Can We Really Manage Time?
We left off in the 2cnd of 3 Leadership Series with a great quote
from Robert Kaplan.
John Maxwell wrote a great new book
called Leadership Gold. If you have not read it yet, iet’s a must and
is on our recommended book list at www.chrisprefontaine.com. Let me give you one of the Chapter Titles:
“Don’t Manage Your Time – Manage Your Life”.
I thought this was a perfect time to insert this as we kick off this Leadership Series because it sets up a
foundation for us.
Two thoughts for you:
1.
Time is an equal opportunity
employer. Everybody gets 24 hours a day
but not everyone gets the same return on that same 24 hours.
2.
There is no such thing as time
management.
“But Chris, you’ve talked about time
management in the past.” I know I know – now it’s time to move
things to a deeper level!
See – time management is an
oxymoron. It can’t be managed. It can’t be controlled in any way. Regardless of what you do, it’ keeps moving
and this is regardless of whether or not you’re moving or standing still.
·
No one can save minutes to use tomorrow
·
No one, no matter how smart, can create
new minutes
·
No one, no matter how wealthy, can buy
additional hours
Do you every hear someone say “…I need
to find time to…”. Well, they should
stop looking shouldn’t they? There’s
none lying around. Ok, so if you cannot manage your time, what can you do?
Manage Yourself!
One
of the biggest things that separates successful people from the unsuccessful is
how they use their time. They know where
it goes, they constantly analyze it and they constantly ask themselves, “Am I
getting the best use out of my time?”
One of the signs I have in my office (on an index card) reads “IS WHAT I
AM DOING RIGHT NOW MOVING ME CLOSER TO MY GOALS?”
How
do you personally judge whether something is worthy of your time and
attention? Since we started out with
mentioning John Maxwell and many of my Leadership ideas come from him, below is
a system John uses – a three step procdss – to manage his time most
effectively. I have found it to be a
great check system:
Step
one: Rate the task in terms of
importance.
Critical
= 5 points
Necessary
= 4 points
Important
= 3 points
Helpful
= 2 points
Marginal
= 1 point
Step
two: Decide the task’s urgency.
This
month = 5 points
Next
month = 4 points
This
quarter = 3 points
Next
quarter = 2 points
End
of year =1 point
Step
three: Multipoly the rate of importance
times the rate of urgency. Example: 5
(critical) x 4 (next month) = 20.
This
will help you place your top 5-6 priorities in their place at all times.
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