By Matt Pletzer, Lift Consulting
If you’re like 99% of Americans, you let your day run you, rather than you running your day. Ugh, a punch to the gut right out of the gates. But it’s the reality. Working with many organizations and individuals on time management, I hear the same comments over and over:
– “I’m not in control of my day.”
– “Fires just keep popping up and I must put them out.”
– “Sometimes I just don’t have a choice.”
– “There are just not enough hours in a day.”
Does this sound familiar? Here is the question: where do the time management challenges begin? (At this point, please stop reading and really take a moment to reflect on yourself). In my opinion, the challenges begin and end with our own personal mindset about the problem. If you can’t change your mindset, it will not matter what “tactic” I provide you on how to better manage your time. We are victims of our own creation.
Do you know of someone who seems to thrive in chaos? Or how about someone that is always late, no matter what the event or how important it is?
I could give them a book on tactics on how to better manage their time (or share this article), but at the end of the day it wouldn’t matter and wouldn’t make an impact. Sure, they might read the list, pick out one or two and perhaps even have a little success, but it won’t stick long term. Why? Just like dieting or working out, we are the result of our own habits.
Many people believe it takes 21 days to form a habit. Through our own internal research, we’ve found that to not be true. We’ve found to create true “life-changing habits” it takes over 66 days. In fact, we’ve found it can take up to 120 days to do so.
When people are developing new habits, they must break old ones, and that is hard! Especially with a lack of true commitment. At Sandler, we like to say the pain of remaining the same must be more costly than the pain of change.
For someone to truly get a better handle on their own personal time management, he/she needs to first start by breaking down their own beliefs. Beliefs lead to judgements, judgements lead to actions or inactions, actions or inactions lead to results, and a lack of results lead to beliefs … so the cycle begins all over again.
Below are three steps to managing your time more effectively. All of them are tactics my team and I have tried and have found to make a profound impact in our work.
Step one: Rewrite Your Scripts and Identify the “Why Behind the What”
Here is an example: I used to be someone who was habitually late. My father was late, my sister was late. I chalked it up to it being a “hereditary issue” and there was nothing I could do about it. After taking time and asking others how my being late affected them, I quickly realized, it was a choice of mine. I am someone who has a hard time telling people “no” and has a “high need for approval.” I also didn’t have the skillset to tell people how much time I had to talk before I started engaging with them, as I had a perception that doing so would be considered “rude.” After talking this through with my own personal business coach, I identified that my “high need for approval” and my personal challenges with saying “no” were the lead domino in my being late all the time. If I could affect my lead domino, I could fix my bad habit of being late.
So fast forward five years and I did. I worked diligently applying the skills our team teaches by prioritizing my time over others, and really thinking through my commitments before I made them. Now I am habitually early, and rarely, if ever, late. The moral of the story is we are always in control. The only thing we truly control 100% is our own minds and our choice. In order to fix your time management challenges, you must first begin with looking internally rather than externally; and focus on the psychology of time management before focusing on the tactics of time management.
Step Two: Identify Your “One Thing”
Gary Keller is the author of “The One Thing.” If you haven’t read it yet, I’d highly recommend doing so. In Gary’s book, Gary references the “one thing that will make everything else easier or unnecessary.”
Many of you may be familiar with this concept through the 80/20 rule, also known as “Pareto’s Principle.” The principle states that 20% of your effort will represent 80% of your results. Going one step further, it means there is likely one or two things that, if you could focus your effort and energy on everything else, would become exponentially easier.
Watching reality TV is a guilty pleasure of mine. Gold Rush Whitewater is one of the shows I thoroughly enjoy. In this show, the stars mine for gold by dredging the rivers of Alaska. The gold sits on the bottom below all the silt and rocks that have piled up for years. The miners must use a large dredge and suction hose to get to the bottom and hopefully suck up all the gold. In one episode, there was a rock pileup on the bottom of the river. The miners couldn’t get past it. They were locked in, until they found what they called the “keystone” rock. This one rock was looser than the rest. Once they removed it, the rest of the rocks were easily removed. Conversely, when they tried to pull on the other rocks before removing the keystone, they didn’t get anywhere.
Pro Tip* If you’d like more tips on how to manage your mindset check out the philosophy of Stoicism by reading the book “The Daily Stoic.”
To me, this experience was synonymous with finding your “one thing.” Find the one thing that makes everything else easier or unnecessary and focus on accomplishing that first. You will find planning the rest of your day around it will lead to your time management improving dramatically. If you’re busy, which all of us in the construction industry are right now, then the reality is you likely have more things to do and not enough time. One of the beliefs you’ll have to align to is that this is “OK.” It’s OK not to get everything done, so long as you get the most important things done. Recognizing this and changing your belief will be a huge step towards improving your overall time management.
Step 3: Eliminate Your Distractions
In order to honor your “one thing” and change your deeply engrained beliefs, you need to eliminate the distractions that will take you off task from doing so. There are many tactics to do this, and as with any tactic they are only as good as executed consistently. That said, below is a list of a few of our favorites and some protips around them:
Calendar Block Your Day If your one thing is truly your most important thing to get done during the day, where should it go? Obviously, the answer is in your calendar. That said, many people run from meeting to meeting with no time for themselves. I believe it will never happen if it isn’t in your calendar. Therefore, start by putting all things in your calendar. Tasks, appointments, routine personal appointments – you name it, it belongs in there. We only have 24 hours in a day. What you choose to do with it is up to you, but if it isn’t important enough to make it to your calendar, it probably isn’t important at all.
Turn Off Notifications How many interruptions do you get during the day? Is that “smart phone” in your pocket really making you productive? If you’re like most people, it’s making you less productive. Why? Because for every interruption, studies show you lose up to 15 minutes of productivity. Remember, you have a choice. If you check your email, or your answer your phone, that choice is yours. In addition, so are the repercussions of doing so.
Pre-Plan Your Day By Journaling If you took 10-15 minutes every day to plan your day, or better yet, took the time on Sunday to plan your week, we believe you would be exponentially better at time management. Benjamin Franklin once said, “to fail to plan is to plan to fail.” If you don’t plan your day or week, you’re essentially submitting to your day/week controlling you.
Train Your Clients/Colleagues/Employees/Family Our actions lead to results. Results come from our actions. Whatever we allow, we are teaching to others as acceptable behavior. A prime example here is interruptions. We previously outlined how one interruption can lead to 15 min of lost productivity. How many times during the day do you let the old, “Hey, do you have a minute?” question override what you are doing? Worse yet, out of those questions, how many of them could have been solved by a simple Google search? If the answer is a lot, you know you have a problem. You’ve trained others that you will give them the fish, rather than teach them to fish. We know the lesson here – if you teach them to fish, they’ll eat for a lifetime.
Schedule Your Response Times I set my out-of-office assistant daily to inform my colleagues, clients, and prospects that I’ll respond to them before 9AM daily or after 4PM. This is my automatic email response. I do this because I know that if something is truly urgent, my colleagues, clients or prospects will learn the best way to get a quick response from me. Fortunately for me, this is through my team; as I am generally with clients or employees daily in back-to-back meetings. I know, however, because of general practices, this is “against the norm” – therefore most clients/colleagues/prospects have been trained they will get an instant response (basically, interrupt me whenever and for however long you want). Conversely, I choose to train my colleagues, clients, employees and prospects on how I choose to do business. We recommend you do the same.
These are just a few of our best practices. We could go on and on with other tips and techniques. In summary, however, it all starts with you and your choices. Focus on your beliefs above and beyond anything else. If you don’t change your beliefs about time management, nothing will ever change.
Once you’ve changed your beliefs, identify the one thing that will make everything else easier or unnecessary. Then focus on the day-to-day behaviors or “tactics” to keep you on task.
For more tips and tricks on better Time Management we’d recommend these great books: a. The One Thing – By Gary Keller; b. The Four Hour Work Week – By Tim Ferriss; c. Atomic Habits – By James Clear; d. 12 Week Year – By Brian Moran; and e. The Daily Stoic – By Ryan Holiday.
Matt Pletzer is founder/CEO of Lift Consulting. Follow Lift on Linkedin at Linkedin.com/companyliftconsultingllc or contact Lift at lift@sandler.com or 608-515-8163. .
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