Tag Archives: time management

Hitting the Sweet Spot

25 Tuesday Aug 2020

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It’s been a while since my last blog entry, mainly because of a focus on a review of my time management book for former police colleagues. In the meantime I have made a few personal breakthroughs which reflect my own adherence to the philosophy of The Three Resolutions, as described and explained in my book of the same name.

I have lost over 35lbs in weight during the lockdown by dieting and using the infrequent good weather to cycle. The two efforts have synergised and now I can ride up hills a lot easier than I could at my baby elephant weight.

I completed my review of the aforementioned Three Resolutions, addressing a few edit errors and making some paragraphs a little easier to read. The fun part was re-organising the Contents page and paginating it, which will make it an easier ‘dip-and-read’ project for anyone who thinks they might benefit from a (relatively) simple but honestly hard to execute lifestyle philosophy.*

I also wrote and published The Way, a 150 page tome on identifying your personal values, and designing a life of integrity with purpose rather than one where you think you are (and might actually be) living with integrity but can’t be sure because you haven’t truly identified what you’re in integrity with.

And I went on a family holiday for a bit.

Now I am back at it, blogging, writing and teaching others who need input on what they have identified is, for them, a better way. And as I do that, I get better as well. Coaching/teaching/training is a mutually beneficial activity if it is done right. If it only serves the teacher, the motive is wrong. If it only serves the student, the teacher is in the wrong job. When both get better from the experience, a sweet spot is well and truly hit.

Where is your sweet spot? Are you doing the best job you can do, a job you truly love (even if bits of it cause neck ache), which serves others and is therefore, by definition, your Noble Purpose?

If you are – you’re already enacting the Second and Third Resolutions. Good on you. Now buy my book and understand why that is, and how you might be able to get even better at what you love.

It’s cheaper than 3 pints of cider and lasts longer. If you prefer the cider, you fail the First Resolution ‘test’.

Have a great week!

*Anyone who believes the words ‘simple’, ‘easy’ and ‘ultimate’ in a book title or description is probably also easily distracted by shiny things.

This book, here. Available at Amazon.

Why I write what I write.

28 Tuesday Jul 2020

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“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” Louise May Alcott

I sat in my chair this morning, wondering whether the books that I write will ever receive the attention and interest that I desire – all writers want to be a ‘success’ – and then I read the above paragraph and realised that success or not, writing my books is personally rewarding and informative.

When we write, there is a lot ourselves in the result. And not necessarily the ‘us’ that existed when we set out to create, but the ‘us’ that we became as we went through the process of researching, drafting, refining and finalising what was finally put into the public domain. I know from my own crafting of The Three Resolutions that I have become more disciplined, congruent, competent and other-people centred than I was when I began exploring the concepts.

Zig Ziglar felt the same when he wrote ‘See You At The Top’. He tells in its pages of how he weighed several dozen pounds more than a personal development speaker and writer ought to, and part of the writing process was to slim down and get fitter so as to be seen to be what he professed he ought. Yes. I did that, too. Think of me as the less fundamentalist equivalent of that ex-smoker who evangelises at anyone who lights up.

So while I would welcome some interest in my philosophical and practical musings on self-leadership, and my experienced and researched counsel on time management for police colleagues, I haven’t in any sense failed just because I’m not as famous as Stephen Covey and David Allen.

I won’t achieve their levels of success and brilliance. But I can aspire, like Alcott, to do my best to apply what I have learned and about what I have written. If only because of my firm belief that what I learned – about the principles and about myself – make the whole effort worthwhile.

What are you doing to get even better than you are?

Available HERE

Seven Habits – Day 12 – Habit 3 – First Things First

12 Sunday Jul 2020

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As Habit 2 is the habit of personal leadership, Habit 3 is the habit of personal management. The crux is that leadership is doing the right thing, management is doing things right. It is the ‘art of control’ and Habit 3 – time management – is the art of controlling events. How do you execute with leadership and vision in mind?

Time management addresses two measures – urgency (time critical) and importance (mission critical). In the 21st century, due to the immediacy of personalised communication and broadband, many of us have adopted an urgency mentality – it pops up, it must be read/assessed/done NOW! And that is all done regardless of (a) its level of importance and (b) whether it should ever actually be done at all. Habit 3 invites (demands?) that you use the ‘independent will’ in your Stimulus-Response Gap to make an assessment as to where, in a matrix, the task lies. The matrix looks like this:

I won’t insult you with a detailed explanation but as you can see, the most important things lie ‘above the line’, and this is the point at which you must decide where your task lies. If it’s below the line, it can wait. If it’s above, do it. If it’s above and to the left, do it now!

The best place to be is ‘Quadrant B’ and it’s where you do the preparation: planning, proper recreation, envisioning, etc. It’s where you ‘think’ so that ‘stuff’ like emergencies either don’t occur, (thus shooting you unprepared into Quadrant A), or are anticipated, meaning QA isn’t so uncontrolled. But you can’t prepare in QB unless you have done the work in Habit 2 to assess your mission, which requires work in Habit 1 to help you recognise you are responsible, that what you intend is in your Circle of Influence or Centre of Focus, and that you are seeing things as they should be (paradigm).

You see, now, how the Habits and basics all gel?

The way to plan is to find a tool into which you can place your TANC – tasks, appointments, notes and contacts (although the need for the latter has been electronically usurped since the book was written in 1989). You manage your time by keeping a one-stop shop for this stuff. Then, when you make an appointment, you record a note about how/why it was made, write down the appointment, and plan any preparation for that appointment in the task list so that it’s all done in QB before the QA appointment takes place.

There is a whole lot more in the book about time management but this page really boils it down.

Covey wrote a whole book in 1994 about interpersonal time management, i.e. on Habits 2 and 3, which I recommend. It’s called First Things First.

Tomorrow, delegation.