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.”