The view from here

I’ve been running some time management workshops recently and one of the things that we’ve been looking at is the direction in which people are heading, their longer-term goals. Having a direction is an excellent way (and possibly the only real way) of establishing your priorities, without which it’s impossible to organise yourself in any meaningful way. The thinking behind this is that it’s important to know where you want to get to otherwise, as Lewis Carroll pointed out, it doesn’t really matter which way you go.

I left school with weak A-levels and didn’t go to university. A few years ago, I decided that I was going to return to studying and get the degree I didn’t get a quarter of a century ago. As I was thinking about this, it struck me that it would take about six years to do this and that I would be 45 years old by the time I got my degree. That length of time felt daunting until I realised that, unless something dreadful happened, in six years I was going to be 45 anyway – I might as well be 45 with a degree.

My destination was the degree and I had a vague idea of what I was going to do with it when I began studying. An analogy that I often use is that of a pilot filing a flight plan: when the plane takes off, the pilot knows where he’s going to land – unless, of course, something unexpected happens. It’s a helpful analogy but, like any analogy, if you push it too hard it will break down. Since I made my choice, my outlook has changed and evolved. In the words of every contestant on the X-Factor, I’ve been on a journey and the view from where I am now is different to the view I had when I started studying.

Someone once told me that “to decide is to divide” – a yes to one option is automatically a no to another option. But that yes also opens up the possibility of a whole lot of other options. Because of the choice I made five years ago, I was alert to several opportunities that have come my way in the last few weeks, opportunities that have helped to clarify that vision I mentioned above. For us, the destination doesn’t have to be fixed in stone – we’re not locked into a flight plan and it’s possible for us to change our destination at any point. It’s what makes the journey exciting.

Business Maths

I was never particularly good at maths when I was at school and that inadequacy with figures has, I’m afraid, carried over into my adult life. The chances are, many of you could or would say the same. It’s socially easy to admit to difficulties with maths whereas it’s very difficult to admit to difficulties with reading. Perhaps that’s what explains some of the very questionable business maths that I heard from a group the other day.

Let’s begin by setting you a simple problem. You have a team of eight people, all of whom produce one widget per day. If you take away four people, how many widgets per day will the remaining four have to produce in order to maintain your total output of eight? The answer is, of course, two per day: even I could work that out.

However, there’s a problem. The current eight people don’t appear to be slacking. They all appear to be busy each day; they’re not sitting around drinking coffee and gossiping. One widget per day appears to be about right; in fact given that you used to have a team of 16 people producing eight widgets per day, the current productivity seems very good. So what do you do?

The answer to that, of course, is equally simple: you make the cuts anyway and drive the remaining four to work even harder, until they burn out or leave. It seems crazy – no, wait; it is crazy – but that’s exactly what the company was proposing to do. The group I was working with were resigned to taking on a whole lot of extra work on top of their existing responsibilities. When I asked them how they proposed to do that, someone muttered something about “discretionary time” but, in order to be discretionary, you have to have some choice in whether you give that time. They felt they didn’t; they had to work the extra hours, just to keep up with the job.

Oh, I understand that there are efficiency savings to be made. I understand that there might be synergies (and, unlike a lot of people who bandy that word about, I know what it means) but there is a bottom line. This bottom line isn’t on the accounts: it’s the baseline below which no-one can go. Everything you do takes time; there is nothing you do that you can do in an instant. You can be more efficient and look for ways of, perhaps, doing two things at once to speed things up, but there is a bottom line below which we cannot go. There is a point at which there are no more efficiencies; there are no more synergies. What then? Work harder is no longer the right answer...

Speed

Like many people, I’ve been keeping an eye on the television over the past few days, keeping up with the ongoing political situation here in the UK. The thing that’s struck me most is the number of presenters who have been camped out in all weathers, reporting from outside various locations, waiting for something to happen. Exactly why it was necessary to drag these presenters blinking into the sunlight from their warm and cosy studios, I’m not entirely sure but I suspect it has a lot to do with our culture’s current obsession with speed.

Aside from giving the spurious impression that the news they are conveying is somehow more accurate because they are “on the scene”, the main reason for having presenters in Downing Street or outside the cabinet offices is so that they can capture events, as they happen. Sky, for one, makes great play of being the first to bring what is now referred to as “breaking” news as does BBC Radio 5 Live.

But what does speed give us? In all but a very few instances, speed or immediacy adds little: it tells us what has happened but the focus on immediacy means we don’t understand why it happened, or the consequences of what has happened. It’s symptomatic of our broader desire now to get things done quickly. Mobile phones are with us all the time and we’re expected to be available almost 24 hours a day. Email is all but instantaneous so some people assume that the reply should be, too, and I’ve written before about the pressure for ever increasing efficiency – for which, again, read speed.

Where in all of this instant reaction is the opportunity to stop and think? Where is the opportunity to consider, to reflect, to weigh up alternatives? How many mistakes might be avoided, how many ideas might be improved, how many decisions might be better, simply by avoiding this pressure and slowing down? I’ve spent this week with a great bunch of people, all of whom report being under so much pressure that they are at near breaking point. It’s not that they’re inefficient, or poor at their jobs, or unintelligent – they’re just struggling to keep up with the relentless pace of the jobs they do. The only way they stand any chance of keeping up is to react instantly, constantly spending time in Quadrant One, slowly but surely burning out.

It takes courage to take a stand against this tide and I hope, during the course of this week, I was able to give them something that might help. It’s a situation that I’m facing with delegates more and more often, though, and seems to be a trend which is only going one way. It’s like we’re all speeding along a motorway: we’re unsure of where we are or where we’re going, certain only that we’re making such good progress we don’t have time to check the map.

Just one thing

Over the last couple of months, we’ve looked at daily and weekly planning, the key steps towards achieving increased productivity and balance. This week, we’ll finish the series by outlining the process of weekly planning.

The key benefit of weekly planning is that it gives you the chance to stop and think – to step back from the day-to-day and take a broader view. This can feel difficult when all of those urgent issues and tasks are pressing in on you but the busier you are, the more important weekly planning is. It only takes fifteen minutes or so and you can make it a regular part of your routine – essentially, a habit – by scheduling it into your diary as a weekly meeting with yourself.

The first step is to review your roles. Some of your roles will change as you go through life while other roles will stay with you for longer periods or even last a lifetime. Take a moment to reconnect with those roles, ensure they’re still relevant, and remind yourself of what you’re trying to achieve in these roles.

Secondly, ask yourself, what is the most important thing I could do in this role this week? Not everything you could do; not everything you have to do; not everything you hope to do. Just the most important thing – the one thing that would make all the difference. Of course, you'll do other things in those roles but what you’re looking for at this point is simply the most important thing.

The third step is then to schedule it into your week: if it’s an appointment, put it into your calendar, if it’s a task, put it onto your daily task list for the relevant day. When that day comes, that task is the most important thing you have to do that day – it’s your top priority. This is so important: it means that, whatever else happens that week, no matter what other urgent or unexpected activities come crashing into your schedule, you’ll have done some significant, longer-term, activity – something that takes you one step closer to achieving your goals.

You will have noticed that none of the steps to weekly or daily planning are what you might call rocket science and that’s a good thing. Complexity, in this case, is unnecessary – simple things, done well and repeatedly, will produce much more significant results in the longer term. But don’t take my word for it – try it for yourself and prove it.

What would you do with a 25th hour?

Last week we looked at the first part of weekly planning – establishing your roles in life. This week, I want to think a little more about why that’s important and what weekly planning will give you that you don’t have now.

In his bestselling book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey talks about the Time Matrix – a four-box model allowing tasks to be categorised based on whether they are important and/or urgent. It’s not a new model – the first reference I’ve found to it is as the Eisenhower method, as it was said to be used by the US President, although it’s not clear whether that’s apocryphal or not.

© FranklinCovey

When I run Time Management workshops, I’ll very often ask people what they would do if they had a 25th hour – you can think about this question, too. As I’m psychic, I know you’re thinking that you would spend that hour sleeping so I’ll let you do that for a couple of weeks and then you have to do something else: you can do anything you want. Inevitably, the things people come up with are Quadrant II activities; they say they would spend time with their loved ones, play with their kids, learn a language or a musical instrument, travel, paint or simply sit and read a book. You probably came up with something similar.

Why do they never get round to doing these things; why do they need a 25th hour? Because most people spend most of their time in Quadrants I and III. By definition, Quadrant II activities aren’t urgent and there are always other, urgent things to do which take priority – even when those urgent things aren’t important. The Quadrant II activities are left for those times when you have less to do; when things aren’t so crazy around here; when things calm down a bit.

It doesn’t have to be that way. What weekly planning gives you is the opportunity to schedule in some of those Quadrant II activities. And because the most important things in our lives tend to revolve around relationships – with ourselves and with others - establishing your roles in life is more than just categorising what you do. It also means thinking about how you do it. Decide what kind of bricklayer or musician you want to be and then schedule activities to help you achieve that.

The great benefit of weekly planning is that it changes your focus, lifting you out of the day-to-day grind of the urgent and into the future. We all have dreams, hopes or aspirations – they may be big or small but they are all important and should never be put off while we deal with things that are, fundamentally, unimportant. As Goethe said, “things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”

Planning weekly, not weakly...

When we last talked about time management, we talked about daily planning and while the format, degree or rigour of planning varies, many of you already take time to make some kind of plan for the day. However, very few people also plan on a weekly basis, which is one of those instances where we just make things harder for ourselves. Planning daily but not also weekly inevitably means that our focus will always be on the short term. By definition, we’re only thinking about the things that have to be done today. Weekly planning is a simple way of allowing ourselves the opportunity to schedule in those things that are important but aren’t urgent – they have to be done sometime, but not necessarily today and so inevitably they’re put off. If you’re looking for that elusive work/life balance, you’ll find it in weekly planning

Weekly planning only takes about fifteen to twenty minutes each week – I do mine on a Friday morning at 10 o’clock because I’ve found that’s what works best for me. You can do it whenever you prefer but my advice would be to avoid Monday mornings (it’s too late – the week has started) and Friday afternoons (things mysteriously seem to be sacrificed on Friday afternoons). Ideally, you should do it at the same time every week, so that it becomes a regular appointment with yourself.

Before we get to the step-by-step process, you’ll firstly need to understand what your roles are in life. The easiest way of doing this is to think about all the things you do on a weekly basis and categorise them. If you spend a lot of time laying bricks each week, it’s safe to say you’re a bricklayer for at least part of the time. If you spend time playing a musical instrument, you’re a musician for part of the week. For instance, over the course of the week I’m a facilitator, a parent, a friend and a student, to name just four.

If you want to improve your time management skills, take some time over the next few days to identify no more than seven roles that cover everything you do over the average week. If you come up with nine, merge a couple so that you bring the total down to seven but if you only come up with six roles, don’t make one up. There’s nothing magical about the number seven, it’s just a realistic number of roles on which you can focus. These roles aren’t fixed in concrete – some will change as your circumstances change – but understanding your roles is key to your weekly planning and establishing some balance and control in your life.

How to get started when you really don't want to...

I’ve been meaning to write this post for ages but something else always seemed to crop up. First, I had to tidy my desk – you know how difficult it is to write with an untidy desk. Then I noticed there were some old documents I needed to delete from my folders, which then meant that I needed to organise the remaining documents. By that time, some emails had arrived and when I’d sorted those it was time to put some washing on. While I was in the kitchen, I thought I’d make myself a cup of coffee but I found I was out of coffee so I had to go to the shop…

You know the story. There’s a task that you need to do – you may even want to do it. It’s been sitting there for a while now but you never quite seem to get around to it. Consciously or subconsciously, you keep putting it off. But why? And how do you overcome that procrastination?

Not all procrastination is bad but it becomes an unhelpful habit when it starts to put you under pressure or means you risk missing important deadlines. If you find yourself doing this, the key thing is to ask yourself why you’re procrastinating. Is it a difficult or unpleasant task? Do you lack the skills, knowledge or confidence to do it?

If you procrastinate a lot, keep a note each time it happens and look for themes. Some common reasons why people procrastinate are a desire for perfection or a need to know everything before they start a task or a fear of failure. Understanding why you’re putting something off is a key step in spotting future tasks over which you might procrastinate; understanding the beliefs that lead you to procrastinate is the first step to changing those beliefs.

In the short term, here are some quick fixes that will help you to get going:

• If you can, try doing the hardest or least desirable part of the task first – after that, the rest will seem easy.
• Break the task down into sub tasks – the more the merrier. You’re more likely to do smaller, quicker tasks and it’s the old joke about eating an elephant: one piece at a time.
• Get a little egg timer and set it for around ten minutes – don’t check too closely, otherwise you’ll be tempted to clock-watch. Then start the task you’ve been putting off but promise yourself you’ll only do it until the alarm goes off. When it does, you have permission to go and do something more fun – or, if you feel like it, you can reset the alarm and keep on with the task.
• Reward yourself; promise yourself that when you’ve done the task you’ll go for a walk, or eat a bar of chocolate or book a flight to Hong Kong – then follow through.
• Hold yourself accountable – or, better still, find someone else to hold you accountable. Tell someone you trust that you’re going to do the task by a particular deadline and ask them to check up on you. With luck, they’ll not only check that you’ve done it when the deadline arrives, they’ll check that you’re working on it in advance of the deadline.

Finally, something that always works for me is to get those unpleasant or unattractive tasks out of the way first thing in the morning. I know I’m at my best in the morning and, if I do it first thing, it’s not hanging over me for the rest of the day.

The inspiredblog is taking a short break next week but we’ll be back on 11 February, picking up on our series about time management and bringing you the secrets of work/life balance. Now – stop reading this and get on with whatever it is you’ve been putting off!

The crucial one percent

I ended last week’s blog by teasing you with The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask Yourself and I’ll come back to it in a minute, I promise. But first, I want to make it clear that if you’re serious about getting more done this year, you’re going to need to adopt the discipline of regular planning.

Discipline sometimes has a bad reputation but it’s discipline that allows us to do… well, pretty much anything. You won’t have the freedom to play a musical instrument unless you had the discipline to practice. You won’t have the freedom to compete as an athlete unless you had the discipline to train. You won’t have the freedom to achieve your goals if you don’t have the discipline to plan them out. This means planning each week and each day and it’s daily planning that we’re looking at now.

It will only take you five minutes, at most - that’s taking less than 1% of your day to ensure that the other 99% is well spent. It involves checking your Master Task List, deciding which of those tasks you can reasonably expect to do today, and then transferring them from your Master Task List to your To Do list.

The length of your To Do list depends on your answer to The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask Yourself, which is, how long do I want to work today. It’s a simple but powerful question and if the answer, every day, is “about 30 minutes”, do yourself a favour and get another job! Most people find they have enough work to keep themselves going 24 hours a day – you don’t want to work that long, so asking this question determines the number of hours you have available to spend on tasks. From that number, you subtract any meetings or travelling that you have to do. Whatever number is left, halve it and then that lower number is the number of hours' worth of tasks that you put on your To Do List.

Why halve the number? It’s common sense, really: the unexpected happens every day and we need to build flexibility into our plan to accommodate it. The primary reason why people fail at planning is they fill every available minute and don’t take account of what Donald Rumsfeld called “the known unknowns” – the stuff we know will happen, we just don’t know when: the emails, phone calls, chats with colleagues, trips to the loo and so on that stop us actually working.

Trying to plan each day from your Master Task List without a To Do list can be overwhelming; faced with an endless list of tasks that never seems to shrink, it’s easy to get discouraged. Using a shorter To Do list will give you a sense of perspective and progress and using some common sense ensures you won’t get overloaded. But how do you ensure that you’re staying on track? For that, you’ll have to come back next week when we look at weekly planning.

Procrastinating pleasure

Interesting piece here from the New York Times on the tendency of some people to procrastinate over things that are pleasurable. It just goes to show that balance is important in all things!

To do, doing, done...

Following my previous post, the snow over the last week has prevented me from leaving the house very often and I’ve been able to devote a bit of time to looking at the “how” part of managing your time. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll develop this further and provide you with some useful tips for organising yourself in the New Year, as well as helping you overcome common time management pitfalls.

Whatever system you use – Blackberry, iPhone, Filofax, DayPlanner or any of the hundreds of other, similar, systems – it should do four things for you. It should tell you where you need to be (a calendar); who you need to be there with (a contacts list); what you need to do when you’re there (a task list) and remind you what you did afterwards (a place to keep notes). Those four things don’t all have to be in the same place; for instance, I keep my calendar, contacts and task list on my Blackberry, because I find it convenient and it’s portable, which is important given the amount of travelling I do. However, taking notes on the Blackberry is inconvenient, so I use a Moleskine journal for that.

You could have four separate places for those four things – whatever works best for you. The important thing, however, is to only have one place for each of them. For instance, one place for notes, one place for appointments and so on. It often happens that people try to keep multiple calendars going – one for work, one for home, one on the fridge door for the kids and so on. I’m not saying that can’t work – clearly it does for some people – but it involves an awful lot of duplication and immediately invites the possibility that you’ll update one calendar and forget to update the others. Almost inevitably, things fall through the “cracks” between the calendars. If you haven’t already noticed this, I’m a simple man and I like to keep things simple so my advice is to have one place and one place only.

There is an exception to this, however, and that’s your task list. So often, people only run one, ever-increasing task list – it gets longer and longer every day as they add new tasks to it. Stress comes from work you haven’t done, not work you have, and using one task list constantly reminds you that each time tick anything off, there’s still far more to be done. So, when it comes to tasks, one of the smartest things you can do to help improve your productivity is to keep two lists. While this might sound counter-intuitive, it will work in your favour and dramatically increase both your feeling of productivity and your actual productivity.

The first list is your Master Task List: this is the “dumping ground” for all of the things you need to do. Something occurs to you, someone asks you to do something – add it to your Master Task List. This Master Task List can be as long as you like, although I recommend that you review it on a monthly basis. The second, smaller, list is your “To Do” list. You prepare this every day (don’t worry, it’ll only take you a couple of minutes) and it is a sub-set of your Master Task List. Your To Do list should contain only the things you can reasonably expect to do that day, no more and no less. The length of that list is determined by the most important, most life-changing question you will ever ask yourself – and I’ll tell you what that question is next week.

Happy New Year

I don’t want to start 2010 on a depressing note but I wonder how many people have already failed their new year’s resolutions? If they have, they’re in good company – according to a recent report, around 80% of people won’t succeed in keeping their resolutions. If you’ve set yourself some goals or resolutions for 2010, I’d like to offer some practical advice on goal setting and, more importantly, goal achievement.

Whatever it is you’re trying to do, you’ll need three basic things to succeed. Firstly, of course, you need to know what you’re trying to do. This is where all that “SMART” stuff comes in handy – you need to make the goal specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timed. The more you can phrase your goal using these guidelines, the clearer the goal is likely to be and clarity helps you both achieve and monitor achievement.

Secondly, you need to know how to do it. There are simple things you can do that dramatically increase your chances of success: breaking the goal down into smaller, interim, steps; telling other people what you’re trying to achieve; keeping a record of your progress. All these things will help keep you going, as will understanding that you will sometimes slip back into your old habits. It’s important not to beat yourself up for this; keep visualising the positive results that come from achieving your goal or keeping your resolution.

Often, we know what to do and we think we know how to do it although sometimes how we go about achieving our goals sabotages our attempts. That’s certainly the thrust of the research I quoted earlier. But those of you who have children – or who have ever been children – will recognise that there is a third, crucial element. You can know very clearly what to do; you can understand explicitly how to do it but if you don’t want to do it then nothing will happen.

I start my time management workshops off by asking people to list all the things they know about time management. They list the stuff you’d expect: keep lists, prioritise, say no, focus on important not urgent and so on. So I asked every group, “If you did these things, would they help you manage your time?” – they would all say yes. Then I would ask, “Do you do these things?” and they would all say no. Ultimately, they didn't do them because they didn't really want to.

People often talk about not being sufficiently motivated to do things and it’s true that motivation is important. But all too often, lack of motivation is just a code for a lack of discipline. Sometimes, the things we want to achieve are hard – they involve sacrifice or hard work. It’s at those times, the times when you don’t feel like it, when discipline – mind over mattress – is what you need. But ultimately, whatever goal you set for yourself, whatever your resolution, it has to be something that you actually want to achieve. Don’t set a goal because you think you should achieve it – spend your time, energy and effort achieving something you actually want.

Have a very happy, prosperous and peaceful New Year.

Spinning plates

I just wanted to draw your attention to this excellent article concerning "information overload", a subject close to my heart in my studies on time/personal management. Having spent a day very recently with a group who complained they never got time to get their work done, while checking their BlackBerrys, iPhones and various other devices constantly throughout the day, it echoes my own thoughts on the subject perfectly!

Do you have the time?

What is time? If you’re struggling to answer that question, you’re not alone. It’s something that we think about all the time but it’s almost impossible to describe what time is. This isn’t a new struggle – in the fifth century, St Augustine wrote, “what then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Often, about the only thing we do know about time is that we don’t have enough of it.

It’s a faulty paradigm, of course: we treat time as if it was a commodity, which it clearly isn’t. If we don’t have enough of something that we want, we’ll generally go and get some more but you can’t do that with time. It’s not possible to pop down to Tesco and pick up an extra half an hour. So we often look for time management systems to provide that “extra” time – some new process, some new diary, some clever system to give us the time we need. But what do we find? All time management advice is fundamentally the same, regardless of how it’s dressed up, and I’d be willing to bet that you already know most of it.

Time management is a myth; there’s nothing we can do to time to give ourselves a 61-minute hour or a 25-hour day. It’s not time we should be managing: it’s ourselves. I was working with a group recently, talking about time, and one of the delegates was in training for an Ironman triathlon competition. He estimated that he spent about 24 hours a week in training and one of the other delegates barked with laughter and derision at this, boldly claiming that, as a working mother of two children, she couldn’t possibly do something like that because she didn’t have enough time. Of course, what we discovered after a little questioning, was that she spent around 30 hours a week watching television.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have the time to train for a triathlon – it just wasn’t as important to her as watching TV. Time management, at its heart, is self-management: it’s about the choices we make on how to spend our time and every choice we make has consequences. Recent studies have shown that the average Facebook user spends about 70 hours on the site per year – three whole days. The biggest users spend a full week. Users of social networking sites estimate that they spend around 40 minutes a week, at work, on the sites – at a cost to the economy of about £1.4bn a year. Most eBay bids and sales are made during the hours of 9am to 5pm. I guarantee that most of these people “don’t have enough time”, either.

I’m not criticising television or Facebook or Twitter or any other website – I watch TV and use social networking sites like most other people. But the fact is, we have all the time we’re ever going to get: we’re never going to get any more. We have the same 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year as Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama or any other significant achiever you could mention. What it comes down to, at heart, is the choices we make on how to spend that time. Choose wisely.

Working to live - part three

I ended last week’s blog by suggesting that Frederick Taylor was a fraud. Rather than rehash here all the reasons why that may be true, I’ll refer you instead to an excellent article that Matthew Stewart wrote for the Atlantic Magazine and recommend you read that. What I’d like to concentrate on here are some of the consequences of Taylorism.

Regardless of Taylor’s methods, there is nothing inherently wrong with a drive for efficiency. Everything we do, both inside and outside work, takes a certain amount of time. The principle underlying Taylorism is not necessarily fraudulent - business must involve, to an extent, the search for the shortest time period within which the widget can be made, how quickly the client can be served and so on. My concern is not with that but with the other question that no one seems to be asking: what is the consequence of this efficiency?

The superficial response is that greater efficiency results in faster throughput and therefore greater output and productivity; it may also result in reduced costs and greater profit. So far, so good. This is a logical argument when we’re talking about machinery and possibly even production lines. It even has merit when talking about the everyday processes that employees use in order to get their jobs done: the fewer steps in the process, the faster they are able to get their work done.

But what about the other consequences of greater efficiency? If you’re wondering what they are, ask yourself this question: whenever new processes are introduced at work and time is saved, what does your employer ask you to do with the saved time? Do they allow you to go home early? Have longer lunch-breaks? Or do they, as I suspect, expect you to do more work in that saved time?

What kind of incentive is this? Who in their right mind (aside, of course, from Frederick Winslow Taylor and his deluded devotees) thinks this will encourage people to work harder? Efficiency works well with machines but we are not machines. A drive for ever greater efficiency is damaging the lives of a great many employees in fundamental ways, leading to less job satisfaction, greater stress and, as I wrote last week, increased suicide.

Over the coming weeks, I want to look at and, perhaps, challenge two sacred cows – that setting targets and managing to them is a good thing and that management/leadership can be taught. These two beliefs have been at the base of a system that has resulted in people killing themselves because of their work – what if both of those ideas are wrong? Perhaps it’s time to examine them a little more closely.

It's not a bad plan...

I was working with a group recently and I asked why it is that some work or task starts as not being urgent but eventually becomes urgent because it’s left; the answer they gave me, as groups often do, is that bad planning caused it. Now, bad planning can be the cause of many problems in business – and in life generally – but planning is not the panacea it is often thought to be. There is much more to achieving a goal than just having a plan.

Think of a city, separated from lush farmland by a deep chasm. The inhabitants of the city gaze across the chasm and begin to ask themselves what it would be like to be able to use that farmland – to grow more food, perhaps different food. They get excited about the prospect of being able to expand out, even beyond the farmland and so they commission the city’s architect to design a bridge and when the design is complete they task the city’s builder with constructing it. Soon, the bridge is finished and the inhabitants of the city are crossing back and forth, happily using the produce of the new farmland to enhance their lives.

In a nutshell, this story describes the four stages of goal achievement – and the broader process of project management. After all, what is a goal if not a mini project?

Initiate

The first phase is to have the vision of what you want to achieve – in this case, spanning the chasm and using the farmland that’s currently just out of reach. In projects, this is where you get very clear about your end result, about what your stakeholders and key stakeholders want, about your criteria for success.

Plan

Having decided where you want to go, you have to work out how to get there – the architect’s blueprint for the bridge. In projects, this is where you set out clearly and logically how you will get from where you are now to the vision outlined in the Initiate phase. The plan can be for a beautiful and ornate bridge or a strict, utilitarian bridge – whatever your key stakeholders define for you as part of their vision.

Act

However, having a vision and a plan are vital but insufficient. You can have a great plan but it will be worthless if you don’t do anything with it. This stage is where we take action. We execute the plan – either building the bridge or working through our project plan, responding to events, reviewing our progress, adjusting where necessary, sticking with it

Complete

The hallmark of a project is that it must finish; goals are there to be achieved – at some point, you complete the bridge, you reach the end of the plan, the other side of the chasm. Here is where we learn the lessons from our project and assess the benefits of having completed it – did achieving the vision bring us all we hoped it would, what’s our vision for the future, how do we apply the lessons to our next project?

All four parts are essential to make up the project or the goal – failing to carry out any one of them will dramatically lessen your chances of success, now and in the future. Planning is important but it’s not enough: without a vision, a plan is vague and unfocussed; without action, a plan is just a useless piece of paper; without completion, we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our previous plans.

Blackberry Grumble

I recently bought a new Blackberry and I love it; I love being able to send and receive emails wherever I am. In fact, I’m in the odd position of wishing I received more emails, so I could use my Blackberry more. Before this starts turning into an advert for Blackberry, I have noticed an interesting side-effect of constantly being in touch. That little device, so shiny and glossy, with its flashing green light (oh, the thrill when it turns red because then I have a message) is a constant reminder that there are other things going on in the world – there is an “out there”, where things are happening and where people may, even now, be preparing to get in touch with me. As much as I love it, this Morrisian device – both beautiful and useful – is, I’ve begun to notice, something of a distraction.

Around forty years ago, researchers first discovered something they called “microexpressions” – tiny, mostly involuntary, and extremely quick expressions, often lasting for as little as one quarter of a second. These microexpressions were difficult to fake and gave real insight into whether the subject was telling the truth. It is possible that these microexpressions combine with the well documented phenomenon of perception without awareness to give us that “sixth sense” feeling we get sometimes, when we suspect that someone isn’t being totally honest or that something isn’t quite right.

Of course, in order to register the fact that something isn’t right, you have to be paying attention – to yourself and how you’re feeling, if nothing else. However, increasingly we seem to be paying less and less attention to what we’re actually doing. I’ve talked about this previously, when I mentioned the perils of multi-tasking and it strikes me that the more connected we are, the harder it is to be fully present in whatever it is we’re doing at any given moment because of that ever present distraction. And the less present we are, the more likely we are to miss things.

If you’re worried that this might be happening to you, try this experiment next time you have a day off. The night before, go round your house and cover up all the clocks. Turn off the computer, turn off the mobile and have a day without any screens or contact with the outside world – no TV, no radio, no internet. Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired. Really be present in whatever activity you’re doing and pay attention both to the task and to how you feel. You might be surprised by what you notice and please do let me know how you get on. In the meantime, I need to go – I’ve just noticed that the little red light is flashing...

Efficiency

The idea of efficiency has been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been doing some diagnostic work with a local authority in Scotland and their biggest challenge is the dramatic reduction in their budgets for next year. Their focus is on finding “efficiency savings” – continuing to provide the same (or better) services with less money and fewer resources. As I was writing this article, McKinsey suggested that the NHS should lose 130,000 jobs to save money while the government has responded that the necessary savings can be made through greater efficiency. It got me thinking: what is this thing we call efficiency?

Efficiency is, essentially, the ratio of output to input. It’s based on the idea that it is possible to reduce input whilst increasing output: in a business context, this usually means increasing outputs such as benefit and profits whilst reducing inputs such as effort and expenditure. Efficiency begins with having a very clear and sharp focus on what outputs are expected of you and gearing all of your activities towards that output. The less clear the expected or desired output, the less efficient the system is likely to be. Everyone in the system – and this is especially important in a complex system like an organisation – has to be aware of the desired outputs and then needs to have the autonomy to gear their efforts towards that output.

As organisations face increasing limitations on their resources (the forced reduction of their inputs) whilst stakeholders demand greater profits or provision of services (the forced increase of their outputs) they are driven to strive for greater efficiencies. While it may be a straightforward thing to set clear, unambiguous output targets for an organisation (or a division or team or individual) it’s vital to remember the system that has to produce those outputs is not a machine. It’s a collection of people and people are, largely, inefficient.

I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense but it’s a fact that we’re not geared to doing things in the most efficient way, all the time. We have our own quirks and foibles, our own ways of doing things, we have preferences, we do things through habit, and use our emotions and feelings to make decisions, rather than proceeding in a logical, rational, efficient manner. All of these things must have a knock-on impact on the quest for efficiency in business.

There’s conflict here as business seeks ever-greater efficiency from a system that, fundamentally, cannot deliver it. The trick, it seems to me, is to reach a balance between the efficiency needs of the organisation and the human needs of the people who populate the organisation. Great organisations will find that balance and thrive but there will also come a point where further efficiency savings are no longer possible because of the human needs and limitations of the people. What then?

You can't always get what you want

After my last post, an astute reader kindly pointed out that it required assertiveness in order to work on one thing at a time. That got me thinking about what assertiveness is and how you do it.

There are degrees of assertiveness beginning, obviously, with a basic assertion of what you want:

I need to leave at 5:30 this evening.

This feels a little bald, so we can be a little more empathic:

I understand that you’re really busy and would like my help but I do need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Sometimes, we need to be assertive because people try to break previous agreements; if that’s the case, you can point this out:

You said that if I finished the Johnson report by lunchtime, I could leave early. Now you’re saying that you need me to work late. I’d like to stick with our original agreement as I do need to leave at 5:30 this evening.

Alternatively, you can try to provoke some empathy from the person you’re speaking to, by describing the negative feelings that you will feel if they continue:

When you change your mind after we’ve agreed something, I feel upset and angry. I’d like us to stick with our earlier agreement as I need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Finally, you can include the consequences of the other person continuing to behave the way they are:

If you insist on making me work past 5:30 this evening, I’ll be so angry it’s unlikely that I’ll get any work done and it’ll harm the good working relationship that we normally have. I’d like us to keep to our earlier agreement as I do need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Notice that the central assertion of your needs – in this case “I need to leave by 5:30 this evening” – remains unchanged and is repeated each time; this is known as the “broken record” technique.

You can practice these different types of statement until you’re comfortable with the words but when it comes to assertiveness, what comes out of your mouth is less important than what goes on in your head. The American Declaration of Independence declares that the “pursuit of happiness” is an “unalienable right” and the language is very significant here. The Declaration doesn’t say that anyone has the right to happiness – just the right to pursue it and it’s the same with assertiveness.

As hard as it is to accept sometimes, no-one has the right to get whatever they want – but we do all have the right to ask for whatever we want. Truly believing this is the first step to being assertive.

One thing at a time

When I’m talking to delegates about time management, we inevitably come to the subject of multitasking. Once we’ve got past the jokes about men not being able to multitask and women being excellent at it we start to talk seriously about whether it’s either possible or even helpful.

Very often, delegates will boast of their ability to do two, three or more things at once – increasingly, they say they must multitask in order to stand any chance of doing all the things they need to do. Bear in mind that these are the same delegates who complain that they’re too busy and feel under stress, don’t have time to plan and so on. When I gently challenge them on their ability to multitask effectively, given the brain’s ability to focus on just one thing at a time, they’re adamant: they multitask and they’re good at it – it’s what keeps them afloat in the sea of work in which they’re nearly drowning.

It’s not just people with time management issues that do this. BIGresearch claims that 70% of media users consume more than one medium at a time: of those who are listening to the radio, 54% are also online, 47% are also reading a newspaper and 18% are also watching TV. The chances are you’re doing it now – scanning this article whilst listening to music, eating a sandwich, checking your emails and hiding from the boss!

There’s clearly a lot of it about but does multitasking actually help? Research released this week from Stanford University in the US would indicate that it doesn’t and there’s an interesting reason why. It would seem that the people who multitask the most are actually the people who are least able to multitask effectively. Not only do high multitaskers do poorly at multitasking, the more they do it the worse they get! Of course, this has a knock on effect on the quality of their work and the time it takes them to do it – probably prompting an even greater desire or perceived need to multitask.

It’s unclear whether poor multitaskers are more inclined to multitask or whether you get worse at multitasking the more you do it. Either way, I’m starting to build up my library of evidence supporting my theory that concentrating on one thing at a time is the quickest and most effective way to regain control of your time.