CHAPTER SIX

Personal productivity

Talk to any manager these days and they’ll tell you they’re busy. Time is the big talking point. It is the most precious commodity around.

There are tell-tale symptoms: a tendency for you to feel in a rush and impatient; losing focus when you are in the middle of a task or conversation; spending more time on your BlackBerry or iPhone than talking to people; seeming to have projects piling up and not getting finished; and feeling powerless with the tsunami of stuff that’s pouring in.

Sound familiar? It’s a warning signal telling you to wrestle back control of your life.

That doesn’t mean closing your business, changing careers or moving out to the country. But it requires you to develop significant but manageable systems to get the best return on your investment in time. It means scaling things down, from the frantic to the manageable.

Whether it’s making the most effective use of your time or watching others fritter away theirs, time management is everyone’s focus. Poor management of time prevents managers from reaching their full potential. As a manager, many conflicting demands might be made on you. Workdays can be long, tiring and frustrating due to poor planning and people controlling your time and work. Time can be wasted doing things that should be done in a few moments or not at all. Here’s the bottom line: all of us have exactly the same amount of time. The best managers know how to use this resource effectively.

Experts recommend starting with a diary to identify where all those precious minutes in a day go. That includes not only work time spent in front of screens, from computer to smartphone to tablet, but also the personal stuff such as shopping, catching up with family and friends or being at the gym.

An alternative and popular method is to have a default diary. For most, a normal diary simply lists the events during the week. For example, it might have an appointment on Wednesday, a session on Thursday and a meeting on Friday afternoon. A default diary turns that around. Let’s say, for example, you have to spend two hours every Monday afternoon working on the finances and every Tuesday, it’s an hour-and-a-half on the marketing plan. With a default diary, you put those down in advance, along with all the other set appointments. That can also include personal items, such as sessions at the gym. It’s not hard to organise, it’s just a visit to Outlook.

They’re not times where you meet with somebody but times when you have actually booked in an appointment to get work done. It’s locked in. Also, you can tell the receptionist during this time to hold your calls because you will be in a meeting with yourself, essentially.

At least that way, you can say: I have had this week but I have been in control of the week because I have spent two hours on this, and hour and a half on that, three hours on something else and got things done that way.

You don’t book up all your time, but 50 per cent of your time. That’s important, because it leaves you with the flexibility for the unexpected, like the ad hoc meeting that might come up during the week.

The beauty of this system is that it helps you manage times and avoids double-booking.

If, for example, someone rings and asks to meet with you on Monday, you can say you already have that time booked, but there is an opening on Tuesday afternoon — how would that work? It means you don’t book over set times.

It is also a good idea to break down the time needed to spend for each task.

While people rely a lot on technology to make it easier, the technology itself can only do so much. Technology is just an enabler.

You might get a good system and hope to use technology to make it even more efficient. But if you’re not using a good to do list, putting it into an electronic format doesn’t make it any better. I have seen people with 200 tasks on their electronic to do list and they just shy away from it because it just becomes too cumbersome. Get the systems right first, and then use technology to make it more efficient, rather than using technology as the solution.

Still, technology does provide new ways to save time.

Darlene McQueen, who runs her Canberra business Office Girl, which coaches small business owners to be better organisers and time managers, says more people are making use of virtual assistants to do all their administrative work.

Most virtual assistants work from home offices. They receive their instructions by phone, email or text messages. They rarely see their clients, if at all. They can be located anywhere in the world, locally or overseas. Indeed, there is a growing market for virtual assistants in India.

Done well, they can help separate out the mundane, repetitive tasks that take up time but don’t earn money. Stuff like typing, filing and appointment scheduling. Delegating these to a virtual assistant allows the business owner to focus on long-term planning, contacting new prospects or even getting home early to spend time with the family.

“They basically do all the administrative stuff that small business owners don’t want to do,’’ McQueen says.

She says technology can be used to save time, particularly with email management. She recommends clients place all emails in folders. For example, they could set up an ‘action’ folder for items that need attention and immediate action. Then there might be a ‘read’ folder for emails that don’t require immediate action but which can be read and absorbed. Or there can be a ‘waiting’ folder for emails waiting for more input from elsewhere.

“My inbox has nothing in it because I use these folders to save me a huge amount of time,’’ McQueen says.

“When I want to read something, I go to the ‘read’ folder, when I want to action something, I go to the ‘action’ folder.”

Kevin Dwyer, who runs the management consultancy The Change Factory, says people run into time management problems when they stop delegating or decide to save money by not hiring support staff.

“When you get a $260,000 executive writing invitations, that’s an inappropriate delegation. It is the wrong way around,’’ Dwyer says. “I could have six people on $40,000 doing what the highly-paid executive is doing.”

Time management coach Lorraine Pirihi, who calls herself “the productivity queen”, says outsourcing and delegating is crucial for time management.

“You stick to what you’re good at and try to delegate or outsource the rest,’’ Pirihi says. “It’s no good if you are spending your time on your bookkeeping when you should be spending your time on the marketing of your business.”

“Some people spend half the weekend doing the gardening and they don’t necessarily want to do it whereas they can pay someone to do the things they don’t like doing so they can free up their time to do the things they want to be doing.”

The same goes for cleaning, ironing and shopping, she says.

With email, she says, people need to switch off so that they only check it at certain times of the day. “You can have an auto responder saying you have received the email and you will respond in 24 to 48 hours,’’ she says.

“That’s important because expectations are high these days that you respond immediately. You can use technology efficiently but you have to take control of the technology.”

She says time management is much like going on a diet. On those regimes, people set up a food diary to note exactly what they ate and when. The same goes for time management.

“You write down what you’re doing on an hour by hour basis, you take it from week to week and you would be surprised by how much time you’re wasting. People don’t actually take stock of what they’re actually doing.

“When I work with small business owners, we look at what they’re trying to achieve, in their business life and in their personal life and we look at what stops them addressing the issues.

“I use a time sheet that I prepare and all they have to do is fill it out for every hour. When you look at it, you can see where your time is going. It’s no different from a food diary.”

All they need to do it is track it for a week and then review it to see where their time has gone.

She says it is also important for people to stay fit and healthy. Even getting in three 20-minute sessions a week would help reduce the stress, make them feel more confident and reduce the number of sick days.

“You have 168 hours a week. If you can’t spend two or three hours a week to keep yourself living longer and happier, then there is something wrong,’’ she says.

It is also a good idea for a manager to peg a time limit to each task; use a calendar (preferably linked to their mobile phone); know their deadlines; aim to finish every task earlier than scheduled; prioritise; batch similar tasks together; eliminate time-wasters; and not batch everything too close together, so they can finish off tasks well beforehand.

The key is to use a to do list.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, however, consultant Peter Bregman says to do lists are all well and good but the challenge is execution. How can you stick to a plan when so many things threaten to derail it? How can you focus on a few important things when so many things require your attention?

To do that, he recommends taking three steps every day, one that takes less than 18 minutes over an eight-hour work day. The first, he says, is to set your plan for the day. Do that before you even turn on the computer. Check everything into time slots and make sure the hardest tasks are done first. The second step comes later, he says, where you refocus for one minute every hour, asking yourself whether that time was spent effectively and efficiently. And finally, he recommends reviewing everything at the end of the day. What worked? Where did you focus? What got you distracted? What did you learn from it that will make tomorrow more productive?

One of the world’s leading management thinkers, Jim Collins, is like a machine when it comes to time.

Interviewed by Bronwyn Fryer in the Harvard Business Review, he explained how he uses a stopwatch and divides his life into blocks – 50 per cent creative time, 30 per cent teaching time, and 20 per cent for “other stuff” (those things that randomly happen). He is also a runner and mountain climber, and manages to fit it all in.

We are told: “Jim took out a piece of paper and drew a picture of four blocks stacked atop each other. Pointing at the top block, he said, ‘I block out the morning from 8am to noon to think, read and write’. He unplugs everything electronic, including his internet connection. Although he has a reputation for reclusiveness, when asked about this, he replies: ‘I’m not reclusive. But I need to be in the cave to work’. After lunch, he spends his afternoon in the office with his researchers, or with clients.”

For Collins, high-quality work requires long stretches of high-quality thinking. “White space”, as he calls it, is the prerequisite for fresh, creative thought. It’s the time he spends with nothing scheduled so he can empty his mind, like the proverbial teacup, and refill it with new thought.

One could argue Collins lives a different life than the rest of us because, as a best-selling author and highly sought-after consultant, he can afford to do that. But he argues companies should seek out that white space instead of moving at a frenetic pace and getting nothing done.

From my own experience, I would recommend starting every day with a to do list and doing the most important stuff first. And don’t forget, procrastination has to be one of the biggest time killers. As are distractions. That includes stuff such as surfing the net, making personal calls, planning personal business and socialising with co-workers.

For managers, personal productivity comes down to priorities.