Successful Time Management For Dummies
Overview
Incorporate effective time management and transform your life
If you always feel like there's not enough time in the day to get everything accomplished, Successful Time Management For Dummies is the resource that can help change your workday and your life. Filled with insights into how the most successful people manage distractions, fight procrastination, and optimize their workspace, this guide provides an in-depth look at the specific steps you can use to take back those precious hours and minutes to make more of your workday and your leisure time.
Modern life is packed with commitments that take up time and energy. But by more effectively managing time and cutting out unnecessary and unproductive activities, you really can do more with less. In this complete guide to time management, you'll find out how to manage email effectively, cut down on meetings and optimize facetime, use technology wisely, maximize your effectiveness during travel, and much more.
- Find out how to accomplish more at work and in life, all in less time
- Organize your professional life and workspace for optimal productivity
- Learn to put an end to procrastination and successfully handle interruptions
- Get specific insights into time management in various functions, from administration professionals to executives
If you're looking to take back your time and ramp up your productivity, Successful Time Management For Dummies is the resource to help get your there in a hurry.
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About The Author
Dirk Zeller is one of the world's most published authors on success, time management, productivity, sales, and life balance. He is the author of ten top-selling books, including Telephone Sales For Dummies and Success as a Real Estate Agent For Dummies.
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successful time management for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Making the most of your time at work means learning to make productive decisions quickly and asking effective time-saving questions at meetings. Save time on the road by keeping a list of your important travel details with you so you can get to them easily. Before you call it a day at work, take a few steps to prepare for tomorrow so you can start your day off on the right foot.
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Time management isn’t a talent you’re born with. With time management, you can work your way up to champion level without having the efficiency gene. Successful time management is a matter of habit. Here are the ten best habits to adopt for winning at time efficiency.
Start your day early
Most people are more productive in the morning.
When managing your time, try to cut out some serious time‐wasters — or at least reduce the amount of time you devote to them; it’ll seem like you’re gaining one, two, three, or even more hours to your day to invest in activities and pursuits that are important to you. Here are some of the most voracious devourers of your precious time.
General Careers
Your first step in getting your employees on board with time management is to find out how efficient they are currently and to assess their strengths and weaknesses in terms of time management. As you gather information about an employee’s time-management strengths and weakness, you may find it helpful to consider the four probabilities of success:
Knowledge
Skill
Attitude
Activities
When you improve employee performance in any one of these areas, your staff becomes more productive — and the individuals on your team become more successful.
General Careers
The planning process for a project, your workday, or even a vacation is more vexing than the execution. But few people plan their day or week with such zeal. You have to fall in love with advance planning. You are likely faced each day with tasks you would rather not do, but frequently they seem to be high priorities.
The value of time in your personal life is at least as valuable as your work life time. Most people think about the value of their time as it relates to on‐the‐job activity.
The fast‐food worker knows he earns a minimum wage per hour. The freelance artist advertises a per‐hour rate. The massage therapist charges for her services in half‐hour and hour increments.
General Careers
Money isn’t the scarcest and most valuable resource; time is. There are plenty of ways to make more money, but there’s no way to add more minutes to an hour. You have a limited amount of this precious commodity, so you want to protect it and spend it as if it’s your own personal trust fund.
Most people think that if they work more hours, they’ll automatically make more money.
After you identify the vital few tasks you need to accomplish to meet your top 12 goals, break them down a bit further into daily to-do items. Then prioritize them to make sure you accomplish the most important tasks first, identifying which ones you must do on a given day.
In that way, you progressively work through all the minor tasks that lead to the greater steps that, in time, lead you to achieving your goals.
To declutter yourself, you need to remember this simple rule: Put the important things where you can remember where they are and where you can get to them quickly. Here’s how the decluttering process breaks down:
Figure out what you can get rid of.
Here are a few simple questions to ask yourself:
Do you really need this?
General Careers
When all decisions, both major and minor, need to be run through the executive, you end up with a tremendous waste of time. That setup does not motivate the employee and bogs down the executive. The solution is to empower employees to identify problems and come up with solutions — in other words, let them do their jobs.
As soon as you understand a staff member’s problem areas, the next step is to develop a plan to overcome these challenges and turn the employee into a productive, efficient dynamo. One of the first items on your agenda when you want to overhaul employees’ time‐management skills is to establish goals.
When establishing an employee’s time-management goals, keep these pointers in mind:
Cast the goals in a positive light.
With all the options for acquiring the merchandise you need or want, you may never have to shop at the mall again — unless, of course, you crave the slow crawl of parking lot traffic, the challenge of finding a parking space, and the thrill of dodging the crowds as you search from store to store for the item you’re seeking.
Crafting and adhering to a set of rules for you as well as your entire family and friends increases your chance of success when you’re working at home. By drawing lines between your work time and your personal time, you allow yourself to be fully present with each — and presence is a key component of productivity.
General Careers
Outside of work, personal relationships should be your first priority, so always consider them first, before you even start thinking about chores. Evaluate your connections with each of the important people in your life — family and friends.
How can you invest your time with this person to create a better relationship?
General Careers
Those who master documents and paper have mastered single-handling. These people touch or read a document, email, or paper one time and then take action. They don’t pile, table, ponder, check, reconsider, refile, or delay. They get rid of the document the first time they handle it or see it.
If you want to become a single handler, follow the five Ds: dump, delegate, detour, do it, or depot.
Some people find mowing the lawn, raking leaves, and planting flowers relaxing, even therapeutic. Whichever side of the fence you’re on, lawn work can add hours to your weekly home maintenance responsibilities, and it’s the type of task your neighbors won’t be too happy about if you neglect it for long.
Why torture yourself when you can hire someone else to do it?
No matter your occupation, everyone sells time for a price; it’s just a lot more transparent in some situations than others. Most obvious are individuals who receive a wage or a fee based on the hours they work, including minimum‐wage workers and self‐employed individuals such as tutors, house cleaners, and consultants.
Whether you are paperless or paper driven, you must have a workable filing system. Before you start going through your documents, think about how you’re most likely to search for the documents you need. You can choose from numerous file-labeling strategies, but here are some possible categories:
Customers (alphabetically)
Past clients you no longer serve
Due dates and project timing
Pending projects
On-hold projects
To-dos, miscellaneous, or a similar catch-all type of label
You can choose to file by subject, client name, importance, or a number of other ways, but if time is of the essence, setting up a tickler filing system may be ideal.
When identifying growth activities, look for things that offer long‐term returns on investment. In the world of sales, for instance, direct income‐producing activities (DIPA) are always considered growth activities. Here are some examples of growth areas:
Prospecting for new customers
Following up on sales leads
Developing customer service strategies to maintain and up‐sell existing clients
Coaching and training staff
Developing yourself professionally
Developing strategic alliances
Launching new products or services
Such growth activities demand a higher focus and energy level than the in and on work categories.
Working from home isn’t for everyone. Some need the accountability of others to show up ready and on time at 8:00 a.m. In a home office setting, you need to be disciplined and accountable to yourself.
Take a little quiz to see if the home office is a good match for you.
Are you well organized?
Do you work well alone?
General Careers
Knowing how you used your time this week can affect your moods, productivity, and preparation for next week. People who evaluate time spent can learn to be more productive and effective.
Key questions you must review:
What went well this week? What could you have done better?
How would you rate your week on a 1-to-10 scale?
General Careers
Although personal time may seem straightforward, there really is a difference between chores and leisure activities, and the way you approach your time‐management decisions hinges on that difference. When you consider the way you live your personal life, divide your focus into two categories: chores/responsibilities, and leisure time.
General Careers
Many people receive more material via snail mail and email in one day than they can read in year. No one wants to miss news or seem out of it, but few people have time to read, let alone organize, the printed gridlock paralyzing their inboxes and mailboxes.
The question isn’t how to handle the information, because you can’t.
General Careers
Your per‐hour value translates to your quality of life, both now and in the future. Not only does your income influence how you spend your nonworking hours, but it also determines how much leisure time you have to spend.
As you can imagine, your hourly value reaches beyond the basics: It impacts your health, too.
One of the most valuable tools in business is a customer relationship management (CRM) program. If you’re in business, you already know the profit to be tapped from existing customers. They’re already yours! It takes many times more effort, energy, and time to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.
Generally speaking, only 20 percent of those things that you spend your time doing produces 80 percent of the results that you want to achieve. This principle applies to virtually every situation in which you have to budget your time in order to get things done — whether at work, at home, in your relationships, and so on.
Everyone seems to be an expert these days with something to share or sell the masses. The information marketing world is exploding with podcasts, e-books, white papers, videos, e-courses, and webinars. Being able to organize all this information with the ability to retrieve it, use it, and implement it can be a full-time job.
Just as you should plan out your hours, days, and weeks on a regular basis, you should use the same strategy for the times you’re on the road. By planning ahead, you’re able to maximize your time, squeezing every drop of productivity from your trip. For each and every business trip you take, sit down in advance and be sure you address the issues set out here.
Anyone can conquer time management, but it’s not always easy. Sometimes your days feel like a video game, where you’re in constant threat of being gobbled up on your course to the finish line. But instead of cartoon threats, your obstacles are your own shortcomings (poor communication skills, procrastination, and the inability to make wise and quick decisions), time‐wasting co‐workers and bosses, phone and people interruptions, and unproductive meetings.
When you need to concentrate, seek out a quiet place or a quiet time of day. The ambient noise of the world around you — humming computers and copiers, ringing phones, the drone of conversation — can distract you, reducing your focus and thereby diminishing the effectiveness of your time management.
You may not want to change your work hours to the graveyard shift, but to maximize your focus and time, look for opportunities to reduce distracting noise.
There’s nothing like getting your day started on the right time-management foot! Too many times, you end one day without preparing for the next . . . cluttered desks, disorganized calendars, and no plan for tomorrow can lead to unfinished tasks. To start tomorrow off right, follow these seven simple steps:
Clear your desk.
General Careers
The hierarchical structure you follow can have an impact on the effective time management for you and all the employees within that structure. Unfortunately, especially with a young company, when a business grows too fast or changes too drastically, it’s easy to end up with an organizational chart that’s stunted or entangled with limbs that just get in the way.
General Careers
Making the most of your time at work means learning to make productive decisions quickly and asking effective time-saving questions at meetings. Save time on the road by keeping a list of your important travel details with you so you can get to them easily. Before you call it a day at work, take a few steps to prepare for tomorrow so you can start your day off on the right foot.
General Careers
One critical key to success in helping an employee manage time is to involve the individual, so be sure one of the first steps you take is to confirm employee buy‐in. You want to put together a plan in which the employee has as much ownership as you do, and that means involving him or her at the outset.
You can’t afford not to pass along time-management tips to your employees.
General Careers
One of the biggest benefits of using electronic scheduling tools is that you and your co-workers have access to each other’s schedules without making a phone call or pestering administrative assistants. This slashes the time you need to set up a meeting because the software also informs you where others are, what they’re doing, and when they’re available.
Deciding if a home office is right for you could have a huge impact on your life and will affect your income, wealth, company advancement, family life, and peace of mind. There aren’t many decisions this big in life. The problem is that most people don’t realize the magnitude. Most people pine for the home office to increase flexibility, efficiency, and time savings to create a level of freedom for them.
Your personal organization is one of the largest influences of your success and happiness in your life. Your personal organization skills and systems help you feel more fulfilled, productive, and achieve a mental state of wellbeing overall. There are three keys that you want to apply frequently to improve your personal organization.
The efficiency of Facebook in communicating a message to a group of people with a few minutes invested is second to none. The advantage of Facebook is that friends and family, many who are long distances away, can experience your life through posts, pictures, and videos. The communication cycle is reduced by Facebook.
Portable planners have an incredibly wide variety of uses. When traveling via air, executives turn their phones or tablets to airplane mode as soon as the flight attendant starts the pre-flight announcements. The inflight Internet allows businesspeople to connect with the office cloud, update their appointments, and send emails long before the plane is parked at the gate.
General Careers
Used effectively, the 80/20 rule can increase your on-the-job performance. From boardroom to lunchroom, executive suite to mailroom, this time-management principle can help you accomplish the most important tasks in less time and help you advance in your career.
The basic principle that in all things only a few are vital and many are trivial is known as the 80/20 rule.
General Careers
Not all time-saving techniques pertaining to your workspace are directly related to organization; elements such as comfort and positive energy also affect your productivity. Two of the most important and often overlooked areas are ergonomics (a fancy term for fitting the job tools to the worker, rather than vice versa) and aesthetics (how you decorate your space to make the place where you spend your time enjoyable and uplifting).
General Careers
Recent advances in electronics and technology have given consumers a bevy of new tools. From hardware to software, the choices are nearly endless for ways to track your time and keep yourself on schedule. Evernote, Dropbox, ScanSnap, Google Calendar, Excel, and LastPass represent software and applications; and of course, tablets and smartphones are needed to run these programs.
General Careers
Professional athletes work to be in the zone, a place where positive results seem to stick like a magnet. You can create that high performance zone each day.
How many hours can you work at a high level each day?
What’s your most productive time of the day?
How many weeks can you work at high intensity without a break?
People who clearly define and write down their goals are more likely to accomplish them — and in a shorter time frame and more direct fashion. People who don’t clarify and write out their goals invest more time and accomplish less.
Some studies calculate that only about 3 percent of goal‐setters document their aspirations.
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