Making the Most of Time Management and Organization
It is so unsatisfying to work my tail off all day and feel like nothing happened. How many of you have had this experience: you get up early and head down to the office, you have an entire day of fire after fire that needs to be put out, you can’t remember what happened to lunch, and twelve hours later you arrive home completely exhausted, collapsing on the couch as your spouse says, “What did you do today?” And you shake your head thinking, I have no idea. Most of us who bust it, who are hard-driving go-getters, have had that experience. That experience is disgusting and unsatisfying; you feel like a stupid rat in a stupid wheel… run run run and get nowhere. To enjoy our work, our business, we must have a sense of traction.
Time management sounds to me like some cooked-up corporate training program by someone who has never really worked themselves. They have never faced an entire day of crisis after crisis. Yet when I apply these basic principles in my life I get a ton more done, and strangely I am more rested—or is it just more satisfied?
My friend John Maxwell says a budget (for your money) is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. Managing time is the same; you will either tell your day what to do or you will wonder where it went. The weird thing is that the more efficient, on task, on goal you are with your time, the more energy you have. Working with no traction, or for that matter simply wasting away a day, does not relax you, it drains you. Have you ever taken a day off, slept late, wandered around with no plan or thought for the day, watched some stupid rerun of a bad movie as you surfed the TV, and at the end of your great day off found yourself absolutely exhausted? Strange as it may seem, when you work a daily plan in pursuit of your written goals that flow from your mission statement born of your vision for living your dreams, you are energized after a tough long day.
As a person of faith I always kind of viewed time management for the purpose of productivity to be a business kind of thing devoid of any spiritual or personal implications. I was teaching this lesson years ago, and one of my young leaders, who is very bright, came to me afterward and asked the leading question, “Dave, do you know where the concept of seconds and minutes was developed?” I said, “No, but I bet you are going to tell me.” According to my young leader, who has a master’s degree in divinity, prior to the 1300s man measured time only in hours using instruments like a sundial. Somewhere in the 1300s mathematicians who were monks were able to do the calculations that now allow us to break hours into minutes and minutes into seconds. The monks did this mathematical work in order to enable them to more precisely worship God. So managing money and time well and viewing them as precious commodities is a normal exercise for all of us, particularly people of faith.
All of us can spend time doing ridiculous things that are a complete waste of time simply to avoid going outside our comfort zone. Dr. Stephen Covey explains in his writing that all of our time is spent in one of four quadrants, things that are:
I. Important and urgent
II. Important but not urgent
III. Not important but urgent
IV. Not important and not urgent
Quadrant I items are easy. Most of us who lead or aspire to be a leader recognize and do the important and urgent things. In business it is things like paying payroll or the team will all quit this week. Or meeting a production deadline, otherwise we’ll have unhappy clients. The type of things in quadrant I are the obvious tasks needed to stay in business. When you are just beginning in business, without a team to delegate to, you have to make the bank deposits, pay the payroll, turn on the lights in the morning—you wear every hat, or most of them. These tasks are necessities.
Quadrant IV items are almost as easy. Things that are not important and not urgent are an obvious waste of time. Most people reading this understand that. You may have some employees who, on their way to becoming team members, will have to be shown this, but generally very few leaders or productive people struggle here. Most watching of TV falls in this category, especially when done in excess like most folks do. Checking your personal Face-book or Twitter while you are supposed to be working qualifies as a waste of time. These are activities that people fall into and almost never intentionally set out to waste that time. The passive, unproductive moments and people all fall here.
Most people do not struggle with the first and last quadrants. It’s the second and third quadrants we have to be very specific about in order to win at a higher level.
Quadrant III is “not important but urgent” items. This quadrant can be deceptive because the urgency of the item makes it seem important, when in reality it is a waste of time. While sitting here right now writing this chapter, an important task, I forgot to close my e-mail in-box. Ding, ding; I hear I have an e-mail, and like a moth drawn to a flame I have to stop my important train of thought and find an e-mail sent by a “friend” whose personal purpose on the planet is to forward every “funny” or political junk e-mail to me. Might be important or funny in another life, but I am so distracted I just did something urgent but not important instead of something not urgent and important. You do it too.
As you grow in responsibilities and go through different phases of life, what might be deemed important can change. When I was a small child we were trained, with great thoroughness, in proper telephone etiquette. Back in the 1960s the telephone was the lifeblood of real estate agents like my parents. My parents had a very low tolerance for some child answering the phone and costing them a lead or even a sale by handling it wrong. So as a very young child I could answer the phone like a professional receptionist. I remember clearly saying “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir,” taking the message, and repeating the phone number back to the caller with energy and a smile. Often upon returning the call my parents would get a compliment on how polite their teenager was, to which they would reply, “He is seven.” Consequently, a ringing phone is drilled very deep into my emotions as something that is important. However, a few years ago, with teenage girls in the home, my social wife, and me relying on e-mail, I suddenly had a revelation: A ringing phone in my home is never for me. So why answer it? My childhood training causes me to jump when the phone rings, but given that it is never for me and we have a wonderful voice mail system, why would I want to take a message from one of the ladies my wife runs with every morning at the YMCA? So I quit answering the phone at my home. Completely. Sometimes it feels weird, but the call is never for me.
That is a great metaphor for spending time doing something that is urgent but not important. Ask yourself what you or some of your team members spend time on that is really not taking you to your goals. It may be that something is urgent and important enough to make sure it is done, but it’s not important that you do it. The answering of my home phone has been delegated to a person who the caller might actually want to reach, or to a very capable voice mail system. As your business and responsibilities grow in size you have to pull back on the scope of what you personally do. You have to spend your time working on things only you can do. When a business first starts you are wearing hundreds of hats, and as you get more revenue and team members you begin handing off those hats. My personal assistant acting as a gatekeeper allows me to work on things I must personally do. When we first opened all those years ago I personally did one-on-one financial counseling. But for many years I have not counseled a soul. When my best friends or even family members need help, they will get better help and quicker help with great follow-up if I assign one of my counselors to help them. I would be doing people I love a disservice by counseling them today. And of course, as harsh as it sounds, that is something that I as a leader have to delegate. Do you still cut your own grass but hate it? You should set a financial goal to stop that very soon. What do you want to spend your life energy doing? Are you still answering the business phone personally, still doing the bookkeeping, still typing your own letters, still booking your own travel, or still vacuuming the office? I have done every one of these things and I am not too stuck up or proud to do them now, but I have learned that typing these pages, or speaking, or mentoring a young leader is something that only I can do, and I can’t do it if my time is used up doing the urgent but not important.
Quadrant II is the important but not urgent. This may be the most important use of your time as an EntreLeader. The things that fall in this category impact the quality of your life and business possibly more than any other area. Examples of what falls into this area are exercise, strategic planning, goal setting, reading nonfiction leadership/business books, taking a class or three, relationship building, prayer, date night with your spouse, a day off devoted to brainstorming, doing your will/estate plan, saving money, and having the oil changed in your car. We can all agree that things that aren’t urgent but are important may be the most important activities we engage in as we look back at our life. The problem is we live in a society where the urge to be in motion, frenetic motion, at all times seems to be the spirit of the age. There is something about a quad II activity that causes you to pause and let a breath out, sigh, then engage in it. Activities like the ones mentioned above are the building blocks of a high-quality life and business, and yet because they are not urgent they seem to be some of the things we avoid the most.
The interesting thing is that if you avoid quad II activities, eventually they will move to quad I and become urgent. If you don’t exercise and eat right (because you just don’t have time) you will have the opportunity for time off when you need triple-bypass heart surgery. If you don’t have a date night and make sure relationship building is part of your month, you will get to take time for marriage counseling. If you don’t change your oil, eventually you will get to buy a new engine. These not-so-urgent activities, when left undone, have a potentially large cost, so budget time to do only quad I and quad II activities, avoid quad IV as much as possible, and delegate or avoid quad III things.
When attending time management classes or seminars over the years, I have repeatedly heard the quote “If you spend fifteen minutes planning your day on paper every morning, you will add 20 percent to your productivity.” If you are reading this book I doubt very seriously that you are wasting one-fifth of your day, but I would be willing to bet you have team members who do. So when you start properly managing time and teaching your team to do the same you will see a huge change in productivity and even more so in job satisfaction. Remember that traction equals satisfaction.
A very simple but time-honored method to manage your day before it begins is the prioritized to-do list. Each morning make a list of activities that need to be done today. Then look at the list and ask yourself which items must be done today. Put an “A” beside each one. Then look at the remaining activities and ask yourself what should be done very soon (and today would be nice). Put a “B” beside those. The remaining activities get a “C” and are great ideas that if not moved up to a B or A within a couple of weeks should be delegated or put in an idea file. Now look at all the A items and ask what is the most important single item or activity that must be done today—and if that’s all you get done, have you done the correct thing? Put a “1” beside that, making that A1. Then ask yourself the same question about what is the next most important, which becomes A2, and so on through the A’s, then the B’s and C’s. Of course we are now going to rewrite our list beginning at A1, down through the A’s, then B1 and through the B’s, and of course C1 through the C’s.
You now have at the top of your page the most important single thing you need to do today, A1. I call this steak sauce in honor of A1 steak sauce. Put some sauce on your steak—your life—by spending your precious moments on this planet doing important work instead of reading junk e-mails. As you start your day with your prioritized to-do list, sometime in the first hour you will be given a test. You will look up, and leaning against your door with a coffee cup will be a coworker or team member with a “problem” or a distraction. You must train yourself to look at them and ask yourself, Are they steak sauce? Is their problem more important—not more urgent, but more important—than your A1? Usually not.
When our company was young and there were about ten of us, I had a young lady in sales who always showed up at my door when the copier jammed. It took a good while for me to train myself not to react to her frustration and run to fix the copier but instead get her to find someone else, anyone else, to handle it. On the other hand, a couple of years ago I was at my desk first thing one morning, having finished my little list, when my human resources director appeared at my door telling me an ambulance was on the way because one of the guys on another floor had passed out. Obviously this was more important than virtually any A1 I might have had on my list, so I went and stood by our guy, who had come to. Good news: even though they took him away in the ambulance, he was fine, just a sugar thing. Then it was, as Brian Tracy says, “back to the list.”
When you have your day carefully planned, it gives you a plumb line, a guidance and measurement mechanism to evaluate interruptions and a place to come back to after the interruption if it was warranted.
As a young entrepreneur, before I became an EntreLeader, I often tried to manage results. I would do things like try to get sales revenues up or try to get team morale up or get profits up. I finally realized that results are generated by activities. If I manage my activities then the results I want occur. If my sales team makes more calls, has a better product, and serves customers better, the natural result is increased revenues. If we watch expenses like a hawk, creating a team culture that hates unnecessary expenses while we increase revenues, the natural result of those activities is increased profit. If I want team morale to be up I need to engage in activities like being very careful with how each team member’s situation is handled, and the result is higher morale. Be careful in your management of your time and your team’s time that the activities you engage in are the ones that cause the result you want. Don’t work on the symptom; attack the problem that caused the symptom.
I have managed my time from the simple prioritized to-do list since I was in my teens. I was trained in this technique early, so I quickly lose patience with people who waste time. There is a time to relax with a good book and a time for recreation, which is good. But the person who walks the office with a coffee cup like a scene out of Office Space and whose sole reason for existence on the planet is to slow everyone else down will become very aggravating to you and your team once you increase your productivity and are aware of every precious minute.
Years ago I had a guy working on our team who was a great guy. Actually a hard worker, when there was work to do. But he is one of those people who must have human interaction, a lot of human interaction. So when he wasn’t busy he would show up at my door and ask if I had a minute; thirty minutes later he still hadn’t gotten to the point. I finally hired someone to keep him booked. He stayed busy doing a great job and left me alone. I am really not that antisocial, but like you I have a lot to do in a given day and people who are time wasters suck the lifeblood out of you and your company. Think about the financial implications: you are paying payroll for the time waster and for the person they are interrupting.
Some people are not quite such capital offenders against time and are more casual in their waste. These people can be repelled by your productivity. If your feet are moving, you are busy, your calendar is full, then the guy with the football story knows he has to wait. For purposes of communication we keep my calendar on Outlook, where my assistant can view it and change it, and my wife and several people in the company can view it on “Read Only” so they can find some time to connect with me on things we are working on. I keep a forty-two-inch flat-screen over my conference table in my office with the Outlook file open and my calendar on it. I am very busy so the calendar is full months ahead. This had an unintended consequence with a casual time waster. I don’t now, but I used to budget some of my time to mentor young leaders in the community on a one-time basis, or some even a few times. I had a young leader wannabe request to meet with me to discuss how to grow his nonprofit ministry, so I agreed. My assistant is kind but very clear about meeting times and the fact that there is likely something happening on my schedule before and after, so the meeting will run on time. We had thirty minutes scheduled, so the young man sat down and for seventeen minutes discussed football. Then something interesting happened. He looked up at that flat-screen and saw my calendar. A lightbulb went on and he said, “Wow, you are very busy, we better get to the point.” Which is what I had been thinking for the last seventeen minutes. Then we had a very productive thirteen-minute meeting. My productivity encouraged him to be more productive. That will work in your organization as well.
When your organization reaches the size where meetings are necessary in order to work on projects and to create quality communication, you will quickly learn to hate group meetings if you don’t manage them very carefully. Have you ever been in a meeting with a few people where the reason for the meeting had been handled but everyone sat there and kept talking about nothing? When someone is not picking up the verbal cues that the meeting is over, you may have to resort to the stand-up technique. When the meeting is over but no one is admitting it, stand up. This is a little rude, but so is some goober sitting in your office burning daylight. When you stand up, you will see the meeting end and people will begin packing up their stuff and heading toward the door. If standing up doesn’t do it then start walking toward the door; even the biggest clown will then get it and follow you out.
If you hate meetings because you think they are a waste, then something has to change. My friend Patrick Lencioni wrote a great book entitled Death by Meeting that has some great suggestions. Several of my leaders read this book and demanded we change some of our meeting processes. I currently have twenty-three people on what we call our Leadership Council. These are department VPs and other key leaders in the company. Once a month we come together to discuss anything and everything about our organization and where it is going. These people are a band of brothers and sisters. We have fought in the trenches together for an average of ten years—some for less time, some more time. We share a close camaraderie and bond. Often a Leadership Council meeting would turn into laughing, enjoying each other’s company, and even telling old war stories. All of those things are good, but that was not the stated purpose of our gathering. As one of my EVPs pointed out, add up the pay in that room by the hour and then try to be excited about wasting an hour. Yuck, that will make your stomach turn. So now the only thing discussed at Leadership Council is what is on the agenda. Anyone on the council can put anything on the agenda up to an hour before the meeting, but we stick to the agenda. Last night we had a Leadership Council meeting that lasted only thirty-eight minutes, so we went home early to our families. Wow, I love a plan. I don’t mind if those meetings run long as long as we are not just hanging out. Hanging out drives my leadership team crazy.
When scheduling a meeting, take time to prepare for the meeting. Too many times we go into a meeting and wing it. If you are going to invest valuable time and money by gathering people together, have an agenda and be prepared to present your ideas. It is almost as if each meeting needs its own mission statement; if nothing else, it certainly needs a stated goal. As solutions are reached assign the follow-up to a particular person by a particular time. It is very frustrating and demotivating to your team to participate in meetings where ideas are put forth and solutions proposed that are never acted on. It starts to feel like the meetings are a waste of time, because the meetings are a waste of time.
Try different styles of meetings. I have one VP who takes his key people on a ride in his pickup out in the country looking at farmland while they talk. He runs one of the most profitable departments in my company, so there may be something to this. We have a coffee shop in our lobby where I see a lot of team meetings happening. Certainly a quick run for some ice cream can encourage creativity to bust loose. If you are doing a leadership retreat or brainstorming session, do it off-site to cause new thoughts to enter the discussion. These things seem obvious but since I am a creature of habit I will sit in the same place having the same discussion and won’t figure out why we get no new answers. Silly.
As I mentioned, my calendar is kept by my assistant on Outlook and readable by others. My e-mail, contacts, and calendar are accessible by computer and smart phone 24/7 on the road, at home, and at the office. I am never without this access unless I choose to be. This is really efficient, even when it comes to my wife planning a dinner party. She can look and see six months out what nights we have free.
In a small-business setting there are generally two types of technological failures. One type of failure is the person who resists technology and doesn’t use the huge time-saving benefits of electronic calendars, e-mail, and great stuff like budgeting tools. I have a friend who is a custom home builder who runs all his estimating, budgeting, and scheduling on his smart phone. His office is the hood of his pickup. I know another builder whose idea of running a job budget is a small personal checking account in his back pocket for each job. I personally hate learning new technology. About the time I get used to my web browser with all my bookmarks in place and master how to use it, they want to update my software and I have to start over. Yuck. But every time I get a new and better phone or new and better software I increase my productivity after I get past the yuck. So don’t lose several hours a week to your resistance to technology. I don’t own a typewriter or a ten-key calculator anymore and there was a day that they were the staples of my business.
The second time-management failure due to technology is on the other end of the spectrum: focusing too much on technology to the point that all you do is play with your new toy and don’t get any work done. The person who’s prone to this tends to be younger and enamored with how cool the new gadget or software is. Yes, we need to understand all the wonderful things we can do with our toys, but we do some work as a result. It is almost as if a young gamer’s addiction has just been transferred to a gadget addiction in the name of “business.” So while we want to use technology to be more efficient, it is terribly inefficient to do nothing but learn about technology.
Most of us are moving away from using paper. My to-do list used to be on a Word document on my computer; today mine has evolved to 90 percent contained in my e-mail in-box. I delegate, delete, file, and/or quickly answer my e-mails in order of priority. When you work on my team you will likely get a ton of one-word e-mails from me in a day. My e-mail might say, “No” “Cool” “k” “Yours.” If you need me to expand you are going to drop down the priority list or we will call a quick meeting. Resist getting in e-mail fights where “Reply to All” is used to chew people out. I have fallen into that trap, and while it feels efficient at the time, it takes away from a quality connection with a team member that will allow you to further delegate later if you make this a teachable personal moment. Tim Sanders says to “stamp out ‘Reply to All.’” I agree.
Since we are moving away from paper my personal assistant keeps all my files. I don’t have anything in my desk but pencils. Delegate that type of time use. Your files should be on your computers and synced together so you can access them from anywhere at any time. I have on the corner of my desk a physical out-box where I lay anything I want my assistant to take and distribute. This would include things like receipts, signed letters, signed checks, or anything she put on my desk for me to deal with.
Your physical desktop represents the organizational condition of your mind and maybe even indicates the organizational condition of your whole company. I used to think stuff piled and stacked all over my desk meant I was busy and a hard worker. Then I found out it meant I didn’t know how to organize and delegate work flow. The most glaring example of this was when I went to the office of a friend named Cecil. At the time I was a very young entrepreneur, and he offered to help me with some financial questions I had and wanted to encourage me through some hard times. Cecil owned a large financial planning operation with hundreds of team members and tons of money. When I went into his office, it was so clean and uncluttered I thought I had entered a surgical ward. He didn’t even have a desk, just a library table with no drawers. He had a phone and a computer, and in the middle of his spotless desk was a yellow pad with nothing written on it and a pencil on top. This place looked like it was ready for a magazine photo shoot. Coming from my cluttered, stacked, and piled office it felt really sterile. He picked up the yellow pad and we had our meeting. At the end of the meeting I blurted out, “Where do you do all your work?” Like he had a secret messy office one room over and this was just for show. He laughed and said, “Right here.” I couldn’t grasp that, so I started asking questions like “Where is all your stuff? Don’t you have a stapler? Don’t you have files? It doesn’t look like anyone works here!” He laughed again and began to explain to me that I would never have a business of size until I reached the point where someone else did the stapling and filing. He explained that his job was not to do that anymore; now his job was to set the vision of his company and lead well in all aspects, and the only “stuff” that took was brainpower and intentionality. So clean your filthy desk and office. No, you don’t know which stack stuff is in, and no, you aren’t artistic; you are simply disorganized. Clean it up, delegate it, or throw it out. File Thirteen, your trash can, might be one of the biggest time savers you can use.
We’ve progressed from dreams, to visions, to a mission statement, to goals, and now to managing each of your hours and minutes to cause those to happen. Remember that even if this information seems very elementary and basic to you, as you teach it to your children and/or your team this information will seem revolutionary to them. I challenge you to bring fresh life to your new business by walking through this process. Try this time-management approach for ninety days without stopping. I can make you the promise that you will see a new level of traction and thereby a new level of satisfaction. Nothing is more unsatisfying than to work so hard and not move the needle.