It’s About Time!

I have a client who routinely works twelve hours a day six days a week, and about six hours on Sundays. He runs a successful manufacturing  company with about thirty employees, and he thinks he has to work like that to keep it all afloat. He also has three kids and an increasingly frustrated wife whom he rarely sees.

Then there is my ‘hard worker’ client. He prides himself on working hard, but he is usually working on the wrong things. He runs a contracting company, and spends a lot of time running around to various projects fixing glitches. In theory, he has managers who should be handling routine problems, but his managers are weak because he doesn’t trust them or train them how to handle the low-level stuff. As a result, he doesn’t have time for the big stuff because his priorities are out of kilter.

I have another client who can’t say “no”. She runs a very successful business, but she commits more time than she has to all kinds of projects,  and her focus is shot. She sits on at least four boards, personally manages two separate parts of her business, and is glued to her SmartPhone even when she is in meetings and at events. She lives in a whirlwind of overcommitment, and doesn’t know how to slow down.

I could go on. When I’m speaking to an audience, I often ask the attendees to raise their hand if they have problems with time management. Most of the hands in the room go up.

I don’t have the space here to go over all the points of my time management class, but here are some highlights:

• Everybody gets the same 24 hours a day. It’s how you choose to use them that makes you effective in what you do and turns your goals into reality. Time management is therefore not about time, it is about choices, which are about priorities.
• If you don’t have a good system of prioritization, you’ll make lousy choices about your time.
• Prioritize your choices in this descending order:

1. Things that are urgent and important. If my driver’s license is going to expire in a month, that’s important. If it expires tomorrow, that is urgent and important.
2. Things that are important. Taking more time with your family. Taking a long vacation. Getting an advanced degree or certification. These are the type of things that are very important, but quietly so. Usually not urgent. I define “important” as “those things that, if done, will contribute greatly to your long-range progress and happiness”.
3. All the rest. In this time when we are overloaded with electronics, and with work demands that have a lot of urgency, it is so easy to lose sight of what is important. Urgency is not importance. Most things that we feel we must do because they are urgent are not really important. Studies have shown that most business people spend 80% of their time working on the least important parts of their jobs. What would happen if that was reversed?

The three clients I mentioned at the beginning of this post all have real problems with prioritizing their activities and managing their commitments to obtain good outcomes. That’s why their lives are unmanageable.

Doug Hickok, CEO,  Institute for Provocative Leadership ,  doug@IPLsmallbusiness.com, (804) 272-0140