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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Career Tools.
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B
This is Sarah and I'm Mark.
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A
Today's podcast, Time Priority Management, part two of two.
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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?
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A
If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Need to hire the right person and fast. The interview creation tool helps you build customized, effective interview questions in minutes based on the role that you're hiring for. Designed with proven management principles, it saves you time and ensures consistency in your hiring process. Available exclusively with our Manager Tools and Executive Tools licenses. Learn more today@manager-tools.com interview creation tool. All right, Mark, we are going to do a time analysis. If you don't keep a calendar or you don't have a schedule, it's going to be really, really hard for us to give you guidance to help you through the rest of this cast.
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B
If they don't keep a calendar, they don't need to listen to this.
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A
Yeah, exactly. Some of us don't. We have jobs that don't have calendars. I mean, you might work on a job site, you might do construction. You could do anything. But if you don't have a calendar that's ruling your life, it's gonna be really hard to do the analysis that is required for this priority management. Now, having a reporting or measuring tool like a calendar for the most precious resource you have is necessary for a business professional. And we're assuming most of the people listening to this are business professionals. Like, it's having not a calendar. Your most precious resource being time is like a surgeon not tracking patient success or a company not billing its customers. If you work in a business environment and you do not keep a calendar, you can't call yourself a professional. Yeah, in that respect, you really can't.
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B
Now, some people say, well, Mark, I don't like, you know, I'm an individual contributor. I don't go to a lot of meetings. That then essentially gives the lie to the issue of calendars are where meetings are captured. And that's the way the vast majority of people use their calendars. And they're secretly hoping that that big meeting on Thursday afternoon gets canceled because then they'll have four hours of interrupted time to get through all their stuff they want to do. But in fact, your calendar is not where you put meetings alone. Yes, meetings go there because you can't be in two places at once. Even though some crazy executives I work with over the years, they say, mark, I'm so busy, I'm triple booked. So in other words, you can't make decisions. No, no, I make decisions all the time. Well, if you're triple booked, you have to decide where you're going to be. You can't be in all three places. Well, one of the reasons I do it is to show my people how busy I am. Like, okay, so now, now your calendar is a marketing device. Yeah. Great. So what we recommend is printing out the last three weeks of your calendar in day view mode. Okay. Not monthly mode, not weekly mode. When I coach executives, I always ask them to send me 20 to 30 work days, not weekends, 20, 20 to 30 workdays, sometimes 60 in fact, of day to day calendar. And printed in portrait mode, not landscape. So taller than wide. It's more tall than wide. And one day on the calendar, so you can see the entire day from 8 to 5, 7 to 3, 30. Whatever your day is, you need to be able to see everything and read everything. If you put it in a week, things are going to get cut off, things are going to be too small, you're going to, you won't be able to actually infer from what was 2 weeks ago what you were actually doing.
- [03:48]
A
Yeah. So again folks, you got it printed off day view. And then once you have that, do your best to capture your start and stop time at work like when you came in and when you left or, or when you stopped working. If you work at home and if you spend an hour at night, every night working, you want to include that in the analysis as well. Right. If you're doing your email or report while you're watching TV with your family, capture those hours in there as well.
- [04:17]
B
Yeah, Most people haven't thought about this, but I spent a lot of time thinking about productivity. In fact, this past week, Wednesday we're recording this on a Saturday. But on Wednesday I had a long item in Things we think. We think if you're a licensee, you get my weekly email. Things We Think, we think if you don't get it and you're a licensee, please write to us and we'll make sure you do get it. And I had a long time topic in there about productivity, about how important productivity is to the world. I would argue that gross domestic product, which 99% of the world doesn't understand, may be the most important metric in the world. I'll never forget about five years ago when the president of France, who is obviously a very smart, very successful person, the president of France suggested, in part because France's productivity is notably lower than the other G7 or G20 countries that major economies are compared to suggested that gross domestic product, in other words a measure of how productive your people are, which is the single best predictor of profitability for a for profit organization, suggested that gross domestic product was old and outdated and we should do gross domestic happiness. And I was tempted to write him a note, having worked in France for the government before, but never having known Mr. Macron, and I'm sure he never would have seen my note saying, actually, I think you'll find if people are productive, they'll end up being happy. I think there are people who believe that we shouldn't be too productive because then we won't be happy. We're not slaves, folks. We're not toiling in minds for free. And most of us are not starving. So productivity is really important. I talked about productivity and I got probably 25 notes about productivity, about focusing. And one of the things that came out of this, which I think people were surprised by, but I've been living this for the last five years since, since the pandemic and the response to the pandemic and people not being able to go to work is this working from home versus working in the office. In the office, you have office hours. People have to be there at a certain time. Of course, there are exceptions for kids being dropped off and soccer practice and those kind of things. That's a reason. Those are all reasonable things that happen in a, in a diverse workplace. That's a good thing. But what happened was there was no longer a time to get to work. You didn't have to be at the office at 8 o'. Clock. In fact, companies didn't say that to people. They actually didn't. And it was a mistake to say to people, we will keep the same office hours. Now, what office hours generally mean is between 8 and 5, let's say those are the office hours that you, you may work at a place that's different, it doesn't matter. We're just going to assume eight to five for now. And if in fact you do that, the assumption is office hours means it's legitimate for someone to schedule a meeting or expect to be able to meet with you between those times. Again, there are some exceptions. Sometimes at the beginning, sometimes at the end of the day. Well, that went away with COVID and companies made a mistake by doing that. And so people started seeing their workday starting at their first meeting, which, by the way, people used to hate having their first meeting be at the start of their day or differently having their day start with a meeting. They want to be able to come in and get some work done. And there were kind of 2 responses to this. One was, oh, I've got a soft morning. I don't have to come in till 9, 30 or 10. Yes, I'll be, you know, there'll be email coming in, but maybe I can get away with sleeping in or taking my kids to school or, you know, spending 30 minutes at Starbucks and having a Danish with my coffee and sitting inside rather than rushing back home or rushing to the office. These were all choices that people made in this uncertain world we were in where we were working from home. However, there were other people who said I'm going to start at a certain time and even though my first meeting is not until 10, I don't have a commute anymore, so I'm going to start at seven and I'm going to get a ton of stuff done before the email starts coming in, before my phone starts ringing and I start getting meeting requests for later that day or later that week and so on. And you mentioned about find out when you start and end the day. If people check their calendars now, as people are starting to return to the office, they'll discover that it's quite different than when they were working from home. And if you are working from home now and you have successfully avoided, at least for now, the return to the office, you'll have to do some thinking about that because your calendar may not show that you were at your desk at 8 even though you had a meeting at 10. Because people leave the time from 8 to 10 when they're doing quote desk work unquote, as not productive time or not part of their workday. So you'll have to think a little bit about that to make sure you get it accurate. It is actually way easier on most people to have a clear start and stop time whether you have a meeting or not.
- [09:20]
A
I'm guessing purely on this, I think that many people who've been work from home for quite a while have kind of learned the I need to keep myself some start and end times and have become more rigid around that, I think.
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B
Oh, you think?
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A
I think so if you work from home and you don't start to get some rigidity around the beginning and end of your day, you start to see it creep into your personal time, like your evening hours, and then you, it starts eating you alive and then it's like what is even happening here. So I think that, I think over the course of time, I think with more Experience, you start to build rigidity at start and end points of your day, to just find a way to make it stop at some point.
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B
Yeah, make it stop. Make it stop. Yeah. And all you're going to do with these printed out days is to review each day from come in to go home. Sarah already said we're going to capture that in 15 minute increments and write down what it is you were doing. That's all.
- [10:17]
A
Exactly. And folks, hopefully you can see the direction that we're going with this. What we're trying to do is find out what you actually did over the past three weeks and see how, if at all, it relates to that one pager that has your five key priorities in it. Remember in step two we wrote those five key priorities. Now we're trying to figure out, okay, does what I did over the course of the last three weeks support those five key priorities? Yes or no?
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B
By the way, long term manager tools listeners who have followed a lot of our guidance probably said, I am so glad I put email on my calendar three times a day. Because our next point is if you look at your calendar and there's nothing scheduled unless you'll swear to what you were doing. And that's possible but unlikely because be careful about your memory from three weeks ago. If there's nothing on your calendar, write nothing. So many people do email throughout the day and they say, well, email, email, email, email. If they. To fill up the dead spaces, we're telling you, no, don't do that because email is not a priority. You just write nothing and you're going to discover, unfortunately, that the problem is not time. The problem is what you do with your time. Speaking of which, I want to give a shout out to an important book here. If you want to know how much time you actually have, you should read the book. 168 hours, by the way, that's seven times 24. And, and I can't remember the name of the author. Female author, really great book. She basically breaks down how many hours you have in a week, including the weekend, and figuring out how much time people actually have that we just fritter away with inefficiency, laziness, misguidedness nowadays, social media and so on. So again, 15 minute increments every single time. If there's nothing on your calendar, write down nothing.
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A
And then folks, make some columns and add them all up and put some percentages next to what you did. And there you have it. That is your horseman's time analysis.
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Yeah, this is what I do with executives? What are you working on, boss? What does it say you're working on? And I've never had a situation. In fact, there's only been one executive of the two or 300 that I've coached in my life, in my professional life, only one, when I asked, it was him. I asked him, what are your priorities? And then I asked that and then I say, send me your calendar. And they often print it in landscape mode. And I have to say no, I want day to day for a couple of months. And only one in my entire history with hundreds of executives was there a clear conclusion that his priorities were, were in fact shown on his calendar. One the vast majority were not close. And some of them were just wildly, bizarrely different. And I have to tell you, I think what a lot of professionals do, managers, executives, individual contributors, is they know in the back of their mind what their priorities are, what they're going to be measured on, the key things should be working on. And they get pulled in a thousand different directions and they justify it because, well, I was pulled and I did this and I did that. And they don't think they can say no. And that gradually adds up to a lot of fear when they get a performance review. Like heaven forbid my boss actually evaluate me on what I'm pretty sure my priorities are because when I look at my time, it gets fritted away with emails and meetings I don't need to be in and chasing down rabbit holes and so on.
- [14:10]
A
Too busy to travel for training. No problem, we've got you covered. The Virtual Effective Manager conference brings world class management skills directly to you. Accessible, practical and designed to fit in your schedule. Sign up today@manager-tools.com training.
- [14:28]
B
Okay, next thing we're going to do is a Drucker analysis. And of course, if there's a Horseman analysis and a Drucker analysis, the Drucker analysis is better. And this is simply capturing everything you do. This comes directly out of one of Peter Drucker's books, capture everything you do in 10 minute increments. But this is an actually live one. It's not reviewing your calendar for the last three weeks. He typically uses this for executives where they have an assistant and you can have them help. And the other way you can do it is you can use a timer, you can use a stopwatch. There are actually apps you can get for your phone that every 10 minutes will ring as part of a time analysis and you keep a log and.
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A
For how long or just an undetermined amount of time.
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It depends. I generally find that three out of four weeks in a month, generally this is not always true. I'm sure I'm going to get some mail. Go ahead and send it mahorstmannandashtools.com and I will answer you. But it depends. But typically, three out of four weeks in every person's month are relatively standard, within one standard deviation of what the norm might be if we could magically pile up all the data and analyze it. One week is unusual. So I wouldn't recommend doing it that week. When I first got an admin, gosh, probably 30 years ago, I did it for three weeks.
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A
Okay. Yep.
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Now, in my case, my job was really easy. We were supposed to grow the business and I owned the company. And my only job, really now, I'm sorry, my first job was to get business, to get people to sign contracts, to have my management consulting firm do work for them. Obviously then I had to do the work along with my team. But it was fairly straightforward for me. And I'll admit it, guys, it's been fairly straightforward ever since. I've had very clear knowledge of what the two or three most important things I do are. And there have been times in this company, at Manager Tools, in my previous company, Horsemen and Company, where people got angry with me that I wouldn't do other stuff and I said, no, I do some things that only I can do and I cannot do everything and I'm not going to try. Mainly because I was coaching executives and asking them to be effective and, and I'm not going to be ineffective or inefficient. You know, I'm not going to tell you, don't do what I do. That's why we talk all the time in the last 20 years at manager Tools, we eat our own dog food. We do one on ones, we do feedback, we do coaching, we do delegation, we run our meetings a certain way. All the basic stuff, we do it here. Because I think without that, I have no credibility as trying to influence somebody.
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A
Absolutely. And folks, when it comes to the Drucker analysis, the lifetime analysis we're talking about now, you don't need to necessarily do it. If you did the previous Horseman's time analysis, this isn't really necessary. But going back to what we said about your memory from three weeks ago being less than ideal, this will be a real time analysis, which does tend to be more accurate than going back and looking at your calendar. Especially if you don't delete things from your calendar that you didn't actually do. I know a lot of people don't necessarily go back. I know I do, because I like to have a record of what I truly did. But yeah, if you're not really good at going back and cleaning up your days to match what actually happened, then your horseman's time analysis might not be great.
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Yeah, it's easier.
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A
Yeah.
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But it's not as good.
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Yeah.
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And then our key recommendation here is to put your number one priority on your calendar, to have time set aside on your calendar. And if it's not a meeting, you can move it around to make sure that you accomplish your number one priority. After all the diagnostics we've just been through, this is the prescriptive step, this is the thing you need to do to actually change your experience with time and priorities.
- [18:37]
A
Exactly. Now that you know what you've been doing and how off or or on it is with your key priorities, we're recommending essentially that you schedule consciously your primary responsibility or your. Your key priorities. We're not talking about the hottest task or the coolest project or that thing that you really, really like working on. We're talking strategic responsibility or your key priority.
- [19:08]
B
Yeah. And here's the thing, guys. All you need to do is put on your calendar, keep priority. 30 minutes, 60 minutes, nothing more than 90 minutes, okay? Don't try to block out the morning that's a waste of time, because it'll get eaten alive, as it always is in organizations, by urgent stuff rather than important stuff. And it doesn't matter that you don't know what you're going to do in each of those schedule blocks you give yourself. We're simply asking you to step out of the cesspool of the unmanaged time and priorities that you have been living in and saying, nope, I'm going to get up on the shore, get out of the muck and say, for this 30 or 60 or 90 minutes, I'm going to work on my key priority. Now, I know what you're thinking. Oh, my key priority's got a lot of long term stuff and so on. Yeah, yeah. And that's why the book From Zero to One by Peter Thiel is so good, because it talks about how important it is to get started in Today's World. It's 2025 now. If you're wondering about how to tackle your key priority, which is big and sort of requires a lot of planning and so on, ask AI for help.
- [20:18]
A
Yeah, give me a first draft.
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B
Would you please chatgpt the chief executive who's a client of mine recently had a situation where he had to put together a fundamental new bit of guidance for all of his operating vice presidents, all the companies he owns. He runs and owns a construction company. He's private equity funded. His name's Wally Budgel. And I kind of chastise him for not using AI more. So he tried it. He was coming up with a way for all of his vice presidents because of a reorganization. They had previously been organized by company, and now they're going to be organized by industry. And everything was moving around. And he said, I want a new briefing from you next month. And he needed to give him some guidance. Now, what it would have taken probably is 2 hours uninterrupted time late in the day to get some draft together and then meet with his chief people officer, Melinda Kerrigan, and his chief financial officer, who at the time was Dan Christensen, and say, okay, does this work? Does this seem right? Have we covered everything? Are we on the right track here? And he said it was going to take a week to get the letter out because it's two hours of his time plus scheduling time with them and they're very busy people and so on. So he decided he'd try with AI. He used Microsoft Copilot. He put in some information about how previously people briefed, I think, and asked it a series of questions. It took him five minutes. He created the draft of the letter and he didn't have to have the meeting. He showed it to the other two to Dan and Melinda. They said, yep, this is great. It's exactly what we need. And he sent it out. Saved him hours, saved the organization a week. His vice president has learned a week earlier. They have a week more to prepare, which the kind of briefing we're talking about, 10, 12 pages, something like that, an extra week is really, really good. In fact, I don't know if I've said this in a podcast yet. We mentioned this in things we think we think a couple of years ago. Again, licensees get that you should be a licensee if you want to get things we think, we think we've been doing it for 18 years now. And I think it's probably one of the most beloved parts of the manager tools community. And we happened to put in there Wally's experience with this. And we said, and if you'd like a copy of it, I asked Wally to edit it to remove any details that he didn't want shared. If you want a copy, go ahead and ask. It's the single most requested item ever responded to in the history of things. We think. We think. I have sent that out to 240 people.
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A
Wow.
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B
In the last three weeks. Yeah. And apparently, according to some comments I've gotten Sarah, people are sharing it with other people. So, Wally, we tip our hat to you. But our point with that is if you're wondering how to get started, if you're avoiding. By the way, I'm just going to say this. I love the phrase the magic you are seeking is in the work you are avoiding.
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A
Oh, I thought you were going to say eat the frog.
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B
No. Well, eat the frog is good, but you know what people say eat the frog. But I don't know how to begin, I don't know what to do and so on. Well, ask AI for some help. You know, have a 15 minute conversation with AI and get started. And what I have found is as you start working on something, you're going to change it six or seven times. And where you started is not that important. You just need to get off the dime and start doing something. Throw down a draft, probably is crap, but doesn't matter because now you have something that you can work with and realize, okay, that's going to have to change, that's going to have to change and so on. That's how it happens. That's how companies get bigger. Somebody says, I think we should do this. And then they get together with some of the people, no, we need to change that and change that, Change that. The original idea probably got buried somewhere, but the outcome, because somebody took the time to say, I think this is important, shouldn't we talk about it? And then it get massaged by smart people who say, yeah, I see that. In fact, we have an executive tools cast right now about to come out called shared version of reality, that executives have to talk to one another because not everybody is touching the elephant in the same place. Right. The famous parable of the three people, the three blind people touching the elephant. One touches a tail and thinks it's a vine. One touches a leg and thinks it's a tree, and one touches the trunk and thinks it's a snake. And they're all wrong. But if they pooled their knowledge, wisdom of crowds kind of thing, they get a much better result. Another thing, speaking of wisdom of crowds, you could easily say to one of your peers whom you trust, hey, I want you to look at this. Do you think this is right? Do you think this is my number one priority? And then start putting that time on your calendar and sit down and figure it out. And if you need further help going further than that, like, I really don't know what to do, Sarah, I email us. We'll spend 15 minutes on the phone with you. We'll be happy to do it. There's no charge for that. Or write us. For me, it's mahorsmanager.com and say, Mark, here's what I'm struggling with. I can't seem to get from 0 to 1 in this particular situation. Can you make any recommendations? And it's very possible, by the way. We'll say use AI, but if it's a problem we faced before, we'll tell you. Oh, we already have a template for that. You just haven't listened to this podcast, for instance.
- [25:33]
A
Yeah, exactly. And folks, when you're. You're scheduling this important time on your calendar, don't schedule more than 90 minutes at a time. I don't know if you said that specifically, Mark, but you kind of referred to it a little bit. Yeah, it, it won't be efficient. And people are going to start questioning the value of that time. Like, what are you doing on that morning? It's just shorter. Smaller chunks tend to be better. 60, 90 minutes.
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B
Exactly. That's all it takes really, folks. Now you might think, wow, I kind of hope they would tell me exactly what to do. I tried that years ago. And the fundamental problem with that is everybody's calendars are as diverse as the people that you sample. And so we can't tell you exactly what to do. We can say, we have another guidance. It's better to put your harder stuff in the morning than in the afternoon. Every manager I know, if you're a manager and you're listening to this, they all want to. They've got five things to do and they're busy the world. The day starts and they go to a couple meetings and they get behind and they tell themselves throughout the day, the five things I absolutely had to do today, I'll do between five and seven when everybody else goes home, when I have no more videotape. Yeah, exactly. And their ego strength has gone to zero. And I have videotape of managers security videotape of managers sitting at their desk just basically moving paper around because they don't have the mental strength or the physical strength to go through that hard work. So put that time on your calendar in the morning. And when people say, I need 15 minutes of your time, they can't have that time. And by the way, once you get good at this, put your second priority on your calendar. As well. And by the way, once you figure out what your priorities are, you can actually label them and you can actually put the tasks you're going to accomplish in there. You can't book out all your calendar, and we recommend, like, 20% of your calendar should be free. But if you don't do it, unfortunately, when there's a discussion about a downturn and there's a layoff, they're going to look at who got their key priorities done. That. People at the top of your organization do not care that you get everything done. They don't. They care that you get your top priorities done. So arm yourself, defend yourself. Build a fortress around yourself in terms of your job security by getting these key priorities done.
- [27:52]
A
By.
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B
By putting them on your calendar and figuring out what you're going to do to attack them.
- [27:58]
A
Yeah, exactly. Because folks, people constantly say how busy they are, and they let what is some very available time slip away. Time is the professional's most valuable resource. So if we want to use it more effectively in the future, we need to understand exactly how we are spending it today. Once you're clear on your priorities and can see the gap between what you're doing and what you should be doing, it becomes a lot easier to refocus and make better use of your time. And all of us can do a better job of that.
- [28:35]
B
That was great. A lot of fun.
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A
Thanks, Mark.
- [28:38]
B
Thank you.
- [28:39]
A
Thanks so much, folks. We hope this helped you. Now help us help others. And tell your friends. And of course, course follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please. Bye, everyone.