Team Efforts in Time Management
Family and co-workers are a part of the team of people that you should include in your time management plan. When you promote confidence and motivation to your team, you are taking the first step in making your plans work. Time Management is essential in any success strategy planned. If you are not into cramming, rushing, or failing it is wise to get ahead by setting a time management plan that includes each person that works around you.
If you have family time, management is important since you do not want to neglect the people you love the most. This is part of your team, and when they are neglected, you are affected. When you are planning a time management schedule, it is wise to include all details of your life into the plans. For example if you are making a list of tasks, then you will include sleep, waking hours, meals, job, family, entertainment, social, chores, travel, and so on.
Try to avoid planning a task list that works against your schedule. If you set a time in the day to eat a meal, then make sure that is the time you will dine. There comes time in our lives where we may have to modify our schedule but try to avoid this if, at all possible. If you need to check off your list this is great for keeping up with a schedule. Checking off your list only assures you that your time management is working.
Another helpful tip is to determine what tasks take longer than other tasks. For example, if you work and are expected to handle a large project, be sure to take care of the bigger tasks and work down to the smaller tasks. By handling, the bigger tasks first will save you time, since the smaller tasks will be easiest and you can then find more time for your team members. If you work as a team at your employment, then try to include your team in the time management plan as much as possible. When teams work together, there is always more time for other details that are needed to be fulfilled.
You want to include time in for the family also. If you work long hours, you might want to cut back on the hours by getting your work done. Some of us tend to lax when we are working. Do not waste time chitchatting if you have work that needs to be fulfilled. Get the work done first. Teamwork is where it is at, since no one person can stand-alone. However to make team effort work, collaboration is essential.
Teamwork is essential when working out a time management plan. The key to success is taking necessary precautions to prevent communication leakages within a business. Teamwork that instills motivation and confidence is the primary focus of getting the plans in action. When you have confidence, and motivation, you have the primary keys to getting on the road to managing your time. Communication is an important ingredient that makes time management fall into place.
© 2005 www.your-offical-guide.com; All Rights Reserved
Steve Hall is the owner of http://www.your-official-guide.com, your one-stop location for getting the information you are looking for on a wide ranging and ever-growing list of subjects.
Need to get more time? Try the Soundview Executive Book Summaries.
Learn to Manage Your Time Effectively ==>Click Here
Management, Balance & Time – 10 Tips for Managing Overwhelm in your Business
How many of us have been in a position where we have more to do than can realistically fit into one day, or week. So we spend all of our time feeling rushed, being rushed, and wondering how on earth we are going to manage. If you are having that feeling of overwhelm in your business, it’s time to take stock of what’s going on.
How well you manage yourself and the time you have, is crucial to your success. Wasted time equals lost opportunities. Lost opportunities equal lost business and profits.
Time can’t be “saved” – it’s an impossibility. You can’t find more of it – it’s a fixed commodity. You can only manage your activities as time passes. So how are you spending the 60 seconds in each minute – the 60 minutes in each hour – the 1,440 minutes in each day?
What you need is to achieve is working on your top priorities in the most effective way. Here are 10 great strategies for doing just that.
Lesson 1: Prioritize
Aside from just listing what needs to be done, rank them from most important to least important. And then complete them in that order. Too often we start with the easy stuff or the quick stuff, regardless of how important it is. Look at the list of things that need to be done. Hi-light the activities that you could put on hold if you had to. How much time could you free up if you put some of those activities on hold?
Be realistic about the number of priorities you have. Most of the activities we are involved in are things we want to do. The problem with overwhelm is that there are many more things we want to do, than we physically have time for. So create some space by telling yourself that you are just putting some activities on hold for now. You are not giving them up forever, but you are giving yourself permission to put some activities on hold – so you can focus on the most important priorities. This may force you to make some tough choices – but it’s a pretty empowering thing to do.|
Lesson 2: Be ruthless with e-mail
What a productivity killer email can be if misused. Use a private email address for clients and customers. Get everything else sent to a generic or alternate email address. That way you can deal with your client issues first, and the rest when you have time.
Only respond to your emails at set times during the day. I personally do emails first thing in the morning, and between 2 and 3pm each day. There’s no need to respond the instant that you receive an email. This approach simply means you get interrupted all the time, and your productivity remains low.
Lesson 3: Restrict your use of the telephone
Try to devote a certain time of the day to both return and originate phone calls. Carrying a mobile telephone makes us feel as though we’ve got to be “connected” at all times – but this is just plain crazy. And just because someone calls us doesn’t mean we have to answer immediately. Some people I now work extremely effectively by restricting calls to two periods during the day – one period in the morning to make all their calls, and another in the afternoon to return calls and to followup. At all other times, voicemail takes any messages. This may not work for your business, but the idea of not answering the telephone unless it is at a good time for you can really help you with the continuity of your work
Lesson 4: If you don’t have time for something, just say so
There is no need to listen politely if you’ve already decided the conversation is not of interest. Simply say – “I am sorry to interrupt you, but I don’t have time for this right now.” Yes it’s direct, but then you are not sitting there feeling frustrated about the time you are wasting.
Lesson 5: Limit your availability
This is one of the keys to beating overwork. Unexpected and unplanned interruptions and distractions can “steal” your day. An “open door” policy is fine, but not if it has a negative impact on productivity and profitability. Actually schedule time when you can’t be interrupted, and let everyone know about it. During that time you don’t answer emails, you don’t answer the phone and you don’t talk to others – you just do whatever it is you’ve got to do – no interruptions.
Lesson 6: Protect your productive time
Each of us knows if we are a morning person or a night owl. We know if our peak productivity times are at 7 am or at 11pm. So make sure you are free and uninterrupted at those times. Try and make this time just for you and devote the activities that need your brain the most at the times you are most productive.
Lesson 7: Plan your day the night before
I know – you’ve heard it before. But spending 5 minutes at the end of the day preparing for the next day helps to orient you in advance and mentally sets you up. So when you get up in the morning, you’re ready to go!
Do whatever works for you – make lists of activities, check your calendar, enter tasks into your electronic task list, schedule a couple of uninterrupted hours in your diary, tidy away your papers and get tomorrow’s ones ready to go. Do whatever you need to to feel comfortable about the next day’s work.
Lesson 8: Don’t get buried by paper
When possible, try to “touch” each piece of paper only once. File it, act on it or toss it! (Periodically, every quarter, purge your files. If you haven’t touched it in 3 months, you probably never will…so toss it!). As the saying goes: “Do it, ditch it, or delegate it!”
Lesson 9: Group your appointments
If you have several appointments or errands, try to group them all in the same day so that all of your external travel and time is scheduled for one or two days in the week. That leaves you 3 full days in the office without the need to go out for meetings.
Lesson 10: Confirm appointments
Never assume that your 1 o’clock is on! The realization that you’ve been “stood up” is both frustrating and irritating. A simple phone call or e-mail message, saves time, energy and anxiety.
Management expert Peter Drucker, once declared, “Time is the scarcest resource.” Time really isn’t scarce, it’s uniform and constant. However, your ability to manage it is crucial to your success. If you can’t get this part right, you may not need to not worry about cash management!
Megan Tough – published writer, coach, facilitator and speaker – works with people to create outstandingly satisfying and truly successful professional lives. Make more money – have more fun! To learn more and to sign up for more FREE tips and articles like these, visit http://www.megantough.com
Managing Your Small Business
Most small businesses fail within the first three years because of a lack of management on the part of the owner. Most people who start a business love the excitement of the start-up phase but don’t understand that you must have a plan and provide direction for the business.
The success of any business depends on people. You can’t build and grow a business without people. You have to take the time to hire good people and help them set goals. You have to be able to manage, motivate, and lead employees, which is something most business owners don’t know how to do. Employees today are more educated, experienced, and knowledgeable than ever before and they won’t work for a business that has a hardball style of management.
One of the first important keys to building a successful business is to put in a system that is flexibile. You cannot keep people pigeonholed in organizational boxes. Your business will succeed or fail based on how you manipulate and sometimes circumvent cut-and-dried rules and regulations. The success of your business will depend on how flexible you are in managing people.
If you’re flexible, your management system won’t be a system. Rules and regulations won’t be set in stone. They’ll be guidelines. You need this freedom to provide excellent customer service. For example, if you’ve promised to ship a customer’s order the same day but the new order system won’t let you ship it until tomorrow, you circumvent the system and ship it today.
There are two types of employees, those who care and those who don’t. Break the rules for those who care. For example, if your employee policy calls for two week paid vacation and one of your good employees has a family emergency, you give him or her the time they need and not charge it to their vacation time.
On the other hand it is important to be inflexible when it comes to ethics and principles. And especially on things such as expense controls, quality, working hours, and substance abuse.
Today’s employees are complex, frustrating, unpredictable, and potentially rewarding in a big way. They are your number one asset in today’s highly competitive business world. A flexible management style and flexible employees, then, are strengths that can help your business grow and prosper.
The best framework is only as good as the people that oversee it which is why to be successful you must have good people. You must constantly search for the best people. But once you have good people it’s important that you’re patient. Even the best people don’t become superstars overnight. They require time to develop, mature, and learn.
When you’re looking for a good employee, you can get a good indication of how he or she will perform based on how he or she performed in the past. Trust yesterday’s actions, not today’s words. And always look for those people who embrace change. Resistance in the ranks of top management impedes growth and destroys opportunity.
Once you have assembled a team for you business make sure they are compatible. They must agree on the company’s goals and that a cohesive team is worth working for. Your employees must be able to work in a group and leverage their skills by working with others. Always look for team spirit.
If your business is growing slowly, find and develop superstars from within your business. If you’re growing rapidly, find them outside. And always pay your best people extraordinarily well and help them solve their problems.
As the business owner it is your responsibility to provide the vision, mission, and goals for the business. Your vision needs to be broad and say where the company will be in five or ten years. And not just in sales of product, but in distribution, markets, manufacturing capability, and anything else you think will ensure your company’s survival and growth.
Put your vision in writing for your employees. They deserve to know where they’re headed.
The mission for your business is what gives direction to your vision. It’s a plan of action that has to be understood and implemented by the entire team. That is why you need to involve every person in your business to help develop the mission. Involvement paves the way for commitment.
A good mission provides focus, defines direction, differentiates you from the competition, and communicates your niche. Put the mission on the walls of your business, in manuals, and memos. Then set company, department, and performance goals that will achieve your company’s mission.
Empowerment by itself isn’t enough, you must establish a culture that encourages accountability, allows for mistakes, and welcomes change. But you need the right employees for this culture to work. Empowerment won’t turn inferior employees into superior ones, but it can turn good ones into great ones. Besides, you’ll find that the best people like empowerment because it allows them to contribute to their fullest.
Empowerment starts with your own heart. If you don’t truly feel that employees can or should be empowered, they won’t be. Begin by letting people help make decisions, set goals, define roles, and assist in setting missions and strategies. People need to be given a voice before they’ll accept the responsibility of empowerment.
Employees also need to understand the business. They must share your vision, responsibilities, and even your financial statements. And consider sharing equity. You may have heard the old story that people don’t want the reins if they don’t know the horse.
Most business owners have problem focusing. Many of them waste time focusing on jobs that someone else in the business can do better. Many businesses offer too many products and services. They often try to provide the fastest delivery and the best quality at the lowest prices. Just as the owner can’t be all things to the business, the business can’t be all things to the marketplace.
To manage your business successfully you must learn to give your undivided attention to tasks, meetings, and conversations. You must make good choices for yourself and for your company and limit activities to those you can and have time to achieve. You must be able to prioritize long and short-term projects and learn to say no. You must understand that concentration is a cultural issue. If you can’t focus neither will your employees.
It is important to understand that it doesn’t matter what you think or believe. What matters is what your employees perceive you think or believe. If they perceive you don’t care about their problems, then they won’t care about yours. If they perceive that quality is not important to you, it won’t be important to them. If they perceive you believe customers are trouble, they’ll treat them poorly.
Anytime you communicate with your employees, prepare your words carefully. Always hear your words from their perspective.
Business owners cannot escape the 80-20 rule which shows how hard it is to avoid putting in so much time for meager results. This rule states that 80 percent of your profits come from 20 percent of your customers. 80 percent of your output comes from 20 percent of your employees. 80 percent of your people problems come from 20 percent of the people. 80 percent of the sales come from 20 percent of the sales force. 80 percent of the headaches come from 20 percent of the responsibilities. And 80 percent of the your success comes from 20 percent of your efforts.
The 80-20 rule both helps and reveals problem areas. On the one hand, you know to take good care of your top 20 percent of your customers or employees. On the other hand, it means you must work to improve the productivity of the rest of the work force. Or cater to the other 80 percent of customers more efficiently.
There is never just one reason for success or failure. If your business is a success, it’s because you’ve hired right, focused, made a good product, provided excellent service, and planned well.
Plan, prioritize, and pay attention to detail. Hold people accountable. Refuse to be satisfied. Everything matters, big things, little things, and in-between things. Knowing this, “rule of many reasons” is the key to managing your business successfully.
Copyright©2005 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.
Joe Love draws on his 25 years of experience helping both individuals and companies build their businesses, increase profits, and achieve total success. He is the founder and CEO of JLM & Associates, a consulting and training organization, specializing in personal and business development. Through his seminars and lectures, Joe Love addresses thousands of men and women each year, including the executives and staffs of many of America’s largest corporations, on the subjects of leadership, self-esteem, goals, achievement, and success psychology.
Reach Joe at: joe@jlmandassociates.com
Read more articles and newsletters at: http://www.jlmandassociates.com
Where Did My Time Go, Why Can’t I Manage
Have you ever wondered where you time went? Sure you havewe all have at one point in our lifetime. We all sit around looking back at a series of wasted time we invested and wonder where the time went. If we would have planned, organized, worked hard, and set goals, we would be looking back wondering how we can move beyond our already achieved goals.
But no, we did not have a plan, set our goals straight, stay organized, or worked our booties off to achieve the goals we planned. Don’t complain you did it!
Planning Ahead
Planning ahead is a step to managing time. When we plan ahead, we are setting goals that we can achieve over a course of time. Planning is the process of devising or projecting a realization of achievement. Therefore, when we are planning we should plan both short and long-term goals that we can meet. If we over dramatize our goals, we will be sitting on a couch looking back wondering where our time went.
If we start out with smaller goals and work to achieve these goals, our long-term goals will be an easy ride uphill. Unless you have some terminal disease, you always can reach a level of completeness, as long as you are planning a head, reaching for achievable goals, and making the effort to get to the top is the key to success. We all make mistakes, but the trick is to learn from those mistakes.
If your plan is in action and you find a problem area has developed, step back and take a good, long look at what caused the problem. If the problem occurred as a direct result of your planning scheme, then you know right of the bat that your plans need modification. Time management is the process of making plans work, by developing skills and using actions that make the process run smoothly.
Do not sit around looking back, since this too waste time if you are not doing anything about it. Take the step to developing a scheme that works smoothly with your schedule and situation. When you are planning before sure you calculate factors that could change your planning scheme. Changes such as weather disasters, lost data, changes in relationships, family, and so on are some of the factors you should calculate into your planning scheme for time management.
Don’t fool yourself into believing that nothing ever changes. The fact is everyday all things are changing as a direct force of reality. The key then is to move forward with caution, yet not worry about everything that is changing around you. If it is going to happen it will, but don’t let it be an accident or incident caused by your negligence in time managing planning.
Everyday, if possible, you should make list of the tasks you want to achieve and work through those tasks until they are completed. Anytime we complete a task, we are encouraging our self-esteems and promoting motivation.
© 2005 www.your-offical-guide.com; All Rights Reserved
Steve Hall is the owner of http://www.your-official-guide.com, your one-stop location for getting the information you are looking for on a wide ranging and ever-growing list of subjects.
Need to get more time? Try the Soundview Executive Book Summaries.
Learn to Manage Your Time Effectively ==>Click Here
Taming The Procrastination Demon
Are you like many people who put off what you know you should do in your daily life? Is the basement, the closets, your office, the garage, the yard work all demanding your attention? We all delay doing some chores, but if you are finding yourself with more and more undone projects, maybe you are a victim of “procrastination”. This gets to be a really demoralizing situation. If you accept the challenges that life provides, then you are more likely to live many years longer than those who spend their lives stressing about “getting things done” and never making the necessary moves to accomplish what needs doing.
If you are not being challenged in your daily life by your work or your living situation, then maybe it is just fear holding you back and you need to accomplish much more. Fear grips you so that you are not able to accomplish what you desire and so you put it off, making excuses not to accomplish the project. Eventually this can become a habit throughout all your facets of living. This article will attempt to reinforce your zest for a challenge, to enable you to take chances, to overcome rejection and to step up to the plate when you know you have things that need attention.
Here are some steps to take immediately:
1. Be organized – I know that this is a hard goal to reach. But, start out small to accomplish the larger goal. Make a project chart for your larger jobs and put the smaller projects on your daily chart. Organize your day with a “TO DO LIST” and put the items down as rapidly as possible and do not worry about what order until the page is filled up. Then go back and rank what is most important and circle the item, make a star by that item, or otherwise note their importance. This way you can let the other items fall below what is most important and you can get to them later. What you do not get done one day can be added to the next day’s list. I know this can be a hard habit to get into, but once you do it for a week or two, you will find it will be hard to get to sleep without your list made for the next day.
2. Divide Major Projects – If a project seems overwhelming, then have a major project list and divide each segment into smaller tasks. For instance, let’s say you want to clean out the garage. (At my house, that is a MAJOR project!) On Monday, you can go through the stuff that looks like it should be going to Goodwill and box that up. Tuesday, you can do an easy chore of taking it to Goodwill. Wednesday, you can arrange all like items in separate piles. For instance, yard tools, lawn furniture, sports equipment, household tools like step ladders, tool cabinets, brooms and mops, things of that nature. On Thursday, you can map out how much room to allow for each category because maybe you have too much lawn furniture based on the space you have or maybe you want to devote more space to lawn furniture and less to sports equipment. Whatever your lifestyle is, this is the way to organize it within the garage area. On Saturday, move everything that you plan to keep out of the garage and clean the shelves and floors and windows. Then put it all back and arrange neatly based on the space sketch you have. On Sunday, enjoy having a place to park the car, finally. It is all a matter of doing little bits of associated action and keep moving to the final goal.
3. Just get started – When you find yourself making excuses and putting things off, then you know that you are letting yourself go down the road to being a prisoner of the demon called procrastination. Just do not let yourself provide excuses. Start with your easiest task and proceed from there. You will have a greater sense of accomplishment when you make small insteps to the greater project than if you do nothing at all.
4. Outside help – Enlist outside help if you find it necessary to finish a project. There is nothing wrong with having help, whether you have to hire outside help or whether you encourage your family members to help on some projects. The idea is to make a goal sheet and keep on the projects you know are needed around your place and pick a start date so everyone knows how to schedule their time to be involved. A family that cleans together keeps the place cleaner for the next time!
5. Reward Yourself – Finally, reward yourself and your crew when you finish a project. Getting a job done has taken a lot of effort, and you need to be good to yourself for fighting the procrastination demon. There is a wonderful feeling which comes over us when we know we have done a good job and can see the fruits of our labor. That is how the world works. As it has been said, this is a kill and eat world. You have to know how to make yourself set goals, work through the human desire to put things off, and finally to feel the sense of accomplishment and reward with completion of a project.
Ok, now, get out those pens and papers and take a mental trip across your home, your business life, and your personal or religious life. What needs to change? How soon? Will you take my advice and banish the procrastination demon and finally feel the reward for accomplishment that you may have been lacking recently? And make no mistake, the procrastination demon can come on you at any time, in varying degrees, and you must take a stand and banish the demon with whatever steps you feel necessary. Do not put off having the things you want in life because you procrastinate. Give yourself the satisfaction of accomplishing the things you need and doing them within your goal period.
© 2005 www.your-offical-guide.com; All Rights Reserved
Steve Hall is the owner of http://www.your-official-guide.com, your one-stop location for getting the information you are looking for on a wide ranging and ever-growing list of subjects.
Need to get more time? Try the Soundview Executive Book Summaries.
Learn to Manage Your Time Effectively ==>Click Here
Managing Yo-Yo Style
Does being managed by others smack more of “Survivor” than Stephen Covey for you? Could there BE any more management styles out therehave you gotten to experience all of them yet? And what kind of manager are youor should you try to be?
If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with too many types of management and leadership stylesmore flavors than months, for the most part. On the leadership, not so much. I offer to you now an additional insight into a newly designated style that you will recognize, and may even find funny. Or not, depending on life at work.
And speaking of life at work, what could be more fun than children’s toys at work? How about just the thought of them? No, waithow about BEING them?
Before I go on, I must tell you I am at work on a book on management styles, because we definitely need more fun at work, but this type of “leadership” stands alone, and was recognized and developed by a colleague and myself, with one disclaimer only: No alcoholic beverages were consumed in the making of this theory!
Now back to our theory, which shall be forever called The Yo-Yo Style of Management