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Make More Time

Filed Under leadership | 1 Comment

by Patty Azzarello

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Make More Time

If you had 20 percent more time magically appear in your work week — a full uncommitted, unscheduled work day, every week — what would you do with it?

Would you do more email? Would you go to more meetings? Would you do even more of what you are already doing?

Or would you do something different? And Better?

Is being over-busy Valuable?

Think about being over-busy is a low-value way of working.

In fact you could even think of staying over-busy as a form of laziness — not getting the real job done, because you have failed to apply the hard, strategic thinking to prioritize your workload for the highest impact.

But why is it so hard to do this?  Why do we get stuck?  Why can’t we let stuff go?

You might feel like you’re dropping the ball, letting someone down, risking your job.  You might be one of those people that feels good when you are constantly busy, and you get recognition for working hard. 

Consider a Values change. 

You  need to see getting less busy as more valuable than having your time consumed by your work. 

You need to recognize that the more strategic work you could be doing instead of the endless activity, would deliver more value to your team and your company.

Make the Container Smaller

It’s like the Ideal Gas Law:  A gas will expand to fill the size of its container – no matter how big the container.  Likewise, the amount of activity in any job will always expand to fill your time – no matter what the job, and no matter how much time you allow.

It’s up to you to contain it – make your container of time for your current activities smaller. 

Here’s how to get started:

1. Give yourself permission

2. Realize you are not merely allowed to be less busy, it’s a requirement of your job, especially if you want to create value and stand out.

3. Then take some time back. 

Just take it. 

For a start, schedule 2 hours per week and HIDE. 

The hiding part is important.  It won’t work otherwise — the activity knows where to find you…

This time is just for you – to think, to plan, to focus on what’s most critical, re-prioritize, delegate, create processes.  Remember: It’s not stealing from the company. 

It’s not dropping the ball.  It’s not getting less done. 
It’s getting more of the right things done better — it’s creating value.

But it’s up to you to take back the time.

You’ll find that you can make even more Time.

For example, if you take two hours to improve a process or clarify an outcome or a delegated task, you could gain another five hours in saved time.

Then you use those five hours to communicate more effectively, and re-assess priorities and outcomes for your team. When those efforts then take hold you have created even more time. And so on…

It is a core trait of the most successful people to rise above being over-busy.  And it’s important to remember that the most successful people are not the ones who were less busy along the way.  They are the ones who dealt with it. 
If there are any secrets to what really successful people do – this is one of them. 

They make more time.

What about you?

What do you struggle with that saps your time? How do you fight it? Leave you ideas in the comment box below!

—–
Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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The power of focus

Filed Under Business Life, Successful Blog, leadership | Leave a Comment

It’s the nature of the beast: deadlines, exploding printers, clients’ demands (and schedules) all get thrown into one big hopper, scattering our focus. Our jobs as the boss (even if/especially if we are our own boss) each day: sift it and rank it.
We serve as counselor, creative idea generator, executor and priority-setter. Chief cook and bottle washer. Janitor. Oh, and it was needed yesterday.

With our own brains conspiring against us and technology morphing faster than you can say gigabyte, focus becomes even more of a premium skill in today’s world. The topic of focus has crossed my laptop and tweetdeck about seven times in various guises this week alone, so it’s my best guess that others out there are wrestling with the same issue:

How do you prioritize when everything’s a priority?

Wired’s Nicolas Carr asks if the internet is literally changing our brains. The New York Times has an online test to see how well you can focus: have you taken it? Pretty wild. For those keeping score at home, I tested out at 92% and 100%, respectively. What’s a bit scary (at least for me) is that the more distractions there were, the higher my concentration level. Perhaps I was destined to be an air traffic controller?

To make matters worse, folks who gravitate to entrepreneurism tend to be highly enamored of shiny objects and are loathe to miss The Next Best Thing. I’m already salivating over the implementation of geotagging platforms for specific social media clients while they are barely comfortable with updating their site(s).

“Crawl, walk, run” should be tattooed in reverse on my forehead.

I had a point somewhere. Oh. Yes. Focus. How do you prioritize when everything’s a priority?

  • Be quiet. Find somewhere where you can shut out all distractions and breathe for a couple minutes. When I was in radio, I used to get in the booth, shut the door, flip the ‘ON AIR’ switch and zone out for 15 minutes. Ask yourself “what’s important today?”
  • Apply a triage lens to Your List: What’s bleeding? What can wait? Record it in whichever way works for you: Outlook task list, pen and paper, tickler file. Then follow up accordingly.
  • Set up the pins and knock ‘em down. One. At. A. Time. Multitasking does not work
  • Honor your system. Establish the foundational structure (of your business plan, of your social media presence et al). Then honor it. Make it a habit to honor your system and you’ll discover a paradox:  structure provides fluidity.
  • RELAX. Hold your shorts on, man. Unless you’re MacGyver, the fate of the free world does not rest in your hands. Besides, tense people can’t flex. Bring your breath to center and recalibrate when you feel as though you are going in circles.
  • Celebrate your victories, no matter how small. Success begets success.
You can do this. What do you think? What works best for you when you need to focus?
——-

Molly Cantrell-Kraig is a woman with drive. Possessing an innate sense of purpose and a pragmatic, solution-based approach to empowering people, she fused these two traits in order to establish Women With Drive. Based upon its founder’s personal history, Women With Drive is a means through which Cantrell-Kraig may effect change on both a micro and macro level. By providing women with something as essential as personal transportation in order to transition them from poverty to prosperity, she, through Women With Drive, seeks to empower women to help them help themselves. Through this action, the individual applicant benefits, as does society as a whole. Follow Molly on twitter as @mckra1g or @WWDr1ve (Women With Drive)

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Cool Tool Review: Toggl

Filed Under Successful Blog, Tools | 7 Comments

Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Toggl
A Review by Todd Hoskins

I have a confession: I am an obsessive tracker and quantifier. As much as I love art and language, I find some comfort and satisfaction when numbers tell a story. Perhaps this explains my love of baseball and its box scores, or why I love web analytics. For over a year, I experimented with assigning prioritized value to daily tasks, tracking my success or lack thereof. I stopped when I realized my creativity was being hampered by my desire to improve my average weekly scores. I was looking down too much, not looking up enough.

Still, tracking, whether it be your blood pressure, web traffic, or time management can be valuable information. Toggl, a time tracking tool, makes it easy to capture this information. If you bill by the hour, you should definitely be using some type of time tracking tool. Even if you don’t, it’s a useful exercise to check in for a week or a month and see how you spend your time. (The book Lifelong Activist makes a strong point that time tracking is an important measurement in personal development, and offers great tips on interpreting the results and implementing change).

Toggl can be installed or run on about any platform. It’s simple – a running clock that allows you to assign projects and clients to time spent. Start the clock. End the clock. But you do have to remember to do this with every project transition. Of course, there are pretty charts and graphs, especially useful if you have the whole team collaborating on various projects.

toggl

Word of warning: If you impose time tracking on employees who are not billing by the hour, make sure you jointly establish some reasonable expectations. It’s not good for the soul to feel like every minute is being monitored. Nor is it good for the soul to play the workplace role of hall monitor. For example, in an eight hour workday, you may expect web developers to spend 6 hours on specified projects.

There is a free version. The paid version, starting at $5 per month, has more features. For a team, it may run up to $100 per month. A good value for the information you receive.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 3/5 – Good programming tool, but doesn’t replace the elegance of Pivotal Tracker

Entrepreneur Value: 3/5 – Freelancers gain credibility when they can show their client when hours were worked

Personal Value: 3/5 – Commit a week. See what you learn. With the iPhone and Android app, you don’t have to limit your tracking to work. How much TV do you watch? Time spent wiith kids?

Creative Batteries: How Far Can You Go on a Single Charge?

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 7 Comments

by Seth Simonds

How long can you work on a creative task before you need to recharge?

I like to think of my creative energy in terms of a little electric car. Not a beautiful and fast electric supercar (who am I kidding?) but a little bee-bop two-seater with an 8-inch steering wheel. If I had a picture of my creative energy, it’d look a lot like the one in the photo, only blue.

Thinking in terms of a small electric car allows me to plan for my projects based on three factors:

  1. My Range: I’m good for about 150 miles of projects before low-battery warnings start to sound. Sure, I can push a bit more, but if I do, I’ll need to take an extended break before I can get back to work in top form. There’s a time to push ahead through blinding exhaustion in order to get a task done but I try to avoid it.
  2. My Itinerary: Having a plan means I’ll know when to stop  for breaks so that I keep myself charged and can bring a project to completion. Planning can seem like a dreadfully dull portion of a project but the resulting energy makes every moment of planning worth the effort.
  3. My Destination: If you’ve ever driven a car the size of my creative energy, you know that it can be hard to see over and around the larger vehicles involved in a project. Financial restriction trucks block intersections and deadline buses will try to run you off the road. Having a clear idea of what my end product allows me to stay focused no matter what short term distraction comes up.

I’m not a tireless machine that can happily trudge around social media stapling smiles to telephone polls and posting stump speeches on my blog without ever needing a break. I’m more like that little electric car, using power at a discernible rate. I get worn out during projects and find myself growing frustrated with people over things I’d never notice if I were getting enough sleep. I get dismayed by human nature and sometimes catch myself saying things like “I hate people” even though I don’t really mean it.

That all changes when I’ve planned out a project and know what my destination is and how I plan on reaching it. When I take time to recharge by quietly reading a novel, talking on the phone with a friend, or going for a walk, I find that my energy level stays high and projects are completed with a flourish. Bringing a friend along for the ride can add a lot to a project as well. The picture of the car shows only two seats but there’s room for a lot more people than you’d imagine!

What do you do to keep your battery charged?

Seth Simonds is about writing, networking, sharing in crazy conversations with brilliant people. He writes at Seth Simonds.com
Follow him on Twitter: @sethsimonds
photo credit: Flickr: frankh

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Whoa! Could You Stop for 1 Second? Or Are You a Work Snob?

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 28 Comments

You’re Not Doing Yourself or Anyone Else Any Favors

Hey, I know you’re busy, gotta get a lot of things done. But whoa!



But, could you stop for 1 second? It’s barely that –> . <-- long.
Just stop. Don't do anything, before you read on.

–> . <--

If you don’t stop once in a while, you’re not doing yourself or anyone else any favors.

About Things Humanly Possible

When I first got into publishing, I was an adrenaline junkie. I loved getting things done. I prided myself on being able to find more seconds in an hour than anyone could. I could arrange, rearrange, multi-tier, multi-task, and multi-delegate the same page to multiple people while I was doing multiplication for multiple project quotations in my head. I could spin 23 plates on sticks and watch 18 fishing poles in the river, while I was juggling 6 balls in the air and talking on telephone. I even said things like, “I want to be known as the person who can do the impossible.”

It all embarrasses me now.

Because more isn’t more. Not one of those things got my full attention. I was good, they all got B work or better. But none them got my best. And in the end, they got the best of me instead.

When I finally got a job, where they wouldn’t let me do that, I learned the value, the fun, and the excitement of going deep and doing quality work. Less really is more. That’s when I found out what I was really capable of. That’s when I did the work that I’m still proud of, the work that lasted.

So if you’re

  • tossing off emails
  • overbooking meetings
  • missing details
  • forgetting things
  • Twittering while you’re talking on the phone
  • thinking you can do more in the same time than anyone

You might be what I was — a work snob — I thought I was better than the rest.
A work snob because every human can only do what’s humanly possible — even if they do it well. Slow down just enough to show folks how damn good you really are. Take a rest.

What are you doing to keep the human in you around?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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