Welcome to Rob Brown Council!

I’m pretty sure that, by now, you have read the other articles in the series. So, here we go with even more top tips to boost your time management skills.

1. Touch Things Once. The most productive professionals touch every email, fax, note, memo and phone message just once and action it. Revising things can dilute your efforts and waste unnecessary time.

2. DDD. Dump it, Delegate it or Do it! Another method is Act, File or Bin. Experts reckon up to 40 hours (a working week) is wasted revisiting old emails and looking for things you’ve filed!

3. Be Ruthless. Watch out for time bandits: interruptions, people asking for ‘five minutes of your time’, unplanned inbound calls, extra long meetings and breaks. They’ll suck the productive time from your day.

4. Procrastinating Prevents Productivity. If you think you can go slack today because you’ve got time tomorrows, you might be right. But you’ll do less tomorrow because you’ll still be doing today’s stuff. Put in a fair day for a fair wage and develop a reputation for getting things done quickly and achieving more in an hour than most people would take three hours over.

"I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature."
John D. Rockefeller

5. Get Back In The Car. When you are interrupted, a measure of your discipline will be in how quickly you can get back to your schedule and back into the task you were doing. Jump back quickly rather than delaying the return to action.

6. Control Emails. Email can be the scourge of even the most disciplined people. Broadband and constant online connections have their disadvantages as you’re always connected. Consider taking the ‘you’ve got mail’ reminders off and only checking your emails 2-3 times a day. Nothing is usually so urgent that the world stops if you don’t answer it immediately.

7. Eliminate Clutter. They say 80% of emails and filed papers will never be looked at again. If you have the ‘just in case’ attitude which leads to a cluttered life and a cluttered desk, you’ll waste time looking for things, lose time being distracted by things and weaken your laser-beam focus on what counts – your Prime Tasks. Resolve to be strict and rigorous with your efforts if you want maximum results in minimum time.

8. Chunk Down. Trying to tackle the biggest job of the day all in one go is like trying to climb Everest barefoot, with no shirt on. It’s very difficult. Try to break your work down into manageable chunks, rather than diving in head first and getting stuck! Think about which aspects are the most important, and start on the tasks that have the shortest deadlines – don’t just jump into the jobs that you will find the easiest.

“Lost, yesterday, somewhere between Sunrise and Sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.”
Horace Mann

9. Magic Meetings. Another time sapper that probably accounts for around 20% of your working week. Clear and agreed agendas, clear areas of responsibility, clear actions, strong time-keeping and strong chairing all ensure your meetings take up the barest of time. ‘Standing up’ meetings have also been shown to eliminate wasted time as people seem to get through things quicker. My final tip on meetings – schedule them before lunch and watch how quickly people finish on time!

10. The Pareto Principle – Think about this. How much of your day do you spend doing ‘your job’? What return do you see on that? Not as much as you would like, I’d bet. The Pareto Principle is the 80/20 rule. If you spend 80% of your time working on all your job description priorities, then you are only going to see about 20% productivity. However, if you spend as little as 20% of your time working on goal-oriented tasks, you will see a return of 80%. It’s all about priority!

11. Set Your Priorities #1. This model shows us the categories that we should break our job tasks down into:

1’s – These are all the things that will make the world end if you forget them! They are crises. They are the most urgent jobs.

2’s– You will find yourself spending a lot of time here. This is the ‘planning’ stage; this is where you will set most of your priorities.

3’s – Day-to-days. These are the meetings, the calls, and the jobs that are ‘more relevant to someone else’

4’s – You can really do without these. The 4s are the biggest time wasters of them all. They are the ‘trivia’ – the chats around the water cooler, the answering of junk email. Avoid them at all costs!

12. Set Your Priorities #2. Now, think about which of these numbers (1, 2, 3 and 4) are going to feature in both your ‘Job Description Priorities’ and your ‘Goal-Oriented Tasks’. If you have a day full of 1s and 3s, then you are fulfilling your job description – you’ve had your meeting, and solved a number of world-ending problems. If you have a day that is 1s and 2s focussed, then you are setting yourself up for much greater productivity. You’ve given yourself planning time. You’ve planned how you can apply your skills to the high priority tasks.

13. Be Decisive. Here’s a four-step guide to conquering the biggest, self-generated timewaster. Bear this model in mind next time you think about deviating from your task list.

Step 1: What is the BEST that can happen from doing this task?
Step 2: What is the WORST that could happen from doing this task?
Step 3: Is ‘the best’ worth risking if ‘the worst’ happens?
Step 4: Can you deal with ‘the worst’ if it happens?

So if you’ve read all four of these articles on my best Time Management Tips, you’ve now had close to 50 fantastic gems to make you more productive, more profitable and more focused with your time. And if you asked me to drill them down to the two most important, here they are!

Rob’s Top Two Rules for Time and Self Management

Develop discipline. It is the difference between mediocrity and excellence. Between failure and success. Between fulfilling your goals and fulfilling someone else’s.

Be proactive, not reactive. If you manage by crisis and fire fighting, you’ll never get ahead. Go back to your values and decide what’s important against what’s urgent. If you don’t you’ll heap more stress on your already unproductive life!

Now go and make them count. As top motivational speaker and friend, Clive Gott, told me once: “You don’t have to be successful today. You just have to get through the day and be one step closer than where you were yesterday.”

"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."
George Bernard Shaw

 

Rob's Quick Tips