Improve Your Time Management Skills * Incedo Group

Improve Your Time Management Skills

Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have. – John C. Maxwell

We cannot control time, as much as we think we can and would like to. What is true is that poor prioritization can affect your productivity and those that don’t know how to prioritize well rarely reach their goals.

Let me tell you a story about a client. I am working with two partners. Both are responsible for revenue generation, both have responsibility for operational activities and both are wonderful people who don’t know how to say no.

When we began working together one of their goals was time management. They told me about their challenges with managing the client work, and business development activities as well as the endless list of things to do, as well as managing the team. Their goal was how to become more efficient and productive…how to get better at time management.

Here’s what they had done for years. They started with a list of the things they needed to do and kept adding to it and wondering why they were always behind and continued to miss commitments. Sound familiar? My clients do what we all do, we keep adding to the list somehow thinking we will get more productive. I refer to this as the platter syndrome. We start with a salad plate. When that isn’t big enough we get a dinner plate. When that isn’t big enough we get a platter, and then eventually a cookie sheet to manage everything we have on our long list. And each is piled high to overflowing.

How did I help them get better control of their time? Here are some tips that worked for them?

You can’t prioritize unless you have a plan. I’m not talking about making a to do list. I’m talking about a plan that includes specifics of what needs done (each task), how long you estimate the task will take, by when does it need handled, assessing whether it is a task or project that can be delegated to someone else, and using a calendar to time block the activities.
Effective planning leaves time for the unexpected. Things happen you can’t anticipate. Every plan includes unplanned time…time to handle the unexpected.
Everything takes longer than you think it will. Statistics indicate that most tasks take 50% longer than we anticipate. So if you think something will take two hours it will likely take three. Multiply that by everything on your list and it’s no wonder we are always behind.
Quit fussing about the unimportant details. What absolutely positively matters? What simply doesn’t matter that much, or at all. When I had my recruiting firm my marketing manager spent weeks on the design of a newsletter. I kept suggesting the design was good enough, but she thought differently. I finally had to say “STOP” it’s fine. Months later she admitted that the extra time she spent gave us no return on investment.
Don’t put something off just because you think you have time. When my children were applying to college I was bugging them constantly. Write your resume, get the applications done, go see the teachers you want to write references for you…the list goes on. They hated me I’m sure. But several of their friends did not get teacher references because they waited too long and the teachers were overcommitted. One of their friends missed a deadline for applying because he got sick and was unable to complete the application. Don’t put something off believing there will always be time to handle it.
Learn to say “NO”. When you say yes to anything it means you have to say no to something else. You cannot keep getting a bigger plate, platter, or cookie sheet. Before you say yes consider what might be coming up. Do you have a vacation planned or a conference you are attending that will have you out of pocket? Is your schedule packed with meetings, are you onboarding a new employee or do you already have a compressed timeline on another project?

There are other tools we have worked on during our time together and I confess, they still occasionally want to discuss how they can be more productive. But, as soon as it’s out of their mouth one of them speaks up and says WWFS or WWFD (that stands for What would Finkle say or What would Finkle do), and because they know they coach themselves to the solution. It’s huge progress and a big win for them.