You can play first and work second. It's human nature!

I taught a lively group of post-grads the other week and the theme of the lecture was ‘time management’. This is of course nonsense, as we can no more ‘manage time’ than we can knit soap.

We can make use of time, we can fritter it away, or we can use it to drink sherry in. But we can’t manage it… what we have to do is manage ourselves.

At the end of the work I offered my top five tips to manage ourselves more productively and here they are again, in all their sparkly glory:

1) Notice when you work best and make sure you’re productive during those hours. For example, I work best towards the end of the day so I make sure I do all my ‘bitty’ admin tasks at the start of the day and big projects at the end, when I’m more settled and can think clearly.

2) Don’t fight your kid. If the excitable little child inside you wants to go and play then let him/her our for some fresh air. Often if we force ourselves to work when we want to play we just fritter the time anyway, or work more slowly. (This is called ‘being rebellious’ and we all do it).

3) Say ‘not at this time’ or ‘not yet’ if you’re asked to do something for someone else and you’re busy. That’s easier than a blank ‘no’, which people can find hard to say.

4) Less is more! Write a short to-do list which you can achieve in the next four hours. Stick to it and then pull something forward from tomorrow, if you have time at the end. That’s more satisfying that always pushing things back, like a snow plough.

5) Write it all down. Keeping things in your head just fills an already crowded space. Have a list of lists if you like. I favour Post-It notes and keep a pile of scribbly actions on my desk. I don’t mind that they’re messy. All I mind is that they’re there! Writing things down saves memory and means we can organise and shuffle and reorder the things we need to do. That’s much harder to achieve when they’re all in our head and as the old adage runs; if you can see it, you can sort it.

Life doesn’t have to be complicated and making effective use of time is built on having a methodical process for organising our day… and the self awareness to know when we’re productive and when we’re fooling ourselves.

What do you need to do differently this week, in order to make better use of your time?

Tags: time management

You can put yourself first and do things differently.

Sometimes it’s hard to stop, but stopping is what’s needed.

I was in a TA supervision session recently and realised that I needed to stop some things that have been causing time management stress. By the way, supervision is a great way to learn new things and improve your performance. If you’re working as a coach, you’ll probably already be having some. If not; call me.

So what have I stopped? Here are three of the key ones:

1) I’ve stopped cutting my day into tiny chunks of time. I found that trying to work on all of my big projects at once was distracting. Instead, I now have my diary organised so that I have a case study writing day, a book writing day, a client and sales day and so on. I focus on one key theme per day and that makes me more productive.

2) I’ve stopped being an active member of a TA sub-committee. I’ve had to acknowledge that, for now at least, I need to focus my time on my work and cut out some of the time-consuming ‘nice to haves’. Putting myself first here was hard, as I like the people and the subject matter, but I have deadlines to meet and need to be practical.

3) I’ve stopped trying to do it all myself. It’s easy to become self reliant and assume that only I can do the work, whilst fretting that I don’t have the time to fit in everything. Does that sound familiar to you? I’ve started to actively involve Sara, my ILM Centre Manager, with more projects. She’s great, knows her stuff and brings energy and ideas to the party. We have the wonderfully useful LaunchPad profile for leadership and team development, which we’re now promoting, so it makes sense to share the load and increase the capacity for action.

If your diary is full and you’re fretting about things, if you’re anxious that work or life is spinning out of control, if you’re surrounded by half-finished projects and piles of paper, which seem to be taking over; then the message here is a clear and friendly one:

Stop.

Take a step back. Munch a biscuit. Talk to a friend, or get some supervision….

….And decide what you need to stop doing, in order to start making headway again.

Oh, and if you want to stop guessing about how to make progress with your team, or your personal development, then have a go at LaunchPad. Airbus, the NHS and countless Cranfield post-grads have all used it to stop floundering in the dark and start to make progress.

Have fun with your stopping!

Tags: stop, time management, tip

A frustrated Lego manager heading for their next meeting

Meetings are a short cut to a full diary and it’s curious that we need to have them at work, in order to canvass opinion and make decisions, yet we rarely feel the need to have them at home. Pause for a moment and consider all the hours we are going to spend in meetings over the next 12 months… More than you might think perhaps?

However, I attended a business meeting recently which was more useful than some others I’ve been to and for two specific reasons:

• We started off by talking about our frustrations.
• We then stopped talking and did some work. 

Naming Frustrations

Everybody has feelings and when people work together for any length of time they are bound to accumulate niggles, gripes, concerns, irritations or grazes to their ego. Perhaps a deadline was missed, a promise only half made good on, or an email sent that was misinterpreted. Whatever the cause of these things, we tend to carry them around with us and they can affect how well we perform at meetings, because they can get in the way of our rational Adult Ego State thinking.

Adult and Ego State are terms from Transactional Analysis and when we’re said to be “in our Adult” we are being rational and objective and using facts. Often people think they are being objective, when in fact their feelings are making them sulk, or withdraw from the discussion, or they make commitments without thinking through the implications. Therefore, at the start of a meeting it can help to invite people to name their frustrations. We did this in our meeting by asking each other:

• Where are you?
• What’s annoying you?
• You look thoughtful…what’s on your mind?
• What is getting in the way?
• What has to change for you to feel comfortable?

By asking these questions and giving us all a chance to be heard (see Active Listening post) we had a frank and honest discussion and took note of people’s concerns. This meant that we unpacked our issues and ‘put them on the table’ where we could see them. As the old adage runs: If you can see it, you can sort it. This is the same for our frustrations; if we can see them then we can sort them out and that clears the way for a more productive meeting, as we are now more likely to feel included and engaged.

Encouraging people to speak up is a cornerstone of good team dynamics and successful meetings. The way to voice your feelings without offending people is to focus on your feelings and connect to an issue, rather than the person, and to use a sentence construction such as:

“When you do this / say this….I feel that…..and I would like us to consider these options…”

When people are given options it encourages them to think…which can move them out of a sulky place and into their Adult Ego State. Questions for people to consider here include:

• What would you like to happen?
• How many options can we explore?

Active Meetings

The trap that we had fallen into in the past was to use all of our meeting time to collect actions, which we would then go away and work on. I’m coming to the conclusion that busy people do better when they block their time into useful chunks, rather than having tiny bits of work all overlapping and competing for attention. Given that we can block out time for a meeting, but then have to reschedule our diary to find time to do the actions arising, it makes sense to treat a meeting as a block of productive time, rather than just a conversation. My thinking is to allow enough space in a meeting to do some or all of the actions there and then, so that we make better use of our time together. Our meetings stop being passive and become active.

As a case in point; during our recent meeting we stopped writing actions about administrative items and simply reached for invoices, diaries, cheque books and spreadsheets and made payments, updated information and organised appointments. This felt good, because we were being more productive with our time. I noticed that at one point I didn’t have anything particular to do, so I checked emails; which was still a good use of my time. Meetings are a collective activity, so the focus is on collective progress rather than maximising individual progress. From a business perspective if two actions are completed that’s two steps forwards for the business and that’s what really counts, not individual progress.

When you are looking at your diary and wondering how you will fit all your meetings in perhaps reflect on these questions:

• What can you do differently?
• When you are planning a meeting think about what items can be actioned during the meeting itself to make better use of the time, so the whole group/business makes progress?
• How does the agenda need to change to reflect a more purposeful approach?

Meetings can easily slip and slide into ‘talking shops’ so it was good to be reminded that they can be sharpened up. I hope your meetings go well and do let me know if you have any tips you would like to share.

More Time Management Tips

There are more tips and practical suggestions in the Time Management Pack in the shop, including the Drivers model, which is one of the most useful bits of thinking I have come across and which has helped me to really improve the way I work. Do you know your Driver preferences? They’re worth finding out.

Tags: Adult Ego State, coaching, feelings, How To, meetings, time management, Transactional Analysis