Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Career Tools. This is Sarah and I'm Mark. Today's podcast, Time Priority Management, part one of two.
- [00:11]
B
This cast answers these questions. How do I manage my time? How do I make myself more efficient? How can I manage my calendar?
- [00:21]
A
If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Unlock your potential for smoother, more effective and productive interactions. The MTDisk profile is a fast 20 minute assessment that provides a clear report helping you understand your own communication style and quickly spot that of others. This means an end to the communication frustration and the start of more effective meetings, emails, feedback and collaboration. Take our mtdisc profile today and apply self awareness tomorrow. For immediate improvement, go to manager-tools.com disc all right, folks, welcome back. Today, Mark, we're going to do another one of these Career Tools re records. We're going back into the archive of what we think of as our, like our core, if you will, Career Tools guidance. This one we're pulling out of the archives from a 2006 episode on Time management. And when I say time management, people know what that that term means. Now, what most people I think don't realize is that time management is a fallacy. Time doesn't need you to manage it.
- [01:35]
B
Not only does it not need you to. You can't manage time.
- [01:39]
A
Yeah, exactly, folks. It's been around for billions of years. It's been getting along just fine without you. We can't manage time. What we can can manage is what we do with that time. And yet the overwhelming evidence is that professionals and managers do not manage what they do with that precious time.
- [01:59]
B
Yeah, there's an enormous chasm between our behavior in this area area and our knowledge about what to do. Everybody always talks about how busy they are. And what's interesting, it becomes a humble brag, oh, you know, I'm super busy. And they, they make themselves out to be super important and so on, but when you look at their calendars, they're super busy. But there's no evidence that they're busy. Their calendars are largely empty. They're vast swaths of unscheduled time which people actually think is good and is not exactly.
- [02:37]
A
And Peter Drucker, I feel like you should talk about the Peter Drucker stuff, but in the first chapter of his seminal work, the Effective Executive says it best. Of course he does, because he says everything best about all the things that he says. He says the output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource in the process we call accomplishment. This is time of the other major resources Money is actually quite plentiful. People we can hire, but one cannot rent or, or hire or buy or otherwise obtain more time.
- [03:16]
B
Yeah. Bill Gates said something once that I thought was really smart. He said a lot of smart things. He said, I've never been that interested in going to gamble for more money. Now a lot of people when I say that, say, well, of course he wouldn't. He has lots of money. But I've never gambled. The idea of gambling my money to make more money doesn't make any sense to me. And I've always thought, I can make more money. I know how to do that. And I don't get any drama out of making or losing money. I'm always amazed at the. The casinos that have a sign on the front say, we return 95% of all the money backed. So over time, you go to a casino a lot, you'll end up 5% down. I always thought like, yeah, you're paying for that. It makes sense. Right? They can't give away more than they take in. But what Bill Gates said and what I agreed to the moment you said it was, but if I could gamble my money for time, if I could spend money for time, which is exactly what we do when we hire an administrative assistant. We spend resources in order to gain more time. And one of the things I'm sure we're going to talk about is the issue of delegation. It's funny how assigning things to an admin is not considered delegation. And people do it. And they do it pretty aggressively, some don't, and those people shouldn't have admins. But I'm always amazed at people's lack of understanding about how much time they have, how well they use it and how they can get better. So the question really becomes in all this, how can we start to become more efficient about using the time that each one of us has at our disposal? And that's not even talking about effectiveness and stopping disposing of your time. It's everything in the world we live in. There's simply very little room for error when it comes to managing your priorities. That's what you do when you think about managing your time. You're thinking about what's important and what's not. And you're saying, I'm managing my time. But you're not managing the time. You're managing what you're going to do with your time. And look, if you aren't spending time on your key priorities, and most people aren't because they spend an inordinate amount of time on email because they haven't learned how to manage email. We have an entire series of casts about that. If you're not spending time on your parties, it's really hard to argue that you should be able to keep your job if you're not meeting your key deliverables. And people say this all the time. Yeah, I didn't meet my key deliverables, but there were 34 other deliverables. Yeah, you did the easy stuff. It's the hard stuff that's important usually. And if you'll be willing to get in trouble for not doing the easy stuff, which frankly nobody cares about, nobody will really miss, and you'll focus on your big priorities, magically your big deliverables will get done and you'll look really, really good.
- [06:00]
A
Yeah. And Mark, I don't think that the average person out there really thinks of it this way and that we don't think that we're missing our key deliverables. I mean it seems like the major stuff seems to get done. I mean we're not getting fired, but yet you're telling me that we're way off base on how we're spending our time. So how is that possible? Well folks, it's because in many cases we are being saved by what amounts to fire drills.
- [06:35]
B
Yep.
- [06:35]
A
Every once in a while something that's really important becomes also time wise important. And the boss tells everybody for the next week no one does anything but priority X. That's it. And it's because it's like probably the end of the quarter or there's a big push or there's a massive new initiative or there's a, a new boss or what have you. There's some sort of reason and we make up for these overall inefficiencies throughout the course of the year by essentially cramming laser focused sheer brute force into those major priorities that aren't being prioritized. So after a fashion it works if you like, sure, feeling like you're being drawn and quartered every day.
- [07:23]
B
But then they complain about the stress and the stress is enormously contributed to by the self mutilation we do by focusing on easy things to do rather than on putting our time on what we ought to know are our key priorities. So what the heck we do about this problem this cast basically is about how can manager tools listeners take advantage of the opportunity that time gives to become more efficient and more effective relative to our priorities.
- [07:53]
A
Yeah. Okay, so our outline for today. We're going to start by a conversation about Roughly assessing your time, then capturing your priorities, followed by a rough analysis. And we'll talk a little bit about a Drucker analysis there as well. And then putting number one, your number one priority on your calendar.
- [08:13]
B
Yeah, so let's talk with a doing a rough assessment of your time. It's a relatively easy step. Look, we want you to sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, nothing else. Don't look at your calendar on your computer, just pen and paper. Ask yourself a simple question. What do I spend my time doing? Think back over the last two or three weeks. This is your recollection, this is not you mining the data that you have available to you. Even though many people's calendars are so empty that they don't know what they spend, the majority of their time is. We just think back over the past two or three weeks and think about your days again. Don't look at your calendar in advance, don't have your phone there, no desktop calendars, no daytimers. We're not looking for a numerically valid analysis here. We're suggesting you start getting in the mindset of thinking about your time. Every executive who's really good at their job, they do this all the time.
- [09:13]
A
And folks, what you're going to discover when you sit down and you try and write this out for yourself is that there's a lot of time in there that is not accounted for. You're going to remember the big stuff, like the important things, the meetings, the key deliverables, that project task that you had to do. But you're also going to remember things that at this time seemed important, but in hindsight, you know, just didn't make that much of a difference. And by the way, that's why you're remembering them now. They had an emotional content at the time and the emotion is a great memory enhancer. So you're going to remember meetings that were relatively unimportant now in hindsight, but there was an argument or there was a blow up, or there was an important person there and for some reason it stuck to your brain. But even those things that you can think of two or three weeks later, you're going to be like, but that wasn't important. Where's the important stuff?
- [10:11]
B
Exactly. And at the end of this, and we only suggest 15 minutes, you'll have a list of the things you did in the past two or three weeks. You don't need to do any editing. Surely you did in fact do what you're remembering. On the other hand, if you want what you can do as an additional step is to categorize your list however you want. We're not going to suggest a particular way. However you think about it is fine. It doesn't matter. Because after this guidance, it doesn't matter how you think about prioritization. You're going to change your thinking anyway.
- [10:45]
A
Struggling to stand out in interviews Most professionals don't realize they can prepare for almost every question. With any of our licenses, you'll have access to our interview series and you'll learn exactly how to prepare, answer and impress. So you land the job that you want. Visit us at manager-tools.com forward/licenses to learn more today. Okay, so now that you've, you've thought about it, to Mark's point, you've got your brain in the mindset for this. Now we're going to capture your key priorities. And just like the first, this is another pretty easy step. Though this one is going to potentially require that you look some stuff up. If you're lucky, you can maybe do it in 15 minutes. If not, it might take a day to find your source material to get the proper input, that kind of stuff. And you may not have any source material to work with. This is probably particularly true for professionals or small business people where their organizations haven't yet built the documentation that will support their priorities in this way. And if so, that's fine and just hold on to your notes and that you come up with for later when you start thinking about this kind of infrastructure kind of stuff.
- [12:05]
B
Yeah. So what you do is you gather up your job description, your bosses and directs job descriptions, your last couple of reviews, any documents that you report, key metrics in or on the last 10 or 15 presentations you or your team have presented. In fact, we include gathering presentation slides because things change pretty rapidly and your reviews, or more likely your job description may be inadequate. We're not big fans here of job descriptions. We are big fans of really, really good job ads. And too often job ads are job descriptions and they're out of date. But things change so quickly that administratively, the idea that a year old job description is accurate is crazy. In fact, I've often told people the most important line in every job description is and finally, other duties as required.
- [13:01]
A
Yeah, I mean, a day later it's wrong.
- [13:04]
B
Yeah, that's actually a good thing. Yeah, you, you, you have to have some flexibility. And everybody's always telling me my job doesn't change that much. And about 10 or 15 years ago, I, I started laughing at him. I said show me your phone. I'm like, oh, yeah, I have a phone. Like, what work do you do on your phone? Well, I do this and this and this. Well, you didn't have that five years ago. Your job is changing. There's a new system, there's a new process, There's a new app internally in your company. Jobs are changing all the time. In fact, when people tell me my job doesn't change that much. No, that's actually not true. You just don't want to change because every job, everywhere, is always changing to depending upon what customers want, what the market wants. There's thousands of things that are changing everybody's job. I tell people all the time this, that if the outside world is changing and your approach is, I don't want things to change. One of the rules of organic life, and we're all organic, is your organic life form has to stay in stasis with its environment. If the outside world is demanding and changing a dynamic and you're trying to lock down your job so it's measurable and simple and the same all the time, you're setting yourself up for failure. In the same way that the outside world gives your organization feedback all the time in the form of purchasing or not purchasing. If you're a profit organization, organization, the idea then internally in the organization that no manager has to give feedback when the outside world is giving the organization feedback is crazy. But people say, well, I don't want to do that. That's hard. I'm not really sure. But that's why some of this stuff gets old. And that's why we ask you to look at slides and everything else we listed.
- [14:50]
A
Yeah, exactly. So pull together as much documentation as you can find, and with all of these documents in hand, take some notes. Ask yourself, what are my key priorities?
- [15:02]
B
When we say priorities in this case, folks, let me be clear. It is not what you want to do. You do not get paid to do what you want to do. This job may be aligned with the things you like, the things you like doing, the things you're good at, and that's. That's a plus. But your priorities. When we say priorities, we're talking about what the organization demands of your role. And all too often I get into conversations with managers and actually a lot with executives, which really kind of bothers me. They're like, yeah, I'm kind of good at this. And I kind of like that. I'm like. Or they're saying, well, I did that for this reason. And it's always them Asserting some personal interest, some personal privilege, some personal preference for something. I'm like, you don't get paid for any of that. You have to understand what your role is. In fact, it's very old fashioned. But every job has a series of duties, some responsibilities to the organization that it takes to make the organization work. And I see far too many people talking to me about their preferences. And look, if you don't like the fact that your job has no priorities that are aligned with your preferences, that's fine. But two things. One, you're not going to be doing well in that job, and you shouldn't complain to the organization that the organization wants what it wants or needs what it needs from your role. And the other thing is, go get another job. Luckily, for the most part, we live in a free world where you can go look for another job. It may be hard, but now you're saying to the company, I don't want to do a hard thing, so you should make my life easy. And if you have a bunch of people wishing for their life to be easy in an organization, that organization is going to be gone sooner or later.
- [16:40]
A
Yeah. So can I ask Mark in, in this piece with these documents in hand and the taking of notes at this point, really, you could think of it, folks, like capturing what is your responsibilities essentially, in a way.
- [16:55]
B
Yeah. Now, sometimes responsibilities are listed in a very artsy way, a very formal way, and you may have to interpret that a little bit. But basically your priorities should be your responsibilities. And I defy people to tell me they can find a job where the responsibilities are not clear. And it wouldn't take me more than two minutes to say so, therefore, your priorities would be this. And of course, as we'll learn, as we've already alluded to, and as we'll learn, people want to do what they want to do rather than what their responsibilities are derived from. Well, what their priorities should be derived from. Their responsibilities from their duty.
- [17:33]
A
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so again, folks, you're writing this exhausted list of responsibilities, priorities, the things you have to do, you know, you have to do essentially, so you can start aggregating it into categories that look like major areas or priorities. You might have a big long list of things that you think that's not a priority. But of this list of 75 things I have, 20 seem to fall into that bucket. That's how you know it's a priority. Essentially, you might have to infer from tasks what the priority headings are for those tasks. And that's okay. Sometimes, depending on your role within the organization. You may be in a role that is an individual contributor role that you don't really get to see the upper priority, but when you lump together responsibilities, you'll be able to discern from that what the priority is.
- [18:24]
B
Yeah, and you mentioned 75. It's actually, it's okay to have a list of 50 tasks if that's what your analysis shows you. I'm not really sure what my priorities or responsibilities are, but I do these 50 tasks. Okay, but let's be clear folks, there is no job on the planet that has 50 priorities. Typically the rule of thumb would be no more than 10 priorities. And so to Sarah's point, you're going to start agglomerating those tasks and say what are all these tasks together? What are they related to and how am I measured? Right. But that's the answer, 10 priorities. And by the way, that's too many for some of you. Yeah, in some cases it's four or three or two. I tell you, in sales it's really easy. It's one and there's a number. You have to meet your number, the sales number that comes down from corporate in order to assure we have the revenue based on our cost structure to make it as profitable as we want in the event of a obviously a for profit company. Although this same analysis applies to government jobs, academic jobs, not for profits and so on. But the same thing is basically true. It's just that most people think I don't want to think about my priorities. But without your priorities, you can't give hierarchical structure to all those tasks. And to know which tasks, as I often say, you're willing to get in trouble for.
- [19:46]
A
Yeah, and folks, you, you might have had a bit of a sticker shock, a wide eyed moment when Mark said you got to boil that list of however many you have 75, 50 into 10, it's only going to get harder. We now recommend that you take that list of 10 priorities and you come up with your key priorities. Not just your priorities, your key priorities. Take that list and boil it down to no more than five key priorities max. Five.
- [20:18]
B
Yeah. And the reason we mentioned the 50 tasks, the 10 priorities and the five keys is that a lot of folks have fought back with me and others on aggregating from 50 to say three. They're just like, well that's, you know, it's like putting five pounds of stuff into a two pound bag. We think this is because there's no overarching priority thinking to their schedule management and we end up seeing task as priorities. In other words, right now, this thing I'm working On, this task, one of the 50 is a priority. But that's not how effective priority management, which people call time management, works. Yeah. So anyway, come up with five key priorities. Write them down on a sheet of paper.
- [21:06]
A
Thanks so much for joining us folks. We will see you again next week as we continue this topic. Now, help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please.
- [21:28]
B
It.