Can you spare a moment to read an article on time management? Maybe you don’t have time, but for those hearty souls who’ll grab Father Time by the arm and slow him down, this could be the moment you’ve been waiting for.  After all, isn’t life the management of one moment after another? We’ve all experienced days when time seemed to drag on forever, or when time flew and we wondered where it went. Is there any way to control or manage time? Time management is a process of deciding what you want to occur with things and people, and somehow getting it to happen. The opposite of time management would be letting things slide


Deciding to Do It, Dump It,
Delegate It, or Detain It

The fun really begins when we grab the steering wheel of our own lives and hit the accelerator. Set aside a few hours some evening or weekend, and pick up a set of communication baskets and some file folders for you and the other members of your business. Then go to your desk, table or workspace and brace yourself for the toughest moment. Pull out every unanswered letter or dispatch, anything incomplete with your finances, all the half-done projects, everything incomplete you have lying around and put it on the desk. This includes your voicemail, e-mail, and even your spam folder.

I worked with a CPA who had a desk the size of a barge. He disappeared on the other side of the desk during this step, with stacks of paper and boxes several feet high.

Even worse, I also did this action with a businessman, and when we got to his home office, he broke the news to me that everything wouldn’t fit on his desk. He took me to see his “pending” 3-car garage. It was piled to the ceiling with incomplete projects and stuff. He was pointing out things to me when he discovered a motorcycle buried in there he had forgotten he owned! The next step can also be a bit gruesome at first but rapidly gets better as you go through it.

 

Pick up one item at a time and take care of it utilizing one of the four Ds:
-Do It.
-Dump It.
-Delegate It.
-Detain It.


And just plow through it. One professional lady burst into tears when I asked her to pick up the first piece of paper on top of the huge pile in front of her. Surely you’re tougher than that. Guidelines to Get You in High Gear


- If you can knock it out in 10 minutes
or less, just Do It.


- If it’s not a valuable document and you
haven’t needed it in the last six months
(or if you can pull it off the Web when
you do need it), Dump It.


- If it’s really not your job, Delegate It to
whomever should do it, obtaining their
agreement as needed.


- The papers and projects that now
remain go into a pending stack of
Detain It that we’ll deal with later.


Do all four Ds and don’t just shuffle papers. I worked with a financial planner who operated from his home, working off his kitchen table. When I commented that it seemed an unusual place to run his business, he asked if I wanted to see his office! It was piled so high that he had to move to his kitchen table to work. His huge pantry was filled with papers and documents that he just shuffled and put back, not completing a thing, saving everything for “when he had time.” When I asked where he had learned to handle work like that he told me about his former boss. It turned out that he had gone bankrupt. Probing further, his father had the same habit pattern and his kids had recently moved him into an old folks home, not because he had health problems; he had just filled his home so full of stuff he wouldn’t throw out that he could no longer move around in it! You can go a bit extreme in the other direction, too. A business executive in a major corporation asked his secretary if she’d taken all the important documents out of a stack about two feet high, and when she said yes, he took the entire stack and dropped it in the trash, commenting to the startled consultant that if it were important, they’d write him back. If you persevere, you’ll end up with a pending residue that is typically between one and 10 percent of what you had initially. Now take the file folders and divide the incompletes by area, such as finance, sales, marketing, etc. Sort the papers in each folder into the sequence in which you want to do them. If there are things you want to do for which you don’t have a piece of paper, make a note and put it in proper sequence in the appropriate pending folder.

Finally, set aside some time on a regular basis to work on your pending folders so that you eventually catch up completely. We have had conservative business executives get up on their desk and do a jig when they completed these steps. Maybe you will, too!

Remember, “the largest room in the world is the room for improvement.”