasters who say they are there to entertain you but put adverts 6 minutes into a programme. Liars.

By analysing what I hate, I find myself discovering that what I value pretty much represents the opposite. I value order, high standards of performance, not wasting time (like walking a dog….), and compliance with rules that benefit all, like respectful behaviour towards others. And to a great degree, honesty.

So this week, as part of your values-based time management studies, look at those things that wind you the hell up and see what their opposites are. Then, ask yourself if those do represent your values system. If nothing else you’ll know why people p155 you off so much…..

 

BTW The Three Resolutions book is now available again through Amazon Kindle. I’ve reconsidered the model, and rewritten the text a little to more accurately reflect what the 3Rs represent to me, and how they could help you.

Get it HERE at Amazon.

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The Forgotten Skill.

22 Sunday Jan 2017

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I tweeted a while ago through @3ResolutonsGuy that after you decide upon your purpose, the rest is just well-executed time management and active communication. I have also discovered, with the help and guidance of several highly educated, qualified and wise mentors that ‘time management’, while a perfectly understandable marketing cliché, is better termed ‘self-leadership’. Communication, if you like, comes under the separate heading ‘interpersonal leadership’.

Having said that I prefer the term self-leadership, however, I find myself reluctant to use it because of something else I have observed. And what I have observed is that the proliferation of genuinely great self-help books, having raised the bar in the personal development field, seem to have inadvertently left the science of time management behind.

Some might disagree, but in my view while digitising communication was supposed to make life better, it actually seems to have hampered our ability to communicate using correct grammar, in considered and polite tones, and after deep thought. It even hampers speech. I am heartily sick of asking people why we are conversing text by text, or email by email, when simply speaking on the telephone would take a lot less time, clarify understanding and speed up completion upon what is under discussion.

In the same vein, while the new world of instant communication should have increased our ability to produce, I find people are no longer being taught, properly, how to manage the massive increase in expectations that the new world demands. They have the digital tools to manage time, but not the education that would enable better use of those tools.

Proof? Do you, like my many colleagues in a hugely digital policing world, keep a separate paper to-do list and diary? Yes? If so, you haven’t been taught how to manage time properly. You may think you are, but you’re under-utilising the potential of a proper, disciplined and systematic approach. And don’t think having a digital diary and to-do list makes you any more effective – you may just be digitally ineffective. You may be cutting edge, but just as lost. (See iPads…..)

Another thing I have noticed is that ‘managers’ and ‘executives’ get (some, occasional) time management training while the front-line staff, the ones doing the work and managing the multiple tasks and challenges, do not. How considered is that?

Hence the change of focus for this site. It’s going to be more about productivity and self-management than about self-leadership because most of us now know where we are going, but cannot manage, as well as we could, how we are going to get there. Including me.

I am going to start exploring time management issues, and invite you to read along and see if something I say improves your lot, and whether your alternative perspectives can improve my own. It won’t just be about method. There’ll be philosophy, theory and observational comedy as well.

Follow me on http://threeresolutionsguy.com or @3ResolutionsGuy and let’s see where we end up.

Where HAS the year gone?

08 Sunday Jan 2017

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In a blink of an eye, just over 1/52nd of 2017 has passed by, and we’re already back into the post-holiday routine. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the work that built up while we were in the pre-holidays procrastination period has hit us broadside on – all the stuff people put off ‘because it’s Christmas’ still needs to be done, but now it needs to be done alongside all the new work that has arisen as it always does, and always will.

How much of the stress we associate with the amount of work we have to do is wholly the result of our unwillingness to manage our time – or more accurately, ourselves? I’d argue that one of the major factors in our workload woes is our own resistance to doing things at the appropriate time, in the appropriate way, and to the appropriate standard. To a large extent, all three of those factors are within our Circle of Influence, but many of us – the time-strugglers – are unwilling to buy the book, do the course or just take the time to learn how to manage ourselves and our time to best effect. And it is in ‘post-break’ moments that this situation becomes more stark.

One big mistake is putting off the unrelished 5-minute-but-really-important task. Maybe a telephone call, maybe writing a letter or filling out a form. It’ll be a tedious, hateful job that should take 5 minutes, but because it’s tedious and hateful we keep putting it off. Then it suddenly becomes urgent, or worse it doesn’t get done until it’s too late, and we suffer the stress that urgency or potential disciplinary proceedings that ensue.

And it was all our own fault.

You can’t manage time, but you can maximise the time you have, and one simple strategy is to Do It Now! The time management experts all agree – a short task needs to be done as it arises (wherever possible), because doing so opens up available time for the more important stuff to be done properly. It clears space in your head, and it is an inoculation against the stress caused by procrastination.

Of course, Do It Now is not the cure for all time management ills, but I can state two things from my experience of applying the time management methods repeated in my book Effective Time and Life Management, available from Amazon Kindle HERE.

First, doing the quick things now keeps a desk and a brain clean, tidy, and available for creative thinking, planning and execution. Second, having created that time through applying the Do It Now philosophy and by creating and executing on properly scheduled priorities, life is less stressful and much more productive. Not just in work, but where leisure time becomes available because the work is done. And by planning that as well, life can be great.

Buy a book – preferably mine but there are others listed on this site – and apply what is contained therein.

And don’t say you haven’t got time. Read a book one Saturday instead of going to the pub. You’ll probably spend less and will definitely learn something that can improve your lot 24/7.

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Go on – I very dare you. HERE.

Purpose or Process? I know which I need to know first – and better.

09 Sunday Oct 2016

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“Principles are the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” Stephen R Covey

Are your working practices dictated in a seemingly endless collection of Codes of Practice, Memoranda of Understanding, Process Documents and Manuals of Guidance? Unless you are the employer rather than the employee, or you work alone, I’d gamble that they are.

I would also expect that many of those procedural guidelines are based on best practices, born of years of experience and the making and discovery of errors. They are created out of a desire to do and be better, or to prevent ‘worse’.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency among managers to look upon these documents as The Holy Bible, compliance with which is expected and deviation from which must be punished.

And the funny thing is that they were created to replace the earlier practices that had equally been the Bible until found to be wrong or incomplete. In other words, for some, the fact that errors can be made in all manner of ways and circumstances, including compliance with current practice, does not stop them absolutely insisting on compliance.

Practices change with discovery, experience and greater learning. Remember that, boss.

On the other hand, and looking at Covey’s quote (above), Principles never change. The purpose behind a Manual of Guidance, which is usually clearly stated on page 1, gets lost in the millions of procedural absolutes that follow. Which is stupid.

Clayton Christensen describes how someone goes to a shop to buy a ½” drill bit. The sales staff discuss whether the client wants a steel one, tungsten tipped, twist-bit or step-bit, brad-point or spade, Forstner or Auger, or Installer.

The client says, “I want to make a ½-inch hole.”

That’s the difference between a practice document, and the ‘job to be done’ stated on Page 1. That’s the simplicity on the far side of complexity – the purpose of the work.

When you know what the job is, the Manual contains guidance and practices that will help get that job done. But life and learning may just provide you with some new information that might make the job get done quicker and better.

And, ironically, it also helps to create the next ‘Holy Bible’……..