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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Manager Tools podcast for Monday, May 22, 2006. Hi, this is Michael Ozan. On behalf of my partner Mark Horstman and I, welcome to Manager Tools. Today we cover the second in two podcasts on time management. If you're new to the show or you didn't listen to last week's podcast, it's probably worthwhile going back and listening to it first. Otherwise you'll be joining the conversation halfway through and wondering just how we got to this point. To that point, I received some good feedback on last week's show. First, some folks were put off by the fact that the series was cut in two. Some would much prefer to have a self contained podcast that doesn't span multiple shows. That is one show, one topic. Well, Mark and I appreciate that point of view and generally foal heartily agree. We also tend to let the content dictate the length of the show and occasionally the length exceeds the 30 to 40 minute show we shoot for. Well, honestly, we want to do a 30 minute show, but almost always fail. So we'll give ourselves a little slack and say the target is 30 to 40 minutes. In any case, when we do significantly exceed the 30 minute window, we break those long ones into multiple parts. Time management was an example of that. Now that leads me to my second piece of feedback we received. And here I'll have to strongly agree. When the topic is split across multiple shows, identifying that fact up front would avoid the surprise at the end when the show abruptly ends without a conclusion. I didn't do that on last week's show with predictably disappointing results. Sorry about that. And I will definitely keep that point in mind in the future. So with a strong apology and lessons learned, let's get on with the second part of the time management podcast.
- [01:48]
B
Okay, so you're going to come up with a list of five key priorities and all you got to do is write them down on a clean sheet of paper. After all that analysis, after all that winnowing or aggregating or glomming together, whatever you want to call it, clean sheet of paper, five priorities. Okay? And then on step three, a rough time analysis. And of course 3A is the Drucker time analysis. And this is, this is kind of a fun part. I really like this. Now we're going to look at your calendar and let's just be clear here. If you don't keep a calendar, if you don't have a schedule, you've got no business listening to the rest of this cast. And I'm sorry You've wasted your time this far not having a reporting measurement tool, which is what a calendar is a schedule is for. The most precious resource you have is a gross lack of judgment as a manager. And if you work for me and you thought you'd get away with would affect your bonus at the end of the year, it is unconscionable in my opinion. It's like a surgeon not tracking her patient success. Right. The longevity of our patients after, you know, whether they die of sepsis or whether they go on to a healthy, happy life or literally a company not billing its customers because sending out bills is a form of measuring one's success. Right. If you don't do this, you can't call yourself a professional. And I say that because there are 5% of people, they don't have one. You know, my assistant keeps it, but I don't really know what it is. I just go from thing to thing and she keeps on track, keeps me on track. Absolutely unacceptable. So, okay, enough. I'm off my soapbox. What I recommend is printing out the last three weeks of your calendar in day view, whatever that is in Outlook or notes or whatever. Don't, don't print out a month because that month hopefully won't show everything you're working on in a given day. All the scheduling items and sometimes even a weekly schedule doesn't do it. So I recommend literally 20, 15 days of each sheet being one day long so you can see every single thing on your calendar. Okay. Once you have that, do your best to capture the start and stop time of your workday that day. Now we're go back to step one. Remember, we were thinking about what we were doing during that day. Just having spent a little bit of time thinking about your time a little bit ago will make it easier to say, okay, three weeks ago, about what time did I get into work? Okay. Another neat trick you can use on that is if you want, you don't have to look at your email. Okay. Most managers I know violate the fundamental rule of coming into work and the first thing they do is they sit down and they do email, which is wrong. That's a mistake. The best time that you have of the day is either when nobody's around first thing in the morning or between 7 and 10 in the morning when your brain is freshest. Every psychologist will tell you make your best decisions before noon and arguably before 10am so because most managers are violating that rule, a great way to figure it out is to go back through email, sent mail logs and as long as you're not doing early mail early in the morning the way you used to do it. Mci, you look and see what time you sent your first mail and subtract 10 minutes from that. And that's when you got into work. Yeah, when I did that to one manager, she said, no, no, I'm here for hours before. And I said, well, this one was sent at six o'. Clock. Oh, okay, maybe I wasn't here for hours before that one. So it's, we're using that as sort of a proxy. I'm not suggesting it's right, but it just gives us a start and stop to your day. Okay. By the way, we're not going to talk anymore about email. If I work with an executive, I will say this though. When they tell me what their schedule was, I go back and all the meetings that weren't on their calendar that they say they were in, and then I find emails that were sent during that meeting from their PC. I challenge them and I say, you know What? I've got 15 meetings here that you say you were in that weren't on your calendar that were ad hoc meetings. Great. And I've got emails, all of them during all those meetings that you sent. He says, well, maybe, you know, maybe I wasn't in a meeting. Yeah, you weren't. You were sitting at your desk. It's okay. As long as you know that when you analyze.
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A
Right.
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B
Let's not kid ourselves.
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A
You do an honest assessment, you're not gonna be honest with yourself. There's no sense in going through this.
- [05:43]
B
And actually, managers are. I find them to be fundamentally honest and good people. Except when it comes to email. Everybody wants to fib. They want to market themselves about how much email they do and how much they have to deal with, but they don't want to admit about how much time it takes them. And it's constant. I mean, every five minutes people are sending an email, which is an enormous waste of time. So anyway, okay, so capture your start and stop time when you came in and when you left work. And now look, if you want to spend, if you want to take that hour that you spent from 9 to 10 o' clock after the kids go to bed, you do email while your spouse is doing her email or his email. Fine, no problem. If you want to include that in your day, I'm okay with that. In terms of an analysis, include that in your work time, if you will. And all we're going to do is review each day from coming in to going home in 15 minute increments and write down what you did in those 15 minutes. Now, your calendar will tell you, right, if you're in a meeting or what have you, if you can't remember what you're doing, if you don't have any notes from that, from step one analysis, that you were in an ad hoc meeting or you were coaching somebody at their desk or you got together for a quick meeting with your general manager about a new structure or something like that, write down nothing. I know you weren't doing nothing. But essentially this will. The purpose of this is to show you that if you have nothing on your calendar and there's no one focusing your time, you can't claim that it was spent on your strategic priorities. I don't see it happening. I mean, yeah, okay, 5% of people do. But guess what, folks? Not all of you are in the 5%, right? Most of you are in the 95%. And I'm guilty of this as well. Don't get me wrong. I have the same challenge challenge I do. When I have unscheduled time, I find myself much lazier. You know, this cast is an example of trying to crunch things into a specific time period as we get better and better and better at putting cast together. So for non scheduled time, unless you'll swear that what you were doing was, you know, unless you'll swear to what you were doing. And again, be careful about your memory from three weeks ago, write down nothing. Now, hopefully you can see where we're going with this. We're trying to do is find out what you actually did over the past three weeks and see how it relates to that one page of no more than five key priorities. And what we want you to do when you're done is aggregate them under those five key priorities. And if it doesn't fit under one of the five keys, and don't twist it too hard to fit, put it over there in another category. If you've got more than five, if you've got a secondary list, I'm not suggesting you break it out into those five at all. Don't worry about that because we already said three is a circus act. So five, you know, is more than you need. So 10 is just a waste. Don't break them down into the 10. Quite frankly, there probably won't be that many of them. And you'll have one or two things under each. Under each of the ten. Okay? Make some columns in terms of the five, add it all up, put some percentages next to them, and There you have it. That's kind of how you spend your time. Is it ideal, Is it exact? No. If you want an exact one, do this analysis in three week increments for the next six months. You cannot get any more accurate about past time than roughly this 15 minute increment thing. Unless you start managing your schedule in advance and breaking your time down. Okay, okay. Or you can do step 3A, which is a Drucker time analysis. Okay. And this is simply using an assistant, which for many managers is not possible. And that's fine. To capture everything you do in 10 minute increments, your assistant, he or she follows you around and every 10 minutes writes down what it is you're doing. If you're an executive, that's a dang good way to use your assistant. There is nothing shameful about doing this. If you can figure out a way to be 5% more efficient with money that the company spends quarter of a million dollars you in salary plus another hundred thousand dollars in bonus. That is very, very powerful use of money and time. Now there's. You can also do it yourself. One of the things I did once was, it sounds really corny, but every 10 minutes I put an alarm on my PDA and it irritated me for the first six hours and then I got used to it. And every 10 minutes I little buzz alarm and I wrote on a sheet of paper what I was doing. Yeah, it's like a metronome thing. It's a random. Actually the original time studies, they use random samples and you carry around a random number generator. It would beep when it came to a certain number and you'd write down what you were doing. And you could, you could tolerate that for a period of time. Sometimes it was six minutes, sometimes it was 81 minutes. It didn't matter. The randomness as such gave it a good, gave it a good sample. But if you do it every 10 minutes, you're going to get a good sense. Some people say, mark, I can't do the 10 minutes. I want to do 20 minutes. Fine, 20 minutes is fine too. Don't do half an hour, don't do 45 minutes. You start losing some of the details. You can use your PDA like I did with my Trio, or you can use a stopwatch if you want. And every 10 minutes have it, you know, stop. And then you go, oh, I've got it. You know, on one of those digital stopwatches, they can make a noise, it'll beep for you, it'll irritate you a Little bit to do it, but it'll be very, very powerful. So the Drucker Time analysis is not looking at your schedule. It's actually doing it going forward for three weeks. Very powerful, lots of data, a little bit irritating. You'll never forget it as long as you. 20 years from now. I've had executives say, I did this 20 years ago when I was a junior executive. I went to a bank and we had a big productivity initiative because costs were being cut and so on. And everybody was stunned by what they discovered. And they actually had time management exper. In their productivity, experts in their workflow experts in there just actually telling them the raw data, which was, yeah, you say you're doing X, but you're really not. I actually had a unit in the army that I was running that got surveyed by the army for how productive we were. And we were the most productive unit in the army that year. And we had 66% productivity, which I was afraid I was gonna get fired for. This is. No, no, this is great. The most productive I've been to. We found out later, was most productive in the army, 66%. So you got dead time, folks. Just get used to it. Okay, so that's a. That's a more involved and it's real time rather than analysis of past. Either one of them works. I don't think you need to do both by any stretch of the imagination. Because we want results, we want action. This is all analysis. You know, you're not getting paid for analysis. You get paid for decisions and results. So what's the results? And the results come in a step forward and there's more to talk about. With time analysis, Mike, there's more analysis and there's more change to be done. But step four, as simple as it is, is the most important thing you can do when it comes to managing your time. Or let's be more clear. Managing your priorities or managing your schedule, Schedule management. And that is, again, this is the prescriptive step, and that is very, very simple. Now you know what you've been doing and how off or on it is with all your priorities. We recommend that you do nothing more than schedule your primary responsibility. That's it. Some people have heard of this big rocks sort of example that people use where they fill up a jar with sand and small rocks and so on, and then you can't fit the big rocks in there, and they pour it all out and they put the big rocks in first, and then you can put smaller rocks in and so on. That's essentially what we're getting at here. But I'm not suggesting you pick all five. All I want you to do is one. Because if you pick all five and you try to schedule it and you do what I'm suggesting next, you're going to fill up and you're going to hate it and you're going to, you're going to go back to the way you did before. I'm suggesting take this thing in small bites. So pick your first priority and put it on your calendar. It's not critical that you know what you're going to do in each of the blocks that you're going to schedule. Okay? And I don't know whether I should tell you to put it for five hours a day or two hours a day, or no more than 90 minutes a day or maybe 90 minutes every three or four days, depending upon what your schedule is. But what I will say is this, in the first week, at least two 90 minute blocks for your primary responsibility. You don't need to know what you're doing in those primary blocks in that 90 minute block because the first one, all you need to do is start spending time saying okay, in this responsibility what are the things I should be doing? And use that 90 minutes. So start planning your time around the next 90 minute block.
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A
The key is though, that, that 90, those two 90 minute blocks, nothing touches on your, on your number one priority.
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And if you're really smart, you're doing it between 7am and 10am okay? And I actually recommend that we don't do one on ones in that first time in the morning because the value of my mentality is not going to be gained in the one on one. It's important for relationships, but it's the creativity, it's the analysis, decision making skills that I want to leverage and that's why I tend to schedule that time in the. And also it's a reminder, if you think of it in the morning rather than at the end of the day, you have a much more likely opportunity to get a couple of tasks done in your primary responsibility later in the day because you were thinking about it first thing in the morning. If you think about it at the end of the day, when you're sloppy, when you're lazy, no offense folks, but it's true for me too. If you're not as crisp and you say, okay, tomorrow, I'll get to that. Then tomorrow comes in and you do that email and somebody else's priority comes up to the top of your mind and you don't get to it. You do it in the morning, that 90 minutes, uninviable time. Then later in the afternoon, you might have targets of opportunity come up where you can push the peanut forward, so to speak, on your primary responsibilities. And by the way, don't schedule more than 90 minutes at a time for two reasons. One, you won't be effective much working on one thing past 90 minutes. That's what the human brain can take, I'm told. And the second thing is people will start wondering how it is you're scheduling two hour blocks of time and they'll start nibbling away at it. 90 minutes, I'll leave you alone. On more than that. I find, organizationally speaking, in the behavior, organizational behavior I'm observing, people will start asking for that time, what are you doing? Then can I have half of that? Can you separate it into 2 hour blocks? 90 minutes, they won't mess with you. It seems simple, but just that knowing what your primary responsibility is and having on your calendar at least twice every week will make you noticeably more effective. And that's based on the analysis that you're going to do. And can we make this kind of a contest? Can we? Sure, sure. Let's do this. We offer to the first person who takes the time and we don't want it done in five minutes, we don't want it cobbled together. We'll offer a book of your choice to the Manager Tools member who takes the time, goes through the Steps, uses step 3 or 3A, whichever one I'd recommend. Step 3, obviously, because you're probably gonna beat to the punch by somebody else. And be prepared to show us your work and then prepare to either post about it or talk about it with us. In terms of your revelations regarding schedule management and your priorities and use your.
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Time, that'd be great. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.
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Yeah. Really? That'd be neat.
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A
So it's interesting. I wonder and maybe we'll get some feedback on this. And how many people were disappointed because I suspect that many people came to this podcast wanting to know how to get more tasks done in a given amount of time and what we're saying. The Manager Tools number one principle around time management, Forget it. It's not about getting more things done in a period. It's about getting the most important thing.
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B
Exactly. Yeah. And you know what? And that relates to my point about when people ask me about, you know, how do I balance work, family? You don't balance it. You go home. It's not about more for work. There is no more time. It's about choosing more effectively. You don't get paid the money you're paid as a manager to try to get more. You get paid to get better, which is more efficient around the time that you have. And that's saying no to things. It's strategy and time management are similar in the way that it's about saying yes to one thing and therefore, by definition, saying no to others. And managers sometimes have to say no. No, I know that's important to you. That doesn't fit into my wheelhouse and I'm not going to do it. A little bit of pain, a little bit of pinch, long run, you end up worrying about your primary responsibility. Nothing shameful about that. Cool. Okay.
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A
I look forward to more of these.
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B
Great.
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A
Thanks, my friend. See you. So there you go. Our thoughts on time management. Let us know what you think on the discussion forums at www.manager-tools.com forums or send us a note at showmanager-tools.com until next week. Have a great one and so long.