Time is the only commodity that we cannot get more of. We can make more money; we might get another chance at something, but we will NEVER get back the time that we lost. This is why it is SO important that we focus on utilizing our time wisely and not letting it get away from us.
Listen in as we talk about some tips for time management that can make a difference in your personal and professional life and how a few tweaks to what you’re doing now can make such a difference in the long term!
The “It’s the Bottom Line that Matters” podcast is all about providing entrepreneurs and seasoned business executives with actionable nuggets that can be used to immediately help grow their business. Ideas ranging from marketing solutions to strategy, finance, and more.
Jennifer Glass, Daniel McCraine, and Patricia Reszetylo share their combined years in business, knowledge, and skills to help small businesses thrive because it’s the bottom line that matters!
Time is the only commodity that we cannot get more of. We can make more money; we might get another chance at something, but we will NEVER get back the time that we lost. This is why it is SO important that we focus on utilizing our time wisely and not letting it get away from us.
Listen in as Jennifer, Daniel, and Patricia talk about some tips for time management that can make a difference in your personal and professional life and how a few tweaks to what you’re doing now can make such a difference in the long term!
#timemanagement #skills #personaldevelopment #growth
Transcript (auto-generated; may contain errors)
Welcome to another episode of “It’s the Bottom Line that Matters” podcast. On today’s program, we are going to be talking about time management.
Yes, you heard that right you’re listening to this podcast and you using your time so listen to this podcast, but you’re actually managing your time well because you’re learning something as you’re going through what you’re trying to do to get you that success, and that edge that you’re looking for in your business. So there’s so many different people that talk about time management so many different statistics so many different programs so many different ways of looking at it.
That Daniel, Patricia and I thought that we should chime in, at a little bit of our own ideas and input in terms of what we do, how we manage our time to make it better for you as you’re listening and learning to know how to improve your time management skills as well. So, Daniel Patricia, let me open you guys up when you’re looking at, time management, there’s been so many things out there that, like we said, talk about time management.
What are some of the biggest ideas that you have come across that really make a difference when it comes time for managing your time.
Jennifer let me chime in here and I’ll kind of set the stage for how we’re going to talk about time management because in this could be all over the board we can talk about all kinds of things for time management, and we’ve got episodes out there about how to manage your tasks how to delegate, all those kinds of things. So let’s not throw that in the mix today about time management. Let’s talk instead about, you know, I’m going to talk for a moment here about how do you manage your calendar, how do you manage the time that you have in a day to the maximum efficiency. So one of the things that I want to throw out there right now that I talked with a lot of my clients about some leadership clients some business owner clients is this idea of an open door policy, you know that used to be the rage in management back in the day is, I just want to be available for all my team members and I want to be an approachable, kind of a boss or leader, whatever you want to say.
So I’m just going to have an open door policy, you can come in and talk to me anytime you want to, well what happens though is we know that that causes distractions and sometimes multiple times a day.
We also know from research that, unfortunately, you know, here I’m going to burst somebody bubble, but for those of you out there who say oh I’m a multitasker I can do multiple things at the same time, the research says, No, actually, you can’t. And in fact, every time you’re distracted from being in the flow and being productive, it takes you a full 20 minutes to reestablish the flow that you were in.
We also know that research shows the number of distractions that happen, per hour and per day is pretty significant. And when you put the two of those together what we find out is.
Anytime you’re distracted you basically lose an entire day of productive work. So, it’s fine to have open office hours when you want people to say, yeah, if you’ve got things you want to talk to me about come see me between these times but when I close the door and say that I’m focusing and I’m in the flow and working on something, I’m, I mean it unless the buildings on fire and about to follow my head. Don’t interrupt this time!
Don’t interrupt this time, unless it’s going to burn down quantifies. You’re right in terms of the time I mean when you have, I actually heard it was closer to 45 minutes to regain your train of thought. But as it relates to getting interrupted though exactly one of my coaches actually goes at one two o’clock in the morning even, and especially when he was going out to Las Vegas all the time. He was sitting outside by the pool at one two in the morning because nobody was out there, and that was his uninterrupted time to be getting a whole lot done, and even in the summer at least it’s not so hot at that hour. It’s a cool 80 degrees. So, it’s comfortable a lot more, but whatever putting that aside because again we’re losing track of time. But, Patricia Let me ask you, so what were some of the things that stood out for you in terms of time management some of the skills that you got in terms of where you are and what you share with people.
Well I found that I have to put everything on my calendar, not just, you know, So I found that I have to exercise. It’s not just Oh, that’s a good thing to exercise no I have to exercise these days. So I actually put it on my calendar because if I wait for an empty spot that empty spot is going to get taken over by, whatever. So I have it on my calendar. Every day, exercise, and lunch. And, you know, so there’s that. And I know we said we weren’t going to talk about outsourcing but I am actually getting into outsourcing now, because there’s just too much stuff to do. And they would really rather not spend my time building what pages are doing super nice graphics I can do graphics it’s just, it’s clunky, There’s people who do it so much, deterred idea.
Absolutely. And sometimes that is involved in your time management like Daniel was saying earlier in terms of things that we spoke about in the past with tasks and things along those lines just prioritizing what you need to do. And it was funny when you were talking earlier about. Oh I know I completely lost my train of thought. Your time filling up as Daniel reminds us very often. I forget the name of the principal right now but your time basically sells out to amount for anything that is going to end on your plate. So there’s a lot of those things that do come up and you’re right. I got and that was another thing that I got from one of my coaches, is that even the trip to the grocery store, to Costco or beach days or Sam’s Club whatever it is that you’re doing needs to be in your calendar. Because then you see exactly what you’re doing in terms of what you’re trying to do and I like how you mentioned, even lunches in there. I used to have my Amazon unit I’m not going to say her name at the moment just because she’s going to start talking and you really don’t need to hear her talk, but she used to have a routine for me, that every day at lunchtime she would say okay get up, go for lunch take a break and, you know, that was a way to remind me to actually eat. I disabled and, well, to my peril because I haven’t eaten lunch I don’t know what how long on a regular basis. Certainly not away from my desk, but when
It’s Parkinson’s Law. That’s what it is Jennifer it’s one work expands to fill the time allotted for what you’re referring to
Yeah, Parkinson’s Law. Thank you, Daniel. Parkinsons. I should remember that because my grandfather had Parkinson’s, but that’s a whole other issue.
But when we’re thinking about what it is that we’re doing though with time management, with all of these ideas and issues that come to us with time management, a lot of those issues. Really do come down to, what are we prioritizing in terms of our time. And how are we doing it, and how on target, are we with time.
One thing that I like saying and I’ve shared this many times is time and your brain are really elastic. And what I mean by that is think about in this perspective. If you have one hour to go to the market and get dinner or you’re not going to have dinner tonight and the Cable Guy is coming in an hour. So you can’t dilly dally in the market, your brain and time seemed to manage to get what you need done in the market. Within that hour. Whereas, if you have two hours, as Daniel pointed out with Parkinson’s Law, being in the market for two hours is completely possible now. It also happens to be Murphy’s Law. Let’s be real here. You know that there’s going to be a major snowstorm coming or some hurricane coming up the coast where you are and everyone is in the store buying milk, eggs and bread because they have to make french toast during the major storm. I don’t know everyone seems to do that but again we’re going away from time management. But the point is, though, is that, if you think about time and your brain and that elastic setting, you can get a lot more done, if you really only have a shorter finite time, as opposed to having more time available.
One of the things I normally work with my clients on when I help them with time management is I make it so that they realize time can be broken down into three chunks, Monday, Tuesday is a chunk, Wednesday, Thursday is a chunk Friday Saturday Sunday is another chunk.
Each of those chunks get broken down into 20 minutes, minutes sessions. So that way as you’re looking at what it is you’re trying to do with your day, you now can say how long should a particular test Take me, if I have to go to the market, and I’m willing to put an hour in there. I take three of those 20 minute chunks and I put that in there. And whatever I don’t do on Monday, I’ve got Tuesday that I can do it because you never use that second set as the additional time because that’s the roll over just in case your kids school calls, someone knocks on the door the phone keeps ringing clients are going off the bat. We’ve all had that we’ve all been there, and issues come up. Just before we started recording my father called me, and I had to tell him I’m jumping on a meeting, I gotta go I don’t have time to be dealing with what it was that he wanted to discuss. And so all of these issues, tend to pop up and we need to have the time to really manage that. And so, I really want you to go back listen to the last couple of moments, because that’s where thousands of dollars that my coaching clients paid. Think about that.
So, what else Daniel or Patricia, what stands out to you guys, as it relates to time management as we look at wrapping up because like you said, there’s so much out there anything that we can give our listeners with that they can get back to time?
And we’re being very focused on the amount of time that were taken from them so far today.
Well one of the things that I find it annoys me but annoys really too strong of a word. It worries me maybe that’s a better way to say it is how my task list just keeps growing and growing and growing my to do list just keeps longer.
So one thing I’ve started doing for myself and I’ve started, suggesting to my clients as well, is while we’re time blocking all those important things throughout the week that we want to take care of.
I’ve also started blocking just 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon to do those, just do it now, kind of tasks. Those things that come up, it’s important that it’s on my mind. I’ve got to take care of this it’ll take me 30 seconds to get it done. But I’m not going to interrupt my flow right now, it goes on my list and then when I get my 30 minute work on tasks on my calendar, then that’s one of those quick hit just do it, that I get done I find I can get 10 or 20 things done and just 30 minutes, those little, just do it kind of tasks.
“Eat That Frog” as Brian Tracy so aptly calls it, so it’s exactly that idea.
Patricia, Yeah.
Just the biggest thing that’s that’s happened for me, you know, has been, you know, walking out room for my exercise and my eating.
And just, you know, you think it’s a mundane thing that you can just kind of fit in anywhere and if you’re you know driven and ambitious like me you end up piling more and more on your plate, metaphorically speaking. Maybe you get more plates to juggle whatever however it works but, you know, especially if something’s important. Then you got to put it on your calendar because as I said can get moved off.
And there’s definitely a lot that we can do in terms of looking at it in that perspective and just making sure that what we’re doing is really going to be focused on how do we remain on task.
And what we’re trying to do and like you said stepping away from your desk every now and then just to I mean one of the things for me with my Fitbit is to get up and move every hour, and it’s good, it helps me not stay in the same place. Sometimes it doesn’t always work the way that you want it to. But sometimes it’s going to really make sure that you are sticking to your plan and like you said earlier with exercise, you’ve got that. And so, as we’re thinking about what it is that you’re doing with your own time management, really pay attention to the tasks that you can outsource we’ve spoken about that many times before and we’re not going to go deeper into that right now.
Think about also those commitments that you are making, and also think about those time suckers that their time vampires. That seems to get in the way. Use your phones. Do Not Disturb mode, Android, and iPhones. Both have those Do Not Disturb mode. Close Facebook during the day. Close your email during the day have certain hours that are dedicated to checking email, dealing with Facebook and all of those other things. That way, those time sucks are not going to be some of the issues that are going to be holding you back,
Until next time, this has been another episode of “It’s the Bottom Line that Matters” and here’s to your success.
