Never mind not having enough time in the day. Randy Boll didn’t have enough time in his year. Even after being named one of the top ten performers at his Fortune 500 company, he was gunning for more.
Randy told us he was hungry to reach his ultimate goal—to be No. 1 in his firm. He had always been a very organized and driven guy, and in the first few years in business, he had been able to crush his to-do list every day—which showed in his results. But recently, something had changed. The bar had been set higher, and he felt like there just weren’t enough hours in the day to get it all done—and even if there were, he had so many more distractions these days.
Randy decided to start small and incorporate one of the basic ideas we’re going to talk about in this chapter. He was going to do what we call “time maximization.”
Over the course of the day, Randy—like anybody else—had a few minutes between meetings, or some time on the schedule he hadn’t planned on because of a cancellation or an early finish. He resolved that whenever three minutes of time came free—and he found that this kind of pause occurred, on average, three times during the course of the day—he would ask himself a simple question. “What can I get done in the next three minutes?” And he’d consult the to-do list and knock out at least one important item from that list.
By maximizing time and attacking the “open space,” instead of allowing himself to waste the time, Randy was essentially creating nine extra minutes per day, five days a week. That translates into forty additional hours per year. This one simple change gave Randy an extra week per year to gain an edge on the competition.
It wasn’t a huge change, but it had huge results. Within a year, Randy broke the earnings milestone he had been dreaming about for all those years and was sitting in the top spot of his firm. He didn’t do it with time management. He did it with time maximization.
It might seem like a small distinction: management vs. maximization. But in terms of achievement, the difference is vast.
Traditional time management theories teach people how to do more with the time they have. Time maximization teaches you to create more time.
Traditional time management theories teach people how to do more with the time they have. Time maximization teaches you to create more time.
The ultimate limitation for all of us is time. There’s only so much time in the day, and you can only focus your attention on a certain number of things. Hundreds and hundreds of self-help books have focused on the concept of time management—ways to get your time organized and build your list of commitments into a manageable plan so you can be more “productive.”
They mean well. But most successful people already manage their time. To break into the ranks of the highly successful, learning how to manage time better isn’t going to change your life. Even if you come up with the perfect way to stack all of the pieces on your chessboard, you’re limited by the size of the chessboard. And, more importantly, if you focus your attention on stacking those pieces and filling up the board, you’re not necessarily creating a system that helps you put the right value on each of the pieces—or assign them the right amount of time.
Just because you have a lot of things to do and get them all done doesn’t mean that all those things were done the right way, or that you’re spending your time the way you want to be spending it.
Time maximization is very different. It is the search for both efficiency and productivity but also the act of prioritization at the same time. When you maximize your time, you’re creating more time to do the important things. You’re changing the size of the chessboard completely. It’s working the other side of the ledger.
A simple analogy would be walking down into your basement and seeing water leaking from around one of the windows. You could manage that leak exceptionally well by coming up with a system of buckets to catch it, and purchasing drying equipment to keep the carpet from getting ruined, and then making a bunch of circuits downstairs to check to see if more water was coming in. Or, you could figure out how the water was getting in and fix the leak. Both skills are important, but one is more important.
In Chapter 1, we started the conversation about prioritizing your commitments for the next day through Organizing Tomorrow Today, or OTT. Really, that process is about assigning your time. You’re predetermining what you will focus on the next day. If you’re able to take that one simple step and be ready ahead of time, you’ve made a huge step toward successfully maximizing your time.
The next piece comes when you are actually executing on your organization. There, you’re going to use three tools to maximize your time:
1. Attack the Open Space
2. Prioritize the Priorities
3. Trim the Fat
ATTACK THE OPEN SPACE
It starts with a simple question: What unit of time do you think in right now? In basic terms, the more successful you become, the smaller the unit of time you need to think in. Let us explain what that means.
In basic terms, the more successful you become, the smaller the unit of time you need to think in.
When you’re trying to manage your time, you look at a bunch of puzzle pieces and put them all together. That’s fine, but it doesn’t fully represent what happens in the real world. What really happens is that you have a collection of meetings, calls, emails, and other work to do during a given day, and most of the time those things don’t happen in nice, clean intervals. You might have a call you need to be on that starts ten minutes early, or ends ten minutes late. An appointment may cancel, or some other responsibility didn’t take as long as you thought it would.
What occurs when the “real world” happens and you have a soft spot of unscheduled time in between responsibilities? Most people exhale and spend a few minutes chatting with coworkers, surf the web, or make a call. Blowing off steam by stepping away from the work grind is fine, and it helps your long-term productivity.
But the success level you have—or the level you want to reach—should determine what unit of time you’re thinking in.
Think about what happens when you reach a lull in your day. Let’s say you have fifteen minutes before you have to go down the hall to a meeting. You might spend the time looking for deals on Amazon, absorb the latest celebrity gossip headlines at Gawker, or wander over to your friend’s workspace to talk about last night’s game. Maybe you have a puzzle game installed on your smartphone, so you tap away on that for a few minutes. Or, it might be time to check in with your mother, since it’s been a few days.
TOP 7 TIME WASTERS
1. Personal email
2. Facebook
3. ESPN online
4. The Kardashians
5. Online News
6. Shopping sites
7. Google searches
Those are all “normal” ways to blow off some steam during the workday. They’re probably so common that you almost don’t even consciously think about doing them. But if you want to be one of the top producers in your firm, you need to do some things that are not “normal.” You need to fill those gaps with something productive.
Take conscious control of those small gaps in your schedule by deciding what unit of time you’re going to think in, and resolving that if you have a unit of time that size or larger, you’re going to apply it to another one of the items on your to-do list.
In Jason’s day-to-day practice, the two or three most important events of the day—usually client meetings—are time blocked, as are important phone calls, meetings, and travel. His “open space” unit of time is two minutes. Which means that if one minute of free time shows up in the schedule, he’ll disengage and send a text message, check the baseball scores, or just close his eyes and recharge. If two minutes or longer of open space show up in his day, he goes back to his expanded to-do list and asks himself what is one thing he can get done before he has to head on to his next commitment. If after completing his one thing there are still more than two minutes of unaccounted-for time available, he goes at it again, attacking his next one thing. And so on until the open space is smaller than his two-minute expectation or the open time is used up completely.
The more successful you become, the smaller that time increment becomes. If you have a big staff or a lot of decisions on your plate, your window might be one minute. You can also create a wider increment, but you won’t see much of the benefit of this tool if you expand the time segment out beyond fifteen minutes.
If you’re a person who has never operated by a strict schedule (or you have trouble keeping the one you already have), I’m sure this seems like a severe or demanding way to operate. It’s an understandable reaction, and we won’t tell you that the transition to a more structured approach will be completely painless. Once you’ve tried it, however, you will be impressed by what you can accomplish with a few minutes here and there. When identifying your “open space” unit of time, be sure to choose wisely. If you are new to this kind of strategy, it wouldn’t make sense to set your number at five minutes or less. Build some success in from the start and pick a fifteen-minute increment. If you nail that fifteen-minute increment 90 percent of the time for three months, then you can think about reducing it to something like twelve minutes.
This new approach to time will certainly feel foreign to a lot of people when they first try it. But the only reason it seems foreign is because it hasn’t become a habit yet. You can do this, and when you do you’ll immediately see the benefits of attacking the open space.
You’ve certainly seen that person at your office who is always the one grinding it out late into the evening, long after everybody else has gone home. Heck, you might even be that person. This is obviously no knock on working hard, but if you’re able to intentionally deal with the unaccounted-for time in your schedule during the day, you’ll be able to get more work done in fewer hours. You’ll be way more efficient, you’ll get more done that needs to be done, and you’ll be able to go home feeling better about what you accomplished and spend more time with the important people in your life. You can win at the things that are more important than your job. It’s a little like being the kid who totally attacks his study-hall time during the school day so that after school he has more time to play with his friends.
Instead of emphasizing time in terms of how long things take, you’ll be changing the paradigm to emphasizing productivity.
PRIORITIZE THE PRIORITIES
As you start to build some momentum from attacking the open space, you’re probably going to start wondering how to choose what goes into those open spaces. It’s a different process than the OTT concept we talked about in Chapter 1, but definitely related.
To be clear, we don’t want you waiting until open time shows up in your day to then start thinking about your “3 Most Important / 1 Must” items. Those things should already be accounted for on your schedule as early in the day as possible.
Attacking the open space is simple. When you find yourself with a few extra moments, ask yourself what is the most important thing you can get done with the available open time window. The tasks you will do when you have those extra few minutes are not from the “3 Most Important” list but are other important tasks that you can now fit into your day even though they were not on the primary lists.
Most people in this situation will go to their to-do list and pick one of the easiest, quickest items to complete. Unfortunately, that runs counter to everything we’ve learned about prioritization. Remember, it isn’t about getting everything done. It’s about getting the most important things done. When the open space shows up, avoid working on those less important tasks and instead attack the absolute most important item you can get moving on within the time available.
The efficiency you gain by filling the unaccounted-for time is directly tied to how well you choose and prioritize which to-do items go into those spots. When you do it well, you’re like an NFL football team with a good game plan and a full week of practice ahead of a big game. If you don’t, it’s as if you told your team that they’d be playing a game Sunday, but didn’t have any details about who the opponent would be, where the game was to be held, or what time it was being played. The second team is pretty much relegated to showing up and winging it. Unfortunately, that’s the level where most people play in business.
We teach the students in our seminars to come in with a much more specific plan. They learn to identify and rank their priorities on two scales—the “macro” items and the “micro” ones. The macro scale is the list of categories themselves—prospecting for new clients, emailing, writing proposals, or having meetings with clients.
We believe there are two categories of productive behavior—short-term revenue collection (those activities that produce immediate financial results) and long-term revenue cultivation (the lead activities that eventually bring about a consistent supply of revenue-generating opportunities).
Let’s use an analogy. If you were an orange farmer, your short-term revenue collection would be going out and picking the fruit from the trees. The long-term cultivation of revenue would consist of taking care of the trees themselves, planting new trees when necessary, and so on.
Most people in the business world pay plenty of attention to short-term revenue collection activities. However, there’s a real weakness when it comes to prioritizing the long-term revenue-cultivation activities. Highly successful people have learned that short-term revenue collection and long-term revenue cultivation need to be emphasized daily.
The micro-scale activities are the individual activities within the categories themselves. For example, within the prospecting category, you’d have items such as asking for referrals, or meeting with centers of influence. The key is to start with the most important. Choose your best client to ask for a referral first, then move to your second-best client, and so on. Reach out to your most influential center of influence before making contacts with some of your less-connected influencers.
It’s easy to see how it works in a sales-driven job, but the tool is just as applicable in other lines of work. Let’s say you’re a physician. Along with short-term revenue generation (seeing patients), you might be thinking about the quality of patient interactions. The longer-term cultivation component might be concerned with engaging in ongoing training or meeting with centers of influence that could potentially refer you to new clients.
No matter what category of activity you are operating in, always begin with the most important thing you can do. If you are emailing, return emails to your most important clients or prospects first. If you are completing paperwork, always begin with the most critical documents.
TRIM THE FAT
Working hand in hand with prioritizing is actively reducing the amount of time you spend on things that you need to do.
Schedule bloat is one of the most common—and most irritating—issues facing people who want to become high achievers. In short, it is quite normal to allow certain activities in your day to last longer than necessary, but you can learn not to let this happen.
Spending more time on critical activities shouldn’t be the main objective. High achievers have learned how to get more done in less time. You should be trying to figure out how to do what you’re doing every day more efficiently—and how to make the time you spend on them more in tune with the overall priorities you’ve been setting.
There are a few methods for making this happen. First, it is essential to set your “game clock.” You must predetermine how long you will commit to a certain activity ahead of time. Once you set that game clock, you need to treat it just like the game clocks you would see at a basketball or football game. When the time expires, the game is over, and you need to move on to the next thing on the schedule.
Knowing that you have a time limit should be the first step in getting you motivated to improve your efficiency. The game-clock concept is extremely helpful when you’re tasked with organizing a meeting. Instead of telling people in a general way that the meeting starts at 9 a.m., establish a specific time frame for it—9 to 9:25 a.m.
When we set up meetings, we actually make it a point to emphasize twice how long it is scheduled to last—first when the appointment is confirmed, and again right at the beginning of the meeting. It lets people know you plan to honor the clock—and that you respect their time.
Group meetings are always the low hanging fruit in conversations like this. They’ve become an integral part of the culture and of so many organizations that it’s doubtful we’ll ever be able to completely get rid of them—and some are obviously necessary. Unfortunately, most corporate meetings are filled with people talking about work instead of actually working.
And virtually every organization does a bad job of really understanding the cost to the business when three, thirty, or three hundred staffers get together for a meeting. We’re not saying the cost isn’t worth it in some cases—because it certainly is. But when you think about the equivalent hourly pay for everybody at the conference table, and the value of the work they would be doing if they weren’t sitting in the meeting, that meeting’s opportunity cost is certainly more than a plate of bagels and some cream cheese.
If you’re in charge of a meeting, you have a lot of power to improve how that meeting is run. The first question you should be asking yourself is, “Do I really need all the meetings I am scheduling?” Even if there is one ongoing weekly meeting you could eliminate, that would be great progress. Maybe instead of weekly, you could meet every other week. The next step is to think about setting a game clock for each of your regular meetings, and choose one of those to shorten the clock by fifteen minutes from where you currently have it.
When Tom was at American Funds, his rule was that no meeting or conference call could last more than seventeen minutes. He would address one or two major points, outline the necessary action, and then get everyone back to work. Keep in mind that this was well before anyone had heard of TED talks.
Carve the meeting down to its three main elements—an opening, the main purpose, and the closing. In the opening, get right into the meat of what you want to accomplish by asking if anything important has changed since the last meeting. Then quickly transition into the main purpose by declaring the (very) short list of things that have to be accomplished (ideally, this would be one thing, and absolutely never more than three).
When the game clock gets down to five minutes or so, start the transition to the closing by asking, “What are the main takeaways from this meeting, and what is the next step of action?”
Meeting adjourned.
What if there’s no action to take? Then you probably didn’t need a meeting at all. You could have sent out a memo. Some quick tips for running effective conference calls:
• Realize going in that “distractions are a given.”
• Hook their attention with a quick story or pertinent fact in the first twenty seconds.
• Make one or two points, and keep it simple.
• Know how you are going to finish—before you begin.
• Limit your time to seventeen minutes; anything longer, and the distraction monster is likely to win.
Group meetings are just the most obvious opportunity area. Client meetings and sales calls are other activities in our schedule that potentially eat up large amounts of your time because of the obvious pressure to generate new business.
The goal is to earn new business and to keep existing clients completely happy with less time spent. Many of the individuals we work with have examined their sales meetings and reduced them from an average of sixty minutes down to forty minutes across the board, just by making a few adjustments in how they handle the relationships. Instead of rambling on, in an effort to build a “relationship” with the person across the table from you, approach the interaction the way a college coach would with a basketball player. We call it the “2-1-1.”
If it’s a client, start the conversation by complimenting two things the client is doing well. Follow that up by teaching the client one thing (within your scope of expertise) that will cause him or her to improve. Lastly, coach the client on a single, actionable element. Your goal with every individual meeting should be to leave the other person motivated to take action on something that will improve his or her life. Complimenting the client will deepen the relationship, and teaching the client will increase your credibility, thus leaving him or her motivated to listen and take action on what is offered in the coaching.
This process is very different from trying to become somebody’s friend.
We’re not suggesting that you run people in and out in an impersonal way—and obviously, this exact format will not work for every kind of one-on-one meeting. But in our view, the “relationship-building” pendulum has swung too far the other way in the business world. The best way to deepen relationships is to actually do your job with the client.
The best way to deepen relationships is to actually do your job with the client.
People like to do business with people they like, but they also like doing business with people who get the job done and don’t waste their time. If your financial advisor, mechanic, or brain surgeon came into a meeting and was friendly but didn’t make things better for you, how long would it take before you were looking for someone else to work with? As a professional, you have a responsibility to coach your clients to improve on one thing in every single meeting, or you have more than likely just wasted your time and theirs.
This lesson becomes exponentially more important the more you move up the food chain, because the people you will be dealing with will be operating under the same time and scheduling constraints that you’re reading this chapter to solve. Small talk is fine at a cocktail party, but it can be irritating when it happens during working hours.
As you use these three tools, it’s also useful to remember what Coach Wooden considered to be the most important key to developing a disciplined team.
Start every meeting on time. No matter who is meandering in late, reward those who showed up early by beginning on time. The more consistent you are with this rule, the more respect you will earn, and the more people will begin showing up on time for meetings.
FIXING PROCRASTINATION NOW, NOT LATER
With any well-intentioned diet, workout routine, or organizational plan, it’s easy to sit in the calm times and plot out the “ideal” way to do things. But, as Mike Tyson famously said about boxing, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.1
Any of the concepts in this book will only work for you if they account for what happens in the real world and give you strategies for overcoming the problems you’re going to encounter. Time maximization is no different. Even if you have the willpower and determination of a Navy Seal, you’re going to run into times when you don’t have the same energy to push and “change time.” It’s natural, and it’s called procrastination. We’ve all been there.
You see something on your schedule you just don’t want to do—either because it’s something unpleasant, like a conversation you don’t want to have, or because it’s complicated and time-consuming, and you know it will take time you don’t have at the moment.
And so you keep putting the thing off to later and later in the day, or move it to later and later in the week or month. Maybe you’re hoping it will secretly disappear. The reality is that you’re trading your time at the moment for time at some point in the future.
It wouldn’t be such an issue if each problem we confront every day existed in a vacuum. But work and time and life go on, and when you procrastinate and push things down the road, the things getting pushed join the other things on your plate at the receiving end.
As you get more behind and have more on your plate, you’re going to feel stressed, rushed, and out of control. That’s when the size of the job at hand—or the pure number of different jobs you have to do—can overwhelm you. It happens every day, and the most common response is paralysis. People get overwhelmed, and they just stop.
One of our favorite ways to attack procrastination is to break those dreaded activities into much more manageable pieces. It’s called “ask and chop.” You ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I can get done next?” and then you “chop” that activity down into the first step of action.
For example, if you have something to do that you’ve been avoiding, the first, small step of progress toward completing it will help overcome the “human inertia” we talked about earlier. Instead of allowing your mind to become overwhelmed with the activity in its entirety, emphasize only the first step. Rather than completing the entire monthly expense report, just get the first day noted. Attacking the first step of action creates confidence and puts you on the productive side of action.
Something about chopping the activity up into smaller pieces seems to free people from many of the stalls that keep them from making progress.
One of Jason’s hockey clients leaned on this technique almost exclusively to get into peak shape during one off-season and earn a lucrative contract extension. The player had never been very motivated when it came to working out, but had always compensated for a relative lack of fitness by being very well prepared mentally and strategically. He was a great “clubhouse guy,” beloved by his teammates and coaches, but injuries had slowed him down for a few seasons, and his strength and conditioning had become much more important.
After meeting with Jason one spring, the player decided that he needed to build another forty minutes into his physical training routine. But instead of letting his mind focus on all of the additional work, he would tell himself, “I’m just going to focus on getting one set done.” Instead of adding the forty extra minutes onto the end of his current routine, he decided to “chop” it up. He would do one set here and one set there. It worked, because completing just one set felt so much easier than adding forty extra minutes per day into his already packed schedule.
The player came into camp in the best physical shape of his career and was able to play more minutes per game than he ever had. After a strong regular season, he played even better in the playoffs. The team rewarded him with a three-year contract extension—a payoff both in money and in the opportunity for his young son to become old enough to really understand and enjoy his dad playing professional hockey. The father-son experience was literally priceless to our client.
To beat procrastination and create inertia toward time maximization, remember to “ask and chop.”
The Big Why: The more successful you become, the smaller the unit of time you must think in.
The Inversion Test: The average income in the United States is around $50,000 annually. The goal is to be much better than average. To do so, you must begin thinking in smaller units of time. Most people think in time periods of one week. Mondays are dreaded, Wednesday is hump day, and then there’s TGIF. Allowing yourself to think in longer units of time will cause you to get less of the most important work completed—costing you money and self-confidence. You will be busy but not very productive. Thinking in smaller units of time will enable you to maximize your time. That doesn’t mean you will be “busier,” but you will be more productive.
Thinking in smaller units of time will enable you to maximize your time. That doesn’t mean you will be “busier,” but you will be more productive.
Act Now: Take a sticky note in your office and write down your Time Maximization “Open Space” Number. This is the number of minutes, between one and fifteen, that will become your default trigger for knowing you need to get at least one thing productive completed when unaccounted-for time appears.
Some examples from our clients:
PRO ATHLETE
Time Maximization “Open Space” Number is 10 minutes. Anytime that 10 minutes or longer of open space shows up between 1:30 p.m. and game time, I will commit to getting at least one set of armband exercises done to keep my shoulders and elbows strong.
FINANCIAL ADVISOR
Time Maximization “Open Space” Number is 8 minutes. Anytime that 8 minutes or longer of open space shows up between 8:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., I will reach out to one potential prospect. This could include reaching out to a current client or client of interest and asking for a referral if I don’t have an identified prospect to contact.
LAWYER
Time Maximization “Open Space” Number is 5 minutes. Anytime that 5 minutes or longer of open space shows up during office hours, I will check my most important in-progress file and note if any action needs to be taken in the next 24 hours.