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Time is the great
equalizer for all of us. We all have 24 hours in a day, 7 days a
week, yielding 168 hours per week. Take out 56 hours for sleep
(we do spend about a third of our week dead) and we are down to
112 hours to achieve all the results we desire. We cannot save
time (ever have any time left over on a Sunday night that you
could lop over to the next week?), it can only be spent. And
there’s only two ways to spend our time: we can spend it
wisely, or, not so wisely.
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We can effectively increase the amount of time available to
us each week by working “smarter” rather than working
“harder”. In my twenty years as a full-time Professional
Speaker on the topic of Time Management, I have noted five sure
fire ways to make an immediate impact on increasing our
available time each week.
1.
Engage an intern. Most
high schools and community colleges offer intern programs for
their students. The student is assigned to a real-life
organization for 10-20 hours per week. They are typically unpaid
but do earn academic credit and make great contacts and the
organization gets an “extra pair of hands”. The person who
is assigned the intern can now delegate any number of things to
the intern to free up their time for more productive matters.
It’s a “Win-Win” deal for both.
2.
Run an Interruptions Log. It
would be great if we could plan our day the night before and
then make that plan happen as scheduled. The real world is
different. We have to deal with interruptions. Interruptions are
unanticipated events that come to us via the telephone (any of
the electronic stuff: beepers, pagers, email, etc.) or in
person. Many interruptions are important and are what we may be
paid to handle. However, many interruptions have little or no
value to our responsibilities. Run an Interruptions Log for
about a week. List every interruption as it occurs and rate its
value to you. A=Crucial, B=Important, C=Little value, D= No
value. After the week of logging them in, review the list and
take action to eliminate the repetitive C and D interruptions
and re-capture some wasted time.
3.
Run a Crisis Management Log. Crisis
management for the most part is when the deadline has snuck up
upon you and robbed you of choice, you have to respond and you
are a slave to the clock. Crisis management is generally poor
time management because you’re rushing, the quality of your
performance suffers, your stress level is elevated, and, most
important, you are often having to go back and re-do what was
done in the first place. “If you want to manage it, measure
it.” Run a Crisis Management Log for a week. After
encountering every crisis, log it in on a piece of paper. After
a week of accumulating the data, go back through every crisis
that occurred and ask yourself, “Which one of these could have
been avoided?” and start to take corrective steps to stop
their reoccurrence and buy back some “smarter” time for your
weeks ahead.
4.
Become a Speed Reader. The
average person reads about two hours per day at a rate of about
200 words per minute. (We get more information exposures in one
day today than people in the year 1900 received in a lifetime.)
Speed-reading is a simple skill that is easy to learn and
improves with consistent practice. The average person can easily
double their reading rate and thereby cut their reading time in
half or double the volume of reading material they can go
through in the same amount of time.
5.
Do Daily Planning. “A
stitch in time saves 9.” Every grandmother knows this. Every
minute of planning will save you nine minutes in execution. Walt
Whitman, the poet, said it best, “The most powerful time is
when we are alone, thinking about what we are to do.” Daily
Planning helps us to focus on what is really crucial and
important in our day to come and permits us to identify time
wasters in advance to avoid them and use that time more
productively.
About the Author:
Dr. Donald E. Wetmore
has been a full-time Professional Speaker for the last 20 years
having made over 2,000 presentations to audiences from around
the Globe. He is available to conduct his dynamic Time
Management Seminars at your location helping your people get
more done in less time, with less stress. Don’s programs are
entertaining, fast paced, and filed with practical, common sense
ideas. His seminars are typically rated as “the best I have
ever attended”. For more information, contact Don through his
web site at http://www.balancetime.com,
via email at: ctsem@msn.com
or call him at: (203) 929-9902.
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