Time Management PDF

Time Management sunnuntai 6. lokakuuta 2024 16.35 Transcript Welcome to this collection of courses where we're going to look at all the key management subjects in 20 minutes each. So the idea of this is that if you're a senior manager and you've just taken over, let's say, a sales department or...

Time Management sunnuntai 6. lokakuuta 2024 16.35 Transcript Welcome to this collection of courses where we're going to look at all the key management subjects in 20 minutes each. So the idea of this is that if you're a senior manager and you've just taken over, let's say, a sales department or a project management department as part of your empire, you need to know what are these people all doing? What is sales all about? Or negotiating or project management. So this course will give you an instant guide to what they're doing, what to look for, what questions to ask. But also if you're new and your career and you're thinking of going into purchasing or sales or project management, these courses will give you a rough idea of what those subjects are like. And I hope that will help you when you're choosing your career. It will also give you a better understanding of what your colleagues are doing in different departments. And also if you just need a quick fix, if you've got to go and see a customer and you want a quick overview of selling, or if you've got to go into a negotiation, you want a quick refresher of what negotiation is all about, then these courses should be perfect for you. So let's get started. From What is the objective of time management? And it's not to get more done or to be as busy as possible. The objective of time management is to maximize the time you spend on important things. Now, that's a little bit tricky because what is important mean and we'll come back to that in a minute, but let's think about this question How can we maximize the time that we spend on the important things? We can't get more time. There's only a fixed amount of time in the day, so therefore, the only way we can do that is by minimizing the time we spend on the unimportant things. And sometimes that feels a bit negative. Time management is about squeezing down things and saying no to things, but actually that's the only way you can get more time for the important things. So the how of time management is squeezing stuff down and the why of time management is to then have more time for the important stuff. If you think about it, it's a bit like money because you've got time and money and these are the only two levers you've got each day. How do you spend your time and how do you spend your money? And we're all happy with the idea that with money we want to maximize the amount that we spend on important things. So if cars are important to you, you'll spend lots of money on your car and then Udemy Page 1 So if cars are important to you, you'll spend lots of money on your car and then you won't spend much money on other things. And we're happy with that idea that we focus our money on the things that really matter to us. But we obviously should focus our time on the things that matter in exactly the same way. So we've got the money lever and the time lever, and both of these should be maximized on the things that are important. So the key thing to realize when you're thinking about importance is that importance isn't things we have to do. There are lots of unimportant things we have to do, like, for example, buying food. We have to do it. But do we want to spend lots of time on buying food? The answer is no. We would press a magic button if we could. So importance isn't that you have to do it. It's Do you want to do it? Do you need to do it really well? Is it something that you want to allocate a lot of time to? So the first step of time management is to work out what's important and then maximize the time that you spend on that. From The second key concept in time management after this idea of maximizing the time we spend on important things is that you've got urgency in the mix as well as importance. So urgency is when you have to do it. While importance is how long you're going to spend on it, and these two are completely independent. So for example, if something's important but not very urgent, you could do it later, but you could spend lots of time on it. Or if something's urgent but not important, you could do it straight away, but you could do it in the minimal time. So you can imagine a four box model of importance and urgency. And this is quite a famous time management model. But the key thing to realize is lots of things are urgent but not important. So you just never start thinking that because something's urgent, it's important and the essence is doing the things that are important but not urgent. Often these are called box three, so the objective is to do the important things before they become urgent. Don't leave them till they've escalated to being both urgent and important because that's a nightmare of stress. So examples of these things that time management wants to focus on these things that are important but not urgent would be things like developing yourself, developing others, thinking and planning. Now these are really important if you're a manager investigating problems and fixing them for later, thinking about your longer term, your 510 year strategy, thinking about ways to improve quality and also improving systems, improving the way things work. So these are all things that are important but not necessarily urgent. Udemy Page 2 So these are all things that are important but not necessarily urgent. And good time management means fitting those things into your day. From The next time management concept that's absolutely vital is the idea of having goals, really clear goals set for both home and work. We used to having targets at work if we were in sales or something like that. But everyone at work should have really clear objectives they're working for. But also at home you should have some clear goals. And these goals are vital because they tell you what's important. So if it contributes towards your goals, it's important. And if it doesn't, it's not important. That's where importance comes from. And I think goals should be a mixture of enjoy and achieve. So we know that goals are about achieving normally, but I think you should have some enjoyment goals as well. So I've got a goal to spend more time playing the saxophone because I enjoy it. I know it won't achieve very much. I do it because I like it. So your goal should be enjoy and achieve at home and at work and you should have both for both. So most people's goals tend to be achievement goals at work and enjoyment goals at home. But I'm saying that at work you should have goals for things you want to achieve and things that you enjoy. You want to spend more time on, things that work, that you enjoy doing and similarly at home have some achievement goals as well as just enjoyment goals. Now, goals need to be ambitious. They need to stretch you rather than just be things you're going to do anyway. And also they need to be very clearly defined. So you can't just say to get better at running, it needs to be able to do a certain distance in a certain time. Also, goals need to excite you. They mustn't be things that are a duty. They must be things that you want to do that you believe in. And what you'll find is that if you set goals, you'll be much more likely to achieve them because they increase both your self discipline and your assertiveness. They make you more focused, more determined to achieve them. And that's why setting goals makes them tend to happen. And what they do is they reduce the amount of time that you spend on time wasters because all time wasters come from either lack of self discipline or lack of assertiveness. If you think about it, all time wasters are either you wasting your time because you're not very disciplined or letting other people waste your time, which is lack of assertiveness. So if you set goals, you'll be more disciplined and assertive because you'll want to achieve them and then you will also naturally reduce your time wasters. From The next key time management skill is to resist the unimportant things. So once you know your goals, you know what's important and what isn't. And if it doesn't contribute to your goals, it's unimportant. And your job is to resist it. Probably with either saying no or negotiating. Udemy Page 3 Probably with either saying no or negotiating. Negotiating is a partial no because you can negotiate to do part of it or do it later. So we've got no and negotiating. And imagine if ten people each take 10% of your time, 10% of your life, you'll end up with nothing left for you. So it is absolutely vital to become better at saying no to stuff both at home and at work. It's more difficult to say no at work, but you can do. And in fact, if you never say no to a customer, they'll ask for more and more and they'll run you ragged until you collapse with stress or go bust. So even at work, we have to say no. Although I think negotiating at work is probably better. You could say I can do it, but I'll have to charge you for it. But either way, if we can save, let's say, one hour a week, that's say 50 weeks, a year, 50 hours a year, that's a whole extra working week that we could get. And if you could say no to one hour and negotiate over one hour and shorten the meeting down from, let's say, 2 hours to 1 hour, if you could save an hour a week from both of those, you could get two extra weeks a year. And that's a significant amount of time that you would be gaining. So we're talking about saying no and negotiating both at home and at work. And I think you could negotiate over when you do something, you can also negotiate over how long you spend on something. You could say, I can do it, but I've only got an hour. You can negotiate over where you meet, which might save you an hour in terms of travel time, perhaps half an hour each way you can negotiate to just do part of a job. So you could say if you give it to me in spreadsheet format, then I'll look at it. You can also negotiate over a list. So you could say this is the list of things I'm doing for you, boss. I'll put this new one in third, shall I? So there are lots of ways you can negotiate. So the first thing you should always think when you're being asked to do something is. Can I say no? And if not, can I at least negotiate over it? From The next option you've got for saving time is to delegate. So if you can't say no or negotiate, you have to say yes to it. You could say yes, but then give it to someone else. And I think this is the number one management skill. It's my biggest regret from when I was a manager. I wasn't terrible, but I wish I had delegated more because imagine if you had, say, ten people working for you and you gave them each just one hour a week of your work. You delegated an hour a week to each of those people. You could save ten hours a week, and that's ten weeks per year of extra time. You could gain you could have all of January, all of February and half of March off just to think, just to do whatever you want to plan ahead, maybe to have some holidays. Even so, delegating can be huge. If you're a manager, it's an absolutely key skill, but you can also delegate outside work because you can delegate to subcontractors. You can pay people. I've got a guy who cuts my hedge, used to take me all weekend and now a guy Udemy Page 4 I've got a guy who cuts my hedge, used to take me all weekend and now a guy comes and does it. So that's really worth doing. You can even delegate to your kids and at work. Remember, you can also delegate sideways sometimes to subcontractors or colleagues, people in other departments. Maybe you're doing work that they should be doing. So thinking about whether somebody else could do a job is a key part of time management. From The next really vital time management concept is that you can't do everything perfectly. There just isn't enough time to do everything perfectly. So it's about discriminating between what's important and what isn't. So if it's something important like time with your family or time with an important customer, then you might do that really well and take lots of time. You might do it BMW quality or even Rolls-Royce quality. Whereas if it's something unimportant, then good enough is good enough. You have to do it, but you want to minimize the time you spend on it. So something like a spreadsheet, it doesn't have to be perfectly neat as long as it does the job or a sales forecast, as long as it's roughly right, because it's never going to be exactly right anyway, or even, heaven forbid, your time sheets. They need to be a rough reflection of what you've done, but they probably don't have to be accurate down to the nearest half a minute. And even the costing for quoting a price to somebody as long as that's roughly right, it's probably fine. And if you spend twice as long working it out, before long you'll have a queue and customers will have to wait for quotes. You'll end up losing business. So as long as these things are done well enough, that's the key. And don't feel bad about this because you are already doing it for everything you do. Everything you do is already a compromise. You could already spend twice as long on anything and do it slightly better, but you've already decided not to do that and that's the right decision. Even this course, we could have made this course twice as long. You could have watched it for twice as long and it would have been a bit better. But the question is, would it have been worth the extra time? And that's what I want you to always ask yourself. I could spend twice as long on this, but would it be worth all that extra time when I could be doing something else? From The next key time management skill is to overcome procrastination. We all have a tendency to put things off, and annoyingly, procrastination affects the most important things. It's the big, important, non-urgent things which we tend to put off and we have to overcome this. So I've got 12 suggestions. I'm going to zoom through really fast. Udemy Page 5 I'm going to zoom through really fast. If you want to know more about this. I've made a whole separate course on procrastination because it's absolutely vital to overcome this tendency that we all have. So method number one, ask a friend to help get someone to help you, remind you nag you and perhaps incentivize them with something like if it's not done by Friday, I'm paying for lunch. That'll make you do it. Secondly, visualize the future. Imagine it going really well. The task is easy to do and you get great results if you do it. Or imagine it turning out horribly badly because you haven't done it. Lots of trouble, lots of regret. If you don't do it right away, that might make you do it. Method number three to overcome procrastination is to realize that it's causing you stress to have it hanging over you. Just get rid of it, you'll feel better. Method four is to delegate it to someone else who would like to do it or is paid to do it instead of you. They might even do it better than you and at least this gets it done. And it also probably works out cheaper in the long run. Number five is to leave the job out visible so that you can't escape it or forget it. Put that folder on your desk, put those running shoes by the front door. It also makes it easier to do if the stuff is already out for you, so you're much more likely to do it if it's there for you. Method six is to start the day with a tough one. When you come into work, ask yourself what's the worst job on your list and do it before you even get a chance to think about why you don't want to do it. Just get it cleared. Number seven is to plunge in and get started before you can think of a reason not to just make that phone call. Just start writing that report. Number eight is to look after your fitness and sleep. So do you have the energy make every day, the kind of day where you come into work and you think, right, that job's been on my list for too long. Let's do it. Method nine is to make it a routine so you don't notice it. For example, if you go for a run every morning before breakfast the first time, you're probably thinking, I must be mad. I could be in bed. But after a few weeks it's just what you do. Method ten is to break it into chunks and say to yourself, I'll just do the first bit and this fools your inner resistance. It gets you at least a first step along the way. And once you've started, you'll probably feel like finishing it off because you're on a roll. Number 11 is to reward yourself and set a rule. Like when I've finished it, I'll have some chocolate or even I won't have any chocolate until I've done it. That'll make you do it. And finally, number 12 is to put an appointment in your diary. Udemy Page 6 And finally, number 12 is to put an appointment in your diary. It feels a long way off, so it's easy to write it in. But that day will come. And then when you get there, you'll have a nice chunk of free time reserved to make it easy for you to do the task. So have a look at our downloadable list of the 12 methods and find one or ideally 2 or 3 of them that you really like that you can now use to stop yourself putting things off. From Finally we come to emails and I find that most people feel that emails are their biggest time management issue. Now I'm going to tell you why that's not true in a minute, but I just want to say four things about emails. Firstly, check your emails every day. In fact, I would recommend checking them about four times a day. So not too often, maybe six times if you've got a very urgent type of job, but not more than that. But definitely don't leave them for several days because people expect a reply within a day. Now from emails. And if you can do that, your customers will be really impressed. The second thing I want to say is keep your inbox empty. I know that's a lot to ask, but get everything out of the inbox. And that takes me to the third thing, which is if you can't do a job straight away, if you can't just deal with that email, it's fine. Put it on your job's to do list and then get it out of the inbox. You can have another folder called Jobs I'm doing. I just put it straight into done because it's on my job's to do list, so it's as good as done. So get them out of the inbox. That's a much better way to manage tasks because if you're using your email inbox as a jobs to do list, it's not a good jobs to do list because more stuff's coming in. You can't change the order, so you should have a separate jobs to do list and just get everything out of the inbox onto that list. Now, the final thing I want to say is if you've got too many emails coming in and a lot of people say they suffer from too many emails, don't blame the messenger. It's not email's fault. In the old days, they used to come in as paper or phone calls or voice mails. So if you've got too many emails coming in, it goes back to some of the things we've already looked at on this course. You've got to get better at saying no to work, even reply to those emails saying don't copy me into this. You've also got to delegate more so that you can give those jobs to other people and you can say to the people sending it, send it to him or her rather than to me. You also need to check your systems. Is there something wrong with the systems which is causing lots of people to have to email you? Or maybe you're too fussy, maybe you're a control freak or a micromanager and you're interfering in everything and that's why you're being emailed all the time on work that shouldn't even be coming to Udemy Page 7 even be coming to you. So you must think about why you're getting so many emails and consider saying no delegating, having better systems or being less fussy. So those are my thoughts about emails. From 2.2+Import ance+vs+... Udemy Page 8 Udemy Page 9 2.3+Setting +Goals+to... Udemy Page 10 2.6+Delega Udemy Page 11 2.6+Delega tion+Chall... Udemy Page 12 2.9+12+Wa ys+to+Be... Udemy Page 13 2.9+12+Wa ys+to+Be... Udemy Page 14 Udemy Page 15