Controlling your workload

Controlling the diary is a major stumbling block for time management. I’ve seen totally blank pages apart from the odd meeting yet the owner is rushed off their feet!

Here are 5 quick tips:-

1. Assign time for all your tasks, whether appointments or not.

2. Limit the number of people who can put things in your diary.

3. Limit when other people can book meetings in your diary and keep a note of when it suits you best to block off your diary for your personal tasks and what your typical day or week looks like when it suits you best.

4. Book one enjoyable thing in your diary each week, and savour the time you spend doing it: and remember you are able to enjoy this because you’re learning to follow a plan.

5. Block out as late as possible today, time equal to the amount of time you spent yesterday (or today last week if you prefer) over and above the total time you actually wanted to work.

Perhaps you worked late for one hour. Then say you need one hour today. You need this buffer until you get better at planning (or to take your typical interruptions.) If it turns out you don’t need it, then leave early or use the time constructively e.g to review how you’ve spent your time today, or to plan tomorrow, or to catch up on something you’re behind on (e.g. reading material)

What are your experiences?

The Secret’ was quite a phenomenon during 2007, with its way of expressing the Law of Attraction (If you haven’t been touched by it yet, see its official website.)

So I’ll be trying my personal version in 2008…..how about you?

Writing down my wants for 2008 - ones which I’m willing to take action towards and believe are attainable.Then dreaming a little: how will I behave in 2009 when I have them? And getting a good sense of this; what will I see, hear and feel? How does success taste (or smell)?

Then, starting to believe I’ve achieved them already and getting the same senses and feelings now. (I do urge acting responsibly as well… e.g my values say it’s not good to spend the money I haven’t earned yet!) This is about generating the response through mind, body and behaviour, to attract the desired outcome.

(Let’s see what happens regarding doubling 2007 income!)

Of course you’ve written your goals for 2008 by now! (Haven’t you?)
New Year resolutions are typically forgotten within a very short space of time. Maybe because they’re thought about in such a short space of time. Often they’re ideals and unrealistic in a practical sense. Or they’re wishes which don’t stand up to making an effort.

Let me encourage you to think about what has gone well, and what not so well during 2007, particularly from a workload perspective. What are the lessons learned for you? Can you amalgamate all those into one overriding lesson you’ve learned this year about what you need to change about handling your personal workload. How can you turn that into a resolution (or a goal) that has more meaning for you?

If you have set goals already, how does this new goal compare in terms of meaning and priority to you?

(Yes, I’ve done this already, having been encouraged by my coach and I’ll let you know how it goes! My resolution relates to keeping things simple, following my own advice and taking action, so blogs will be shorter!)

I’s the start of a new year and time set new goals based on our experiences of the 2007! I felt this blog needed a title that indicated a higher value benefit of being read and commented on, so the title/content of this blog is changing.

It was “Understanding Your Work Style - Improve your success potential by knowing yourself better”, aimed at helping you understand your unique way of working.

It will now be more oriented toward ways to improve the management of personal workload. Some advice may not suit your particular work style, so I look forward to comments on how you adapt the ideas.

What are you changing in 2008, based on your lessons learned during 2007?

I spoke about this engineering book, The Goal, in a previous post
To really improve one’s throughput, it is essential to see which tasks cause things to ‘pile up’. People can commonly think, when something isn’t getting done, it’s down to procrastination (or some other ‘time thief’).

Some closer analysis may be helpful! If you just don’t feel right about doing the task, could the process call for you to do something against your instinct or values? Or do you need more skills? Or are you scared of something? Or are you just giving this activity too little time in your schedule?

Assuming you’ve really got your overall goal really clear, and this task that isn’t getting done is essential to your throughput, maybe it’s time you took time out to really sort out what you need to do. Your overall performance depends on it!

Who else could do this?

How else could you do it?(What tools/skills do you need?)
What alternatives do you have?

What is this bottleneck really costing you in terms of your overall performance?

If you’re thinking there’s nothing you can do, and you’re willing to put up with your current performance, what does it say about you and your work style?

How dominated is your work-life by the effects of others?

Some clients feel a lot of frustration when seeing issues get in their way and use coaching sessions to work through how to deal with the impact; actions are taken to address and remove the frustration. Communication is very positive and clear.

Other clients seem to accept the frustration as a clamp on their capabilities and tend to get bogged down well before taking a decision on what to do; actions are focused more on recognising the symptoms and causes. Communication is fuzzy and actions to reflect on events can be uninspiring. Yet directive advice maintains their position in their own decision-making.

Babies have very clear communication: they need something they scream. Their communication is also fuzzy; the specific need is not obvious, and carers offer a process of elimination to deduce the need. Not everyone has the patience to tend to fuzzy communicators.

How can we condition people for clarity? Is it the same as conditioning children to be self-confident and clear about what they want, with less and less direction?

Having just been on holiday, I’ve had the chance to read something completely different. I chose a book from the background reading list given to my daughter, who is just about to start university: The Goal, a book about management thinking.

Specifically it is about the management of a manufacturing plant, which comes down to locating and exploiting bottlenecks in the system.

Perhaps a rather strange choice for a holiday read, but it is a written as a novel and rather enjoyable.

The improved analysis all became possible because the plant manager began to look at what was important for overall success. Throughput (sales), inventory (invested items that will be sold) and operating expense all needed to be balanced well for a successful plant. (Previously efficiency measurements had been taken on specific areas and as plant changes developed, the measurements hadn’t. Delivery times were always late, and expediters were always busy juggling tasks to rush orders through. Sounds similar to juggling personal workload when deadlines loom! )

As a result, the plant began to deliver on time and was able to take more orders due to more precise controls with less pressure, because plans weren’t being changed regularly. Wouldn’t it be nice to always to deliver on time with no pressure?
Relating this to personal workload style, I’m sure that how we balance long projects (more inventory?) and short projects (quicker throughput?), and whether we invest in developing ourselves or others we can ultimately delegate to (adding to operating expense?) needs to be tuned to our overall goal.

How do you decide your relative time spent on each of your activity types?

I would have to hold my hand up and say “yes” to this myself, knowing that there are some low priority things which I may well be late in doing, yet I’m not willing to give them up (maybe because it’s those I’ve placed at a higher priority that I’d have to give up on!).

It recently started to occur to me other people are not quite as aware of their own load and wonder why their peers/boss find it frustrating that a response rate can be lower than expected!

It has always felt right to me to know (and being doing) a lot of things a little rather than be a narrow expert and I’ve always loved this quote:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects”

I feel I’m doing pretty well in life according to Robert A. Heinlein , though I welcome offers to help me con a ship, will forget a couple of gruesome items, and I’m not quite ready to die yet!

When working on any one task, it’s good to be focused on it, for efficiency and success. When working with others on several tasks towards a goal, cooperation to deadlines starts to become important. Most of us have many tasks and cooperate with many different people, so the question is how to prioritise!

I once worked with someone who was fantastic at providing himself a buffer when giving status: saying he’d done X amount of work when actually he’d done X+Y. So, I endeavour to be clear about which task is my personal top priority at any one time and accept tight deadlines. As my personal priority decreases, there is an increase in buffering, and setting of others’ expectations, so my response rate lands in the right ball park!

If everyone else did this too, I’d want to work with those for whom my top priority is their top priority! Then who’d care about the number of spinning plates?
Shirley Thompson - The Desk Coach
Time Management and Motivation Specialist
Tel: 01425 480631

I was recommended to ‘understand my own psychology’ on a visualisation CD yesterday. (I don’t think the unusual summer sun had gone to my head!) What does that mean? OK, I’d love to spend more time on psychology study, but that’s not a priority! Presumably it just means the way we think about things, what makes us tick. I found it strangely encouraging that it reflected my blog title in that we are all different, unique.

If you currently feel you’re struggling, somehow not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, or just generally there’s something that’s difficult, maybe it’s just the way your brain works, what it’s used to thinking, how you formulate your opinions. Would it serve you better to think another way? Look at family, colleagues, peers, how do they deal with similar circumstances and think what you can learn from them, rather than say to yourself “I’m not like that”. We don’t always have to try hard to change our habits, to improve things; rather we can put more emphasis on our thinking.

Recently I came across an article in Psychology Today about disturbed sleep patterns. Encouragingly, it advised to relax and let the body right itself. There is a chance that your subconscious gets into the habit of thinking of the bedroom as the place to be awake!

Perhaps one view of ‘difficulty’ is that it’s the brain’s feedback control telling us to relax first of foremost. Then if we sense the existence of a bad habit, we can move to an alternate approach with more ease!

What aspects of you could it help to think differently about?

Shirley Thompson - The Desk Coach
Time Management and Motivation Specialist
Tel: 01425 480631

Not being a great talker, I often wonder at those who love to talk.
When I’m coaching people, there are those who will answer a question with a huge amount of detail and not easily get to the point and others who will say “don’t know” as an initial reaction (and of course a whole range in between!)

Recently someone said to me “it’s good to talk” and that made me stop in my tracks: was I encouraging too much talking because my natural tendency is to need to be drawn out to talk?
It’s said the ratio of listening to talking is naturally 2:1 because we have 2 ears and 1 mouth! What about you? Do you have enough people who’ll really listen to you, or would you value someone doing that while you talk?

I was brought up on the phrase ‘children should be seen and not heard’; hardly conducive to being prepared for being asked for an opinion on things and having something ready to say! Sometimes asking people what they think after “don’t know” works fine, because they just haven’t worked the pros and cons yet, but if you’ve not learned to list them, or brainstorm ideas, conversation can be slow-going.

(I would recommend Toastmasters for working up an opinion on things: we talk about all sorts of topics in Bournemouth and every meeting there is a chance to speak ‘off the cuff’ for 1-2 minutes, not to mention listening to others’ opinions through their speeches.)
Shirley Thompson - The Desk Coach
Time Management and Motivation Specialist
Tel: 01425 480631