Do More With Less | Hi-Tech Webinar 6

What does everyone on earth have in common? A day has 24 hours. But how can it be that some people achieve so many things within the samen time we have available? Christel will explain how you can improve your efficiency by using self-management.

By Christel Land | Hi-Tech Webinar 6

Welcome to the HiTech webinar on time management and efficiency!

So take a look at all the people on this picture and then let me tell you that you have something in common with every single one of them.

Any ideas what it might be?

They all have 24 hours in a day, just like you.

And so the first and most important point of time management is to realise that there is no such thing. Time management doesn’t exist! A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour, and a day is a day, no matter if you are Kofi Annan, Richard Branson or Oprah Winfrey. Time simply cannot be managed! All there is, is self management. How we choose to spend that time. And THAT is what time management is about.

About Christel

Through my experience working with businesses around Europe, I have spent quite a bit of my time working on efficiency, it’s one of the things that businesses want my help on. And so over the last 15 years or so, I have seen practically first hand what works and what doesn’t work. Now this is a big subject and we can only just scratch the surface on this stuff today, but I want to share with you some of the keys that I have found that can really unlock efficiency in any organisation.

Time Management Fundamentals

So lets start off by looking at some fundamentals. The first part we are going to be looking at is borrowed from one of the big classic books in time management called The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Stephen Covey embarked on a mission to interview a large number of successful people, to try and work out what they all have in common. The results are what ended up becoming this book of his, where he identified 7 habits that successful people have in common. It’s a great book and if you’re looking for something to read over the summer, then I highly recommend it. But today we are going to speak about only one aspect of his book and that is the time quadrant.

Covey identified a quadrant of tasks, and all tasks we do every day fall in one of these 4 boxes. And as we go through them I’ll explain what is in each of these boxes. So if you have a pen and paper nearby, try writing down how much time you think you spend in each of these quadrants on a weekly basis.

On one axis you have importance, with not important tasks at the bottom and important ones at the top. On the other axis you have urgency, with urgent tasks to the left and not urgent tasks to the right.

So if we start in the bottom right hand corner, you see this is called the Quadrant of Escape. This is where we do things that are not urgent and not important. This might be things like surfing the internet for fun, or doing little work related tasks that just don’t really add much value at all. Everyone has a certain amount of this in their day; none of us will be 100% efficient 100% of the time. And when we do that stuff, we are in the Quadrant of Escape. So try to estimate and note down, how much time you think you spend in the Quadrant of Escape each week.

Then we move one step to the left, at the bottom and you see the Quadrant of Illusion. This is where we are spending time on things that are not important, but that have urgency. This can be things like someone calling you trying to sell you something. It is urgent in the sense that your phone is ringing and you need to pick up because you don’t know who it is. But it is most likely not important either, because you are probably not going to buy anything from this salesperson. This quadrant is called the Quadrant of Illusion because this is where we can have the illusion of feeling very busy but in reality we are not accomplishing much at all! So once again, try to estimate and note down, how much time do you think you spend in the Quadrant of Illusion each week?

Now lets move one step up and we get to the things that are important AND urgent. This is the quadrant of Demand, and as the name suggests this is where we are in demand. This is where we are fire fighting, fixing problems, we are delivering on a deadline, we are managing expectations and delivering on those expectations. When we are in this quadrant, we are adding value and working towards goals, but we are in demand. In other words, someone else is demanding or dictating what our time is spent on. Once again, try to estimate and note down how much time you think you spend in the Quadrant of Demand?

And then finally we have the last quadrant, the Quadrant of The Zone. And this is where we are working on things that are important but NOT URGENT. Those are things like planning, building relationships, learning and developing our skills, brainstorming new ideas and finding new opportunities. This is the longterm stuff that is so important to build in to our time, but that very often gets moved forward and forward and forward because we are in Demand, the other quadrant. So now finally, estimate how much time you think you spend in The Zone each week? Do you spend any time in it at all?

Now before we move on, take a look at your numbers for a second. Are you happy with the proportion of time you are spending in each of these? Or do you think that you might be able to get more of the important stuff done if you reshuffled your time a little bit?

Covey's time quadrant

So what you see here is Covey’s time quadrant, but this time it gives you a hint about what to do about each quadrant. Eliminate the stuff that has no relevance to what you’re trying to achieve. Delegate the stuff that is making you busy but not really adding value. First do the stuff that has a level of urgency and that is important.

And then build in time for working on the long term stuff.

Filling a jar with....

Another way of thinking about it is the analogy of filling sand, pebbles and rocks in to a jar.

If you had to fit all 3 in to a jar, which one would you put in first? What would you put in second? What would you put in last?

Here you see the result of two very different jar filling strategies.

What you see on the left is the way most people approach their time and their calendar.

First they do the little stuff, the not so important stuff. That’s the sand. Then, when that is done they add as many pebbles and little stones as possible, representing the important and urgent stuff. And then it comes to the part of adding the big rocks, the really big important stuff that is long term that doesn’t have much urgency. That is balanced and stacked on top of everything else and it for sure does not fit in the jar! The jar on the right on the other hand, is how highly successful people approach their time. They first put in the big rocks, make sure there is time for that. Then they add the smaller rocks, make sure that they all fit nicely too. And then they let the sand fill the gaps. And have you noticed? Not only is the jar on the left overly full, but the jar on the right which contains exactly the same amount of stones and sand actually has extra space left in it? And that is exactly what happens to people’s time when they start approaching things in a slightly different way.

Learnings Covey's time quadrant

So think about what are your big rocks? What are your pebbles? And what is your sand? And what do you do first, second and third? You want to be starting with the big rocks. Make calendar entries for when you are going to work on the long term stuff, and treat it the same way as you would a doctors appointment: no matter what craziness is going on around you, you will make the appointment. Then you add the little rocks, make time for the stuff that is important and that has urgency. And then finally you fill whatever gaps you have left with sand: small, not important tasks that won’t really impact your end result in any kind of way.

The rule of 3

Now, we’ve talked enough about quadrants, rocks and jars. We are now going to look at another simple but effective approach called the Rule of 3.

So, you have written down your tasks for the day, for the week or for the month and then it is time to decide where to start. What a lot of people do is start with a few easy ones first, so they can get going and they get that feeling of progress that you feel when you can tick stuff off lists. Actually, research has shown that our bodies release endorphins when we tick things off list, there is actually a physical response of happiness when we tick things off lists. So it is natural for people to start doing stuff they can tick off easily.

What the Rule of 3 states is that before you start working on your list, you apply the Rule of 3. This is about identifying your 3 most important tasks. So ask yourself: If I could do only one thing all day long, which one task would contribute the greatest value to my goals?

Once you’ve identified that one thing, you ask yourself the same question again, and then once again. In other words, you identify the 3 tasks that will add the greatest value to your goals. Some experts claim that as much as 90% of your contribution to the company comes from these 3 tasks alone! So think for a moment, would your day be different if you started it off by spending just one or two minutes identifying your 3 most important tasks, and made sure that whatever came along, those 3 tasks were done by the end of the day?

And then of course the question is what do you do with the stuff that is left? Well, start by evaluating what can be eliminated, what can be delegated and what can be scaled back so it takes up a minimum of your time. The goal of making a list of tasks isn’t necessarily to do everything that’s on it, no the goal is to do the right things and not necessarily all of the rest.

Procrastination

Ok, now we wouldn’t be talking about time management if we didn’t also talk a bit about procrastination. Getting stuck, or even worse, not even really getting going because there is something standing in our way. That something is procrastination. So how do we beat procrastination?

Well Mark Twain had a wonderful quote about procrastination and it applies beautifully to time management. He said that if it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

Everyone has frogs on their to do lists. Those things that keep being transferred from one list to the next because we don’t really want to do them, or we don’t enjoy doing them. There’s just something about them that make us think ‘hang on, I’m going to do all this other stuff first, and then I’ll get to that later’

What Mark Twain is saying is instead of leaving your frog on your plate for as long as possible, deal with it first. Deal with it up front. Imagine if every day you started off identifying your tasks for the day and identifying which one was your frog. Which is the one you like the least? Then, you do that one as the first thing of your day. Would not everything else that day feel quite easy after that, like you were riding your bike down hill? If you haven’t tried taking this approach, I highly recommend it. It is incredible how one little thing like that can actually change your entire day.

This frog business and also the Rule of 3 come from a book by Brian Tracy called Eat That Frog, and it’s all about how to stop procrastinating and getting stuff done! This is another good read that I highly recommend.

Time studies

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that you can’t change something you don’t acknowledge, or the first step to fixing a problem is realising that it’s there. And that is where the relevance of time studies come in. Getting a more specific idea about what it is you spend your time on today, in order to be able to then work on that and change it.

There are basically 2 approaches you can take to time studies. The first one is manual. This is where you create categories of your tasks and then you note down how much time you spend in each of them over the course of a day. Now it’s not realistic that you will be timing yourself every time you pick up the phone or answer an email, so the practical way to doing this manually is to set a reminder for yourself, for example once an hour, it might be your phone that sets off an alarm once every hour. When the alarm goes off, then you note down roughly how much time you have spent in each of the categories over the past hour. It won’t be an exact measurement, but doing this once an hour for a week will give you a much more accurate measurement of what you are spending your time on, that if you do the same thing once a day, or even once a week!

A much easier way to measure your time is by using software to do it. And this is an area where software has really evolved a lot over the past 10 years. Time management software used to be so clunky to use that it almost took more time using the software than doing your work, and it interrupted what you were doing. But things have evolved a lot and there are some really great tools on the market now. At HiTech we use one of those tools and it is incredibly easy, we have all our tasks on a list and through a little task bar we can switch between tasks and measure how much time we spend on each of them. So if time management software is something you would like to consider using, get in touch with us because we can probably point you in the right direction for what tool is right for your needs.

What drives it al?

So, now we’ve covered some practical tips and tricks for how to get more done, but I also want to spend a few minutes to go a bit deeper than that. Because even with the best time management tools in the world, if the underlying environment, if the underlying drivers are not right, then there is only so much you can do with practical tips. So the question is, what drives efficiency?

And this is where I give you the third and final book recommendation of today. The speed of trust, which is written by Stephen Covey, who happens to be the son of the man who wrote the first book I showed you.

Drivers of efficiency

Ok, so we’re talking about drivers of efficiency and I show you a book about trust, what in the world has trust and efficiency got to do with each other? Well, let me share a few facts with you and I think you might get the idea…

Trust is something that can be measured in organisations, and research shows that high trust organisations actually generate on average a 3 times higher return to their shareholders than low trust organisations do. And this doesn’t just apply to the business world. Schools with high trust are 3 times better at improving test scores, than schools with low trust!

It applies to inter-company relations and supplier relationships, where the value of contracts increase by an average of 40% where they are based on trust rather than strict SLA requirements. And incidentally, that is exactly how we structure our delivery contracts at Hi-Tech because TRUST is at the foundation of everything we do.

Studies also show that there is a strong correlation between trust and execution. Companies that trust their employees are better and quicker at executing processes and changes, than companies that have lower trust in their employees. One of the reasons for that is that in an organisation that has high trust, you don’t need as much control, checkups and bureaucracy. You still need some, but you don’t need nearly as much if you trust your people to do the right thing.

So why is that?

The reason is that trust always impacts two very measurable outcomes:

Speed and Cost.

Now, we don’t have time in a short webinar like this to go in to the detail but this is a very interesting area of business and one that a lot of management teams overlook. Trust is a huge factor and driver of results and success, it is actually much less of a ‘soft value’ than it is often given credit for.

So, everyone who is on this webinar today will receive this business case by email, as a little extra piece of inspiration from us to you. It will give you all the numbers and facts to demonstrate that trust is a force to be reckoned with, and worked with, in any organisation.

**E-mail to info@hitechsoftware.eu if you want to business case too!**

How Hi-Tech can help

Now, like I said at the beginning, I will tell you how we can help in the area of customer loyalty.

Time workshop

If you feel like there are areas in customer loyalty that you would like to work on, but you would like a little help structuring the process, then we have set up an online loyalty workshop in about 2 weeks. We provide you with a workbook, and then you log on to a 3 hour workshop where we’ll take you through all the different areas of your business that you should be looking at. The purpose of this workshop is for you to create an action plan for yourself about what you are going to do when to work on customer loyalty, and there is the possibility to ask questions all along the way. This workshop is 129 euros and if you have several people from your company who want to do this, then get in touch with us since we can then give you a team rate instead of an individual rate.

Team workshop

If you feel like there are areas in customer loyalty that you would like to work on, but you would like a little help structuring the process, then we have set up an online loyalty workshop in about 2 weeks. We provide you with a workbook, and then you log on to a 3 hour workshop where we’ll take you through all the different areas of your business that you should be looking at. The purpose of this workshop is for you to create an action plan for yourself about what you are going to do when to work on customer loyalty, and there is the possibility to ask questions all along the way. This workshop is 129 euros and if you have several people from your company who want to do this, then get in touch with us since we can then give you a team rate instead of an individual rate.

Quarterly review sessions

If you feel like there are areas in customer loyalty that you would like to work on, but you would like a little help structuring the process, then we have set up an online loyalty workshop in about 2 weeks. We provide you with a workbook, and then you log on to a 3 hour workshop where we’ll take you through all the different areas of your business that you should be looking at.

The purpose of this workshop is for you to create an action plan for yourself about what you are going to do when to work on customer loyalty, and there is the possibility to ask questions all along the way.

This workshop is 129 euros and if you have several people from your company who want to do this, then get in touch with us since we can then give you a team rate instead of an individual rate.

With that, the only thing remaining is for me to thank you all for joining us!

If you have questions relating to anything in this webinar, then feel free to get in touch with us anytime, and we’ll be happy to answer your questions.

Thank you.