Where will you carve out time?

It stands to reason that if you want different results, you may have to do some things differently. Many of us find that to be an intimidating idea – because we think we may have to change everything – and that is just an overwhelming thought.

But, what if you only changed one thing? What if the one thing you added was one block of time each week devoted to one of your goals? Notice – I did not say one block of time each day – I really mean one block of time each week! And it doesn’t have to be a large block of time.

What if you set aside one hour each week to work specifically on one of your goals. Yes, only one hour! Do you have any idea what you could accomplish if you devoted one hour to it each and every week? Well – if you devoted one hour each week to reading for example, you would have read more than 10 books by the end of the year. Which, by the way, is way more than most people will do!

What if you set aside that one hour each week to make calls to your clients, prospects and contacts? I am not talking about having long conversations – just a quick touching base type of call. You could easily reach 30 people during that one hour (and leaving a message counts as reaching them). What do you think you might be able to create if you knew that you would reach out to 1500 people over the course of the year?

Not bad for one hour!

Where will you carve out the time?

Because, really, without a life, what’s the point?

(c) 2010, Terry Monaghan

Want to use this article in your ezine or website?
You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it:
Consultant, coach, speaker, trainer and entrepreneur, Terry Monaghan, publishes Now What, a free weekly ezine for entrepreneurs and professionals who want to double their productivity, improve their performance, and have a life! If you’re ready to jump start your performance and your results, then get your free tips now at www.TimeTriage.com.

Back to the basics

Have you ever noticed that there are certain times of year that fly by? And other times just drag on forever? Summertime seems to be one of those times – alternately flying and dragging. Mostly flying though.

Have you already gotten summer brain? You know what I mean: it’s hot, it’s mid-July, everyone is on vacation (even those still at work), and it seems like there is no point doing anything because nothing is really going to get done until September.

I was thinking about some work I was doing with a client last year on planning. We were meeting in early June, and school was almost out for her kids. She wanted to create a great plan for the summer – one that allowed her to have a vacation as well as get all the work and other stuff done without being a stressed out maniac.

As we were talking, I started asking about what had to be done to get the kids ready for school in the Fall. At first, she was confused and didn’t even want to talk about that.

After all, school wasn’t even out for the summer yet, and I was asking her about the next school year!

But as we looked in more detail, it became clear that if she didn’t think and plan now for the end of the summer and the start of the school year, she would be that stressed out maniac sooner than she wanted to be.

In early June it can look like September is months away. And it is. But remember, summer flies by and September comes far sooner than we’d like.

By taking a little time right then, she was able to arrange the back to school medical checkups quickly. She also pulled together the rest of the paperwork the school always wants, and which always can’t be found in August.

So, when school let out the next week, she was able to take her summer long vacation with absolutely no concern about what had to be done when she returned. It was already planned, scheduled and would be waiting for her when the time came.

Planning. A schedule that works for you. These are two of the fundamentals I keep coming back to. They establish a foundation on which you can build your business, and your life. Without that foundation, you are building sandcastles. Beautiful to look at, and they can be quite elaborate and impressive. But not stable. Not lasting.

You can get a jump on everyone by taking a little time to refine your plans, to re-define your schedule, to look at how things are getting done.

When was the last time you inspected your foundation?

Shameless plug: I am re-running my Productivity Basics teleclasses in late July and early August. There will be two session on developing a schedule that works, one session on planning, and one session on taking control of your email. Details are available at EVENTS.

In the meantime, have a great summer – but remember – time flies!

(c) 2010, Terry Monaghan

Want to use this article in your ezine or website?
You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it:
Consultant, coach, speaker, trainer and entrepreneur, Terry Monaghan, publishes Now What, a free weekly ezine for entrepreneurs and professionals who want to double their productivity, improve their performance, and have a life! If you’re ready to jump start your performance and your results, then get your free tips now at www.TimeTriage.com.

Is an empty inbox even possible?

Did you know that studies indicate most of us in business are spending up to 3 hours a day just trying to deal with incoming email? This time doesn’t include doing any of the work associated – just trying to get through the inbox. And if your email pushes through to your BlackBerry or iPhone it can be even worse!

3 hours a day equates to over 19-1/2 weeks a year – just trying to get through the inbox. No wonder it seems to be so overwhelming.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is just insane. I remember when I first heard those statistics. I realized that I was not spending any where near that amount of time dealing with my email, and I didn’t think I was the only one. I went on a hunt to identify what others were doing to manage this, and found we all had something in common.

It’s no big secret – we had all established a process and protocol that we use to manage our email. This process and protocol has just a few parts to it. And, if you implement even one of the steps, you will see an immediate result.

Here is my six step process:

1. Establish protocols. When will you check your email? How quickly will you respond to incoming email? Make no mistake, if you don’t establish your own protocol, one will be established for you by default. The default is what we now have – 3 hours a day (or more) treating email as if it were some form of instant message, and allowing ourselves to be continually interrupted by incoming messages.
2. Set up some rules to divert email you don’t need to see immediately. I have rules that move newsletters into reading folders, and other rules that move messages sent to a particular email account (yes, I have more than one) into its own folder. So what actually ends up in my inbox is already somewhat sorted.
3. Turn off the feature that automatically checks for email every 5-10-15 minutes. (That is the push.) Instead, pull the email in to the inbox at the time you set to check your email.
4. Turn off that shadow popup (or sound) that notifies you of new mail. Studies indicate we get interrupted, on average, every 6-8 minutes throughout the day. And, it takes us up to 10 minutes to re-focus on the task we were working on when the interruption occurred. That math doesn’t work! So, eliminate the interruption.
5. Process your inbox systematically. I like to think of the inbox as a place where items land and the action is to sort. The inbox is not a place for things to live. The goal is an empty inbox at the end of each sort. Here are some sorting criteria that work well:

Read and delete (you don’t have to do anything else)

Read and respond (simple acknowledgment or one line response)

Read and schedule for future action (including delegating)

Read and file

I said six steps – so what is the last one? Stop treating email as if it were instant messaging. We have developed a culture that treats email as if it all required an instant response. Stop! You can put an automatic response on your email that alerts people to your rules and protocols. This will manage their expectations regarding when you will respond and can give them a way to contact you if something needs to be dealt with quicker. Trust me, they won’t get upset, and you won’t receive five more emails asking why you didn’t respond to the first one.

This is what you can expect: As I write this, I average around 250-300 incoming emails every day. I check the email generally twice a day – in the morning, and towards the end of the day. Each time, I spend no more than 30 minutes (and usually quite a bit less time) sorting, responding and scheduling action. Then, I turn it off till the next time.

A few years ago, I took a vacation to Ireland with my brother and sister. Every hotel we checked into had computer access. My brother and sister were checking their email every single day. I didn’t. I was on vacation. Instead, I had already scheduled my first day back as a catch up day. I came home to 894 new emails in the inbox (many others had been diverted). After two hours, every single one had been read, sorted, and scheduled appropriately. And I was caught up on what had been happening while I was away.

Give it a try. It works every single time.

(c) 2010, Terry Monaghan
Want to use this article in your ezine or website?
You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it:
Consultant, coach, speaker, trainer and entrepreneur, Terry Monaghan, publishes Now What, a weekly ezine for entrepreneurs and professionals who want to double their productivity, improve their performance, and have a life! If you’re ready to jump start your performance and your results, then get your free tips now at www.TimeTriage.com.

Solutions to managing overwhelm

In my last post, I listed some of the major factors contributing to the pervasive sense of overwhelm most of us are struggling with. To review, some of the major factors were:

• Looking for things
• Your email
• Interruptions
• Meetings
• Poorly defined processes

All of which was sucking up more than 100% of our time! And creating an unwinnable game in an unworkable environment.

So pick your head up off the desk. Below are some proven strategies to allow you to wrangle that overwhelm into a more manageable state.

What can we do?

So, what can we do? I am going to give you some simple solutions to address each of these areas. While they are simple, they are not necessarily easy to implement – but any one of them will produce a measurable result immediately!

Get organized

What can you do to reduce the time you spend looking for what you need (the document, the file, the phone number)? Get organized. Set up your physical space to work. Close your eyes and picture your primary work space. Got it? Good. Now, let me know – is it set up in such a way that it invites you in and allows you to get real work done? Or is it set up in such a way that it compels you to run screaming from the building? Or somewhere in between? The easiest way to do this is to work with someone else. Let’s face it – if you knew what to do to get organized, you would have already done it. And, I want to clear up one thing here – having a neat office does not necessarily mean you have an organized office. Some of the most organized people I know have untidy offices – but everything has a logic to it, and they can find what they need exactly when they need it.

Establish a process for dealing with your email

Set a specific time each day when you check your email. Turn off the function that pushes email to your computer or smart phone. When it is time to check, pull all the messages into the inbox.

Go through and sort everything in one pass. Don’t try to sort some and work on some – for now just sort. Some quick sort criteria –

• read and delete (you don’t have to do anything else)
• read and respond (simple acknowledgement or one line response)
• read and schedule for future action (including delegating)
• divert – create a rule to automatically sort it into a separate folder (newsletters, etc) that you can access as you have time

Shifting from checking your email every 3-7 minutes throughout the day to checking 2-3 times a day alone will free up two hours of time, on average, immediately!

Stop treating email as if it were a form of instant message!

Managing interruptions

Dan Kennedy says ‘if they can’t find you, they can’t interrupt you.’ Consider tackling your most important task of the day before you check your email, and your voicemail. Don’t be afraid to close your door (and put a sign on it if you need to) so you can focus on your work. The world won’t end if you let your phone calls go to voicemail. You can manage people’s expectations by recording a clear message letting callers know when you may be returning calls, or setting up an email auto-response that lets people know how often you will be reviewing messages – so you won’t get 6 messages asking why you haven’t responded to the first.

If you may only have 45 minutes of productive time in the day, why not get that 45 minutes in and your most important actions done first thing – before anyone has a chance to interrupt?

Meetings

What is the intended outcome of the meeting? Can it be accomplished with a phone call? If so, then do that and save yourself a lot of time. If you must have a meeting be certain there is a clearly stated outcome, an agenda and a firm starting and ending time. And create clear action items coming out of the meeting. A meeting that doesn’t produce action items was probably not necessary.

Ineffective processes

Don’t be afraid to ask ‘why’ when you find yourself wondering if the way something is being done makes sense. Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better, simpler way to get the same result? Are we using our technology to the fullest? Often, we are too involved in what we are doing to step back to see if there might be a better way. If you find yourself operating over top of a sense of frustration and anxiety, you may want to take a step back and look at what is being done and how it is being done to see if you can tell where it has fallen apart. An outside pair of eyes is great here, too.

In summary, the keys to managing overwhelm are taking back control in those areas that you actually can control. You can set boundaries. You can schedule your time. You can plan your work. You can establish processes and protocols for how things get done. And you can recognize that we have created an environment where it is just not possible for one person to get it all done. So, choose what you will focus on (and choose what’s most important to you), and move forward.

To your success!

Terry Monaghan

Want to use this article in your ezine or website?

You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it:

Consultant, coach, speaker, trainer and entrepreneur, Terry Monaghan, publishes Now What a free weekly ezine for entrepreneurs and professionals who want to double their productivity, improve their performance, and have a life! If you’re ready to jump start your performance and your results then get your free tips now at www.TimeTriage.com.

Are we crazy to feel so overwhelmed?

Anyone here ever feel overwhelmed? You are in the right place.

In today’s fast paced world of business and technology – everything that was supposed to be making life easier seems to be conspiring to swallow us whole! Between smart phones, email, instant messaging, social networking, running a business, running a family, running errands – it is hard to remember sometimes about having a life!

Everyone feels overwhelmed and stressed out from time to time, and our current way of working doesn’t help. Have you ever noticed that when you are feeling stressed it is just a short hop to feeling overwhelmed, and you seem to be unable to even think? Well, science is on your side (or against you, depending on how you want to look at it). We evolved with the ability to focus on one thing, while blocking out most of everything else. Women have a higher capacity for maintaining some awareness of everything else – and we call this multitasking. I think it is more multi-awareness, but back to the point.

When you are overwhelmed – you actually lose both your ability to focus and your ability to block out all other stimuli. So – everything is happening at once, and you are aware of it. Total overload. You can’t focus on even one thing to pull yourself out – have you ever noticed that? No wonder we feel like we are running in circles as fast as we can, getting absolutely nowhere!

In this presentation, I will bring to light some of the realities of our current situation. We are going to examine the biggest impediments to our productivity. I am going to give you some statistics about it, and show you exactly why we aren’t crazy to feel so overwhelmed and stressed out.

It’s not all bad news, though. I will also be touching on some innovative solutions that will make a real, measurable difference – today! Finally, I will leave everyone with a simple process guaranteed to free up around 2 hours a day. What would you do with an additional four months of productive time each year?

So, what are the biggest impediments?

Looking for things

Do you have any idea how much time you spend each day just looking for something you need? Could be a file, a phone number, a document – doesn’t matter. Studies indicate that we spend, on average 45 minutes every day (or 9% of your workday) – which adds up to about 6 weeks. Six weeks just looking for things.

How many of you found yourself thinking you would take a vacation if you just had the time? Well – here’s six weeks.

Trying to get through your email inbox

Another time/productivity impediment is going through your email inbox. How many of you have more than 100 messages in your inbox? More than 1000? More than 5000? Does it just make you tired to even think of it? Based on a series of surveys done in Fortune 500 companies, experts have estimated that the average businessperson is spending up to 3 hours per day just trying to sort through the incoming email. This doesn’t include doing any of the work – just trying to sort through it. So, if you do the math – 3 hours a day, 50 weeks a year – (let’s tell the truth, many of you check your email even on vacation) – so 52 weeks, adds up to 19 ½ weeks every year just trying to sort through your email.

So, we are already up to about 26 weeks of the year – used up looking for things, and checking our email, and we haven’t begun to do any work yet.

Allowing interruptions

Yet another behavior that will negatively impact your capacity to be productive is allowing interruptions. Statistics indicate that on average we can be interrupted at least once every six to eight minutes, and it can take us up to 15 minutes to bring our focus back to whatever we were working on when we were interrupted (if we can even remember what it was). Let’s look at that – we get interrupted every six minutes and it takes 15 minutes to bring our focus back. But before we can bring our focus back to the task at hand, we will be interrupted again. This doesn’t work, does it? The first interruption can derail your entire day. Has this happened to you?

Meetings

And one final productivity killer for many people is meetings. How many meetings have you attended where you realized that the entire thing could have been handled with one or two emails or a short conference call? Or, you were in the meeting for 1-2 hours and absolutely nothing got done? Depending on where you are in your organization, it is entirely possible that 30-90% of your time could be spent in meetings.

Another study of Fortune 500 executives revealed that many of them felt lucky if they had between 28-45 minutes of productive time each day. Time they could use to focus on their most critical areas.

Processes

Where does that put us? So far we have accounted for over 100% of your time, and we haven’t gotten any work done. And, we haven’t even spoken about those processes that seem to take far more time and effort than needed to produce the result.

Unwinnable game

As far as I can see, we are playing an unwinnable game, in an unworkable environment, and we really do not have any time left! Given those circumstances, I believe we are already amazingly productive. The tragedy, of course, is it takes us 8 hours to manage to accomplish that 45 minutes of true productivity each day.

What can we do? Solutions in part two…

Terry Monaghan

Want to use this article in your ezine or website?

You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it:

Consultant, coach, speaker, trainer and entrepreneur, Terry Monaghan, publishes Now What – a free weekly ezine for entrepreneurs and professionals who want to double their productivity, improve their performance, and have a life! If you’re ready to jump start your performance and your results then get your free tips now at www.TimeTriage.com.

Feeling overwhelmed? A little time triage may help

Time is part of a measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects. (Or, time is a concept we invented to keep everything from happening at once.)

Triage is a process of prioritizing based on the severity of condition. This rations the subject of triage efficiently when resources are insufficient for all to be dealt with immediately. From the French trier, meaning to separate, sort, sift or select.

In the coming months, this column will look at various aspects of time management as it effects your everyday productivity and sense of accomplishment.

Ok, so why are we feeling so overwhelmed? Many people are complaining about it. Most people are dealing with it from time to time. And some feel like they have to run full tilt just to keep from falling behind. It all adds up to the sensation of being a hamster on a wheel – running all day long, and basically getting no where fast.

We don’t have to look very far to identify some of the contributing players. By all accounts, we spend up to an hour a day just looking for what we need, and most of us take up to three hours trying to deal with our email inbox.  That means half the day is already gone. Additionally, some studies indicate that we could easily be spending between 30 and 90 percent of our time in meetings.

This math does not work for me. We have accounted for over 100 percent of our workday, and we probably haven’t even begun to tackle our most important tasks.

Most time management books, articles and courses focus on getting more things done. Much of the emphasis is on ways to prioritize tasks to identify what is most important (and not necessarily most urgent). While some suggest delegating, my experience indicates that many entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs are missing this piece.

Getting through every single thing on your list of to-do’s doesn’t really matter much if the entire list is made up of items that ought to be delegated to someone else. You will have spent your whole day without focusing at all on what are the most important things you should pay attention to.

Instead of looking for ways to get more things done, you must begin to shift your focus to getting the right things done. This is absolutely critical for entrepreneurs and managers (and for everyone, really).

What are the right things? And how do you identify them in the face of the swirl of life and work and the never-ending flood of errands, phone calls, emails, and tasks?

That’s where time triage comes in. You can develop a quick and reliable way to review everything on your list to identify what you need to focus on and decide when you are going to give it your attention.

Make no mistake – if you don’t determine the when, the what is probably not going to happen.  Part of being overwhelmed is not carving out a specific day and time to get things done.

Let’s get to the triage. The first step is to figure out what you are going to use as a standard to determine the relative importance (the severity of the condition) of the myriad demands for your time and attention.

There are two standards I encourage my clients to use all the time. First, is this task going to move my goals forward?  Second, if the answer to the first question is yes – is doing this task the best use of my time?

You might think that if the answer to the first question is yes, then the second question must be yes, but that is not necessarily so.

For example, keeping the database of contacts up-to-date definitely forwards the goal of being in regular communication with clients, colleagues and prospects, but doing the work to keep it up-to-date is not a good use of your time at all.

Obviously, to use this method, you will need to know your goals and will need to determine just what is the best use of your time. And that is the single most powerful place to start.

So, here is an assignment for you. Take a little bit of time, and figure out what is the best use of your time. What is the unique contribution you make to the business – the one that no one else can make.

Maybe you are the face of the business, which means networking, creating contacts and building relationships is the best use of your time. Perhaps you are the creative force of the business, the idea person. In that case, having time to think and create is the best use of your time.

Many of my clients are working women, and spending high quality time with their kids is something that they identify as the one of the best uses of their time.

There is no right or wrong here – just the most effective allocation of your resources to produce the results you are committed to. And time, by far, is one of your most limited resources. You must use it wisely.

Just because something has to be done doesn’t mean you have to do it!

Terry Monaghan is CEO of Organizing For Your Life, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in productivity issues, and can be reached at terry@organizingforyourlife.com

(c) 2010 – Washington Business Journal. Used by permission.