TAME YOUR TIME BANDITS

I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung. ~Tagore

By now you’ve probably realized that several of your everyday activities have become time-wasters. It’s not that the activities don’t have value, it’s that we often allow them to dictate when we do them, or how often we do them, instead of the other way around.

Handling incoming calls and drop-in visitors – in the office and at home, reading e-mails, and procrastinating are four of the most notable bandits. But time management experts offer several proven techniques that can put us back in charge of our time.

For each of the four time bandits, I've summarized a few tips below, and supplied a picture link to related articles.

HANDLING CALLS
If you can handle the caller's request immediately, do it. If your answer requires something more, tell the caller when you will be able to return the call. You determine when you have time to find the answer, and when to make the call back. Also, recapping the conversation confirms understanding, and signals that the call is concluded.

HANDLING VISITORS
Stand when they enter the room, so that they also remain standing.
Set time limits up front. If needed, suggest a later meeting, at your convenience, preferably in their office.

EMAILS
Don't be a slave to the computer! Turning off the audible notification will reduce your urge to read each one as is comes in. Instead, plan to check and answer emails two or three times a day, maybe when you arrive, after lunch, and a few minutes before you plan to leave the office.

PROCRASTINATION
Break large projects into manageable steps. Decide to work for only a set amount of time. Once you get started, you'll gain momentum. Reward yourself.

A quick Internet search yields an abundance of time management tips. You'll notice several techniques are repeated often. That's because they work! Spend a little time analyzing what you're currently doing, and comparing it to what you should be doing - according to your prioritized plan.

By changing just a few habits, you can reap many rewards!

TAKE TIME TO PLAN

This week we'll begin to use all the information we've been gathering.

• First, we examined what is important to us - events and activities that bring joy to our lives.
• Next, we set some SMART goals that would guide our actions as we try to create more joy.
• Last week, we took a critical look at how we currently spend our time.

If you're like most of us, your time log exposed several minutes - maybe even hours - you spend each week doing "stuff" that is completely unrelated to your personal and professional goals. Awareness is power. Now that we know what (and who) our time bandits are, we can find ways to eliminate them.

Making a plan for the day is critical. Imagine the achievement of your goals as your destination, and your daily plan as your road map. You need a way to measure your progress, and confirm that you're on the right road at every turn, and not driving aimlessly until you run out of gas (or time).

Well designed time management tools can be a great help to keep you organized and motivated. The variety of tools is endless, and includes calendars, to-do lists, time schedules, project planners, and more. It may take more than one try to find the layout, size, and details that work for you. I've included links to some of the biggest providers so you can comparison shop. Some of these sites also include their own time management tips and techniques.

Once you find the right tools, you have to use them! Let's start with your calendar. How many do you keep? One for home, and another for work? Maybe another for school, or kids activities? Unless you can clone yourself, and assign a different self to tend each one, you need to work from a single, comprehensive calendar. Otherwise, you risk committing to too much at one time - and likely, too much overall. Once you see all the demands for your time in one place, you can make better, more purposeful choices about how and where you spend your time.

Now that you've listed all your events and activities in one place, you can prioritize them, and plan your day in such a way that the most important things get accomplished. We can't do everything in 86,400 seconds - so we have to prioritize each event and activity, based on how it supports our goals.

Check out The Sideroad for How to Prioritize Work.

Over the next week, I hope you'll start your journey toward better time management by following these steps:

• find the time management tools that work for you;
• begin each day by making a to-do list and setting a priority for each item; and
• work on the most important things first.

I know it's not as easy as it sounds, but you can get great results by implementing just a few time management principles at a time. For my next blog, I've compiled lots of tips for taming those time bandits we mentioned earlier. But for now, we're out of time. :)

TIME IS MONEY

Yesterday is a canceled check; tomorrow is a promissory note; today is the only cash you have - so spend it wisely” ~ Kay Lyons

If time is money, then everyone is in debt. ~ Dutch saying

We get 86,400 seconds each day. Instead of the number of seconds in your day, what if that was the number of dollars in your bank account? How would you spend them? Would you invest your money wisely, or would you squander it? Would you share it, or let anyone else tell you how to spend it?

It’s time we start thinking about time in the same way – as a valuable, consumable resource. When we begin thinking about time in this way, we realize several things about our “spending habits.”

• We often let friends and acquaintances determine how our time is spent.
  
• We make impulse buys, without considering the trade-offs.
  
• We sometimes don’t hold ourselves accountable for our “purchases.”

Our calendar, like our checkbook, speaks volumes about what we value. Having committed to a few important goals, we can determine the best way to spend our time and/or money. (In an earlier post, I mentioned that without knowing our goals, we have no way of judging the way we spend our time.) The question then becomes very simple: is this purchase in line with my goals? Does it take me closer to, or farther from, the results I want?

Before we consider all the choices we could be making, we need to become aware of our current “spending habits.” What are you buying? Do you really know the amount of each purchase? Is it a planned, worthwhile investment, or an ill-considered impulse buy?

We can’t make more time, we can only make trades in the way we spend it. So we need to know what we’re willing to bargain: what we’re willing to give up, and how much we’re willing to pay to reach our goals.

Your charge this week is to keep a time log. I know it sounds tedious, and it is. Nevertheless, it is the only way to get a true picture of how you spend your time now. Just keep it for seven days. This isn’t rocket science – it’s simply putting pen to paper, noting the time whenever you start doing something new. Be honest! If you take 10 minutes to chat about the game last night, write it down!

This is not the time to evaluate, only to record. There will be time later to evaluate. And the best part is, you’ll be the only judge.

(Time really is money! Click on the picture to read the findings of a British professor.)

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. ~ Carl Sandburg

SMART Goals

If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.

~ Andrew Carnegie

Now that we've thought a little about what's really important in our lives, our next step is to turn some of our "wishes" into goals. Wishes do come true! But they aren't granted to us as in a Disney fairy tale. Because we live in the real world, we'll have to make our own wishes come true, by setting SMART goals and taking actions to reach them.

SMART is an acronym often used to direct the process of goal setting. The actual words may vary, but the concepts are invariable - because they work. SMART goals are:

• Specific (significant, stretching)
• Measurable (meaningful)
• Attainable (achieveable, agreeable)
• Relevant (reasonable, rewarding)
• Timed (trackable, tangible)

A SMART goal is a wish that has been tranformed into an action plan. If we try to follow a course that lacks these characteristics, we will come up short. Repeated failures can discourage us, and cause us to give up. But by setting SMART goals, we are setting ourselves up for success.
Consider the following example:

WISHFUL THINKING: I need to lose weight.

SMART GOAL: I will lose 18 pounds by August 1.

Can you see the difference? I would never reach the first goal (wish) because I don't even know what it looks like! How much weight do I want to lose? How long am I giving myself to lose it? But by making it a SMART goal, I know exactly what I need to do: lose just three pounds a month for the next six months. My new goal is specific, measureable, attainable, relevant, and timed. And now I'm ready to identify the steps that will get me there.

Let's try another one:

WISHFUL THINKING: I want to improve my golf game.

How can we transform this into a SMART goal? Well, we need to make it specific. What is my average score today? What do I want my average to be a year from today? By adding specifics, I can decide what steps I need to take (golf lessons, different clubs, more putting practice), I can measure my progress (averaging at least one point lower every three months); and most importantly, I will know when I've acheived it! Maybe I can't play like Michelle Wei by Friday, but I can reach a SMART goal like this:

I want to lower my golf score by four points in twelve months.

Test this method for yourself. See how much more clearly you can visualize your success. Experience the benefit of being able to track your progress, so you can gain momentum, or maybe adjust your plan. The best time management starts here, giving us a clear reason to make choices in the ways we invest our time.

To learn more, check out this list of goal setting articles.