Quiddity Higher Purpose Business, help for entrepreneurs, women in business, David Solomon

What Is Time Management?

Or perhaps more to the point, what isn’t it?    

Is it poor time management or wasted time?

Is it poor time management or procrastination?

Is it poor time management or lack of productivity?

Is it poor time management or lack of achievement?

Is it poor time management or poor time choices?

“Time equals money.”

You’ve heard that expression a thousand times or more. So if it is true, what are you doing with yours? Are you spending it, or investing it? And how are your time investments working for you?

Are you frustrated because there are “not enough hours in the day”?  I certainly am. Groucho Marx wanted a 36-hour day - that way he could work 24 hours, and still get a good night’s sleep. Great idea!

Spending time or investing time is a choice. Here are some examples:

SPENDING TIME                                                                         

1. watching TV
2. drinking in a bar
3. reading a newspaper about the local news

INVESTING TIME

1. reading a book
2. writing or reviewing a business plan
3. talking to your kids

NOTE: Invested time spent with your family pays the best dividends i.e. love.

Is this time management? It’s fair to argue that this is time allocation. It’s how you choose to use your time right now. How are you spending or investing your 16-18 hours a day?

New pressures are being placed on the immediacy of your time - and for many people it is hours (not minutes) a day that are being consumed (whether you view it a spent or invested doesn’t matter – it is still consumed).

And there are plenty of other time demands that have crept into the fabric of work and daily life:

• iPhone / Blackberry / smart phone - people are addicted. They can’t sit down without looking at it, and responding to it. 
•  Email. How many a day? Ten? A hundred? More?
•  Texting. Instant and unavoidable.
• Mobile phone. After emailing, searching and texting, then you start talking. How much time? Well just over 700 minutes a month is 12 hours. Most people spend much more.  This isn’t necessarily spent time or wasted time, but do measure its value.
• Add to the list social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and Wikipedia.
• Then add blogs, e-zines and websites.

Let’s be conservative and say that these things combined take up 2 hours a day. That is 700+ hours a year or 30 x 24 hour days.

So here is the big opportunity - in this allocation or re-allocation of time, it is critical to be sure you are addressing the really important goals, whatever they may be for you.

Progress Over Perfection

Being a person with a tendency to get stuck in my own mind I have asked (and re-asked!) the What? Why? and How? questions endlessly.

How much I enjoyed that is the topic of another discussion but last year I decided that I needed to move from contemplation and cogitation to activation and initiation.

I now believe that one of the major reasons for my procrastination (of course I didn’t see it as such) has been my perfectionism trait.

So the new mantras over my computer are “Don’t be perfect - be prolific!” and “Progress over Perfection”.

It’s given me a new sense of urgency and a mechanism for course correction and opening up to serendipity.

So far it seems to be working well.

Can I Offer You Another Distraction With That Sir?

I just went to a 2 day conference in Melbourne and rather than leave the night before and spend a night in an unfamiliar bed, I caught an early morning flight (very early). I had thought I’d do my daily morning meditation on the plane.

As I arrived at the gate lounge 15 mins before boarding (there wasn’t much traffic at that hour of the morning) I decided to meditate for 10 minutes. I put on my headphones with some relaxation music and settled back.

What I didn’t expect was the volume of background noise I’d hear - people talking, coughing, walking, airport chimes and announcements…

And then it occurred to me - isn’t this similar to what happens to us in our daily lives?

What I mean is that we try to focus on the task at hand and then we are surrounded by distractions that appear designed to prevent us from achieving any progress e.g. phone calls, email, queries from staff, children, hunger (or cravings at least) etc.

Keeping focus with all these distractions is a huge challenge, and it is what generally prevents us from getting in a state of flow and achieving big things. And dare I say, some of us even create our own distractions as a surreptitious form of procrastination.

It has been suggested that if you can multi-task then such interruptions are easy to deal with. However, after many years of observation, my conclusion is that we all only do 1 task at a time, and that multi-tasking is a myth. The difference lies is how we switch from task to task!

A university study concluded that a phone interruption could reduce a person’s productivity by up to 20 minutes, taking into account the time required to ramp back up into the state of flow, efficiency or peak performance they were in when first interrupted.

Women appear to be better at multi-tasking as it appears that they can ramp-up their recovery to peak much quicker. In other words, an interruption is momentary and does not have a significant impact on productivity. Men tend to take longer to ramp back up so we don’t have so many examples of men who appear to multi-task well.

So perhaps the solution is to develop individual ways to focus and refocus our attention as we proceed through the day, making sure interruptions don’t derail our progress.

For example, I am quite visual and I surround my work area with images and words that remind me of what is important to me. I also constantly ask myself the question, “What is the best use of my time right now?”

So I spent the ten minutes thinking about this blog, then had a great morning meditation on the flight which set me up beautifully for a productive day J.

I’m having a “love-hate” relationship with my mind

I love my capacity to think, to process complex concepts, to solve problems.

And I am building a business.

WHACK!      (That’s the sound of a 4 x 2 block of wood hitting me across the back of the head)

Yesterday I met a guy who has essentially the same business building tools as me but in 5 months has done a LOT more with them. Why? The main difference is that his total attitude is “GET IT DONE”.

Hey, it’s not that I am a procrastinator or have “paralysis by analysis”, but his sense of urgency puts me in the shade.

He hasn’t just taken action, he has taken massive action.

Yes, I have taken a lot of action, but I have also thought about it a heck of a lot.

It instantly reminded me of a book written by Michael Masterton called Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat.

Michael Masterson has built several dozen companies, all of which are very successful. His first company didn’t do that well, and from there he also learnt what not to do. He says that anybody and everybody in a new company should be spending 80% of their time on selling. However, most entrepreneurs do the opposite of spending 80% of their time on selling. If you’re not doing it, you’re wasting time, energy, effort and resources because that’s what it takes to create a successful company.

He says that it doesn’t matter what sort of expertise you bring into a new venture - whether you are a numbers person, a people person, or a systems person - to be truly effective in a startup you must become your business’ first and foremost expert at selling. And there is only one way to do this: invest more of your time, attention and energy into the selling process. The ratio of time, creativity, and money spent on selling as opposed to other aspects of business should be something like 80/20.

Michael Masterson says it very clearly: if you’re not even selling it yet – don’t think about making it better! Think about how to sell more of it.

As a perfectionist, I know how it feels to have 10 ideas to make something better even before it’s released to the market, but (DOH!) sometimes you have to realise that it’s the last thing you should be doing. It’s not about making something better, but about selling something, selling a lot more of it, making the sales process better, and then improving it based on what your customers say.

So what am I going to DO about it?

Ready. Fire. Aim.