Productivity & Time Management Training, Speaking, Consulting

Ye olde time management techniques taught that a truly efficient person has every moment of his or her time filled with productive activity. Not only the time, but the chinks between the time. And it’s better if you have several things going at once.

So what happens if you have that kind of life, with back-to-back appointments and every minute planned out and a crisis occurs? Crisis, here, means any unforeseeable, unplanned situation that you have to respond to. It doesn’t have to mean an earthquake, it could be the flu that knocks you flat, or a car problem that leaves you stranded and makes getting to your meetings impossible.

Without flexibility in your schedule, your efficient system shatters. But if you build flexibility into your schedule, if you leave room for the unexpected, it’s a lot easier to cope with the unforeseen. And it creates opportunities to put final touches on projects or make last minute phone calls that otherwise wouldn’t have fit into your tightly-wound, intensely-planned schedule.

Building flexibility into your schedule can be approached as a simple math problem. Let’s say that you, like me, get up at 7 a.m. And at some point, maybe 8 p.m., you determine that you’re done for the day. It’s time to start unwinding. In a five-day week, that means you have 65 hours of “productive time.” If you plan up 90 percent of that—58.5 hours—and something goes awry, you will have to cancel appointments, miss deadlines and be generally stressed. But what if you only filled up around 60 percent? That’s still 39 hours a week, and there’s no law against being productive the other 19 hours. But you’ve given yourself room to make adjustments for a crisis, should it arise.

If the crises doesn’t happen, you can use the time to be proactive, knock items off your to-do list, catch up on reading, social media, bills, exercise, or whatever seems like the best use of your time.

Sixty percent may not work for you but it’s a good benchmark to start with. In any case, it will ease your stress level. Little issues like unexpected traffic or copiers out of ink don’t have to throw off your whole day.Try it out and see how productive you can be!

Thanks for reading!

Time management and “AttentionManagement” efforts are easily defeated when too many tasks confront us at once. I learned an anecdote suggesting that’s exactly why lion tamers use chairs, holding the seat of the chair or stool and pointing the legs at the lion. Do lions have some inordinate fear of chairs? Nope, lions are like us. They get overwhelmed with too much information. The lion tries to focus on all four legs at the same time. He can’t. So he becomes distracted, overwhelmed, passive, and less productive (“productive” in this case being interpreted as eating more trainers! .

Whether you’re an executive in a big corporation or a solopreneur, you probably have exactly the same problem. Most of us have piles of paper reflecting jobs that need tending to, pages of unread emails reproducing in our inboxes, phone calls yet to be made and blogs and other social media with embarrassingly old dates on them. This could be due to the fact that attention management is not being effectively practiced.

The pile of old work to be tackled produces a stressed out, overwhelmed, drowning feeling that has a paralyzing effect on your productivity. When you sit down at your desk and you think to yourself, “What do I need to do now?”, the sheer number of potential answers to that question is completely overwhelming. It probably causes you to retreat into some sort of busy work, something that is easy, familiar, and doesn’t require a lot of thought. For most people, this means email. It’s just so much easier to go look at new business coming down the pike than try to figure out what to do about the pile of old business.  Like the lion, we’re reacting, and our reaction is to retreat.As long as we don’t have a system in place to manage all the inputs, we’re faced daily with what I’ve learned to call Lion Syndrome: the passivity brought on by too much to think about. And the old tasks continue to pile up, or get done at the last minute, in a shower of stress. When we have an hour, or heck, 30 minutes to get something done,we need to easily and painlessly be able to answer the question: “What do I do need todo now?”

With a New Year starting, it’s a great time to resolve to overcome lion syndrome and take action that will put us back in control. This means systems of organization and action that really work. That’s what I’ll be talking about in 2012 in my productivity training classes. Keep reading, and step by step, we’ll overcome Lion Syndrome.  If you want some hands-on learning, about avoiding Lion Syndrome and other ways to lower your stress, get more done, and achieve your significant results, consider joining me in Austin for my next productivity training seminar. Read more and register here.

photo by Eric Kilby

One of the productivity training tools of my Empowered Productivity System is how to handle the “shoulds” on your list.  If you’re familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, you know that one quadrant reflects “low importance, low urgency” items that you feel need to be done, yet you know will have very little impact on your life andyour work if you actually complete them. However, knowing this does not free your mind from worrying about them. These are thetasks that I have learned to call the “shoulds”: things that you feel like you “should” do, that weigh on your mind, and perhaps languishon your to-do list, typically out of guilt. You might think of them as the “monkeys on your back,” sapping your productivity.  
Then there are the items that really need to be done in order for your life to run smoothly and according to plan, yet they aren’t nearly as important as other things on your list, and as a result, you just can’t seem to get them done. These include routine household chores like cleaning, laundry, and errands. They could also include business tasks like filing, event assistance, transcription, or data entry, and they often make you feel like your productivity
suffers if they don’t get done.
My advice for these “shoulds” and low-importance needs is to get help. If you are a busy professional and aren’t getting anyhelp in your life, whether it’s a cleaning person, some part-time admin or household help, or specialty services, then I think you are missing an opportunity to create the time and space to achieve your significant results.  Some people call this delegating. I like to think of it as empowering yourself or someone else (in my time management training classes, I teach clients how and when to eliminate some tasks from their to-do lists). Offloading these tasks can be empowering in several ways. It can empower you by freeing you up to be productive in the things that you are best at, the things that only you can do, the things that will have an impact on your life or work if they get done – your significant results. It can be empowering once you’ve found a source to get that item done for you. It can be empowering to someone else because it can give them an opportunity to learn something new (for example, a staff person or intern) or gain a new customer (if it’s outside help).
There are many resources to get “just a little help,” whenever you need it. Websites like Elance and Guru provide specialty business services. Many colleges and universities have resources for college students to make extra money. Here in Austin it’s Hire a Longhorn.  Other Austin resources are Avail Assistants and Let Kelly. There may be businesses like this in your town too. What might be my most favorite new service is Taskrabbit.

See if they are in your city and check them out. I think their business model is brilliant. The more “shoulds” and low priority items you clear from your list, the more you are free to do the things you’re best at; the things that offer you the highest payoff in your life; the things that you truly love to do – your significant results. For example, maybe you’ve been longing to start a part-time business doing something you enjoy.  If you didn’t have to mow the lawn, organize the garage, or fix the leaky faucet on the weekend, you could devote the time instead to generating extra income from your hobby. What have you been wanting to do “as soon as you find the time”? Could unloading some of your “shoulds” create the time you’ve been looking for?

If you know of another service like those I’ve mentioned above, please add them to the comments! Thanks for reading!