Time Management Today

Time Management Extremes: Super Bloggers

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When we review our time management challenges and lament the lack of free hours, we find the cause is often technology.  This productivity issue jumped out in the Marketplace section of this week's "Wall Street Journal" with the heading No Day at the Beach: Bloggers Struggle With What to Do About Vacation."

The dilemma focused on those bloggers with huge audiences, 67,000 to 200,000 unique visitors who are loyal to the one person writing the entries.  Even having a guest writer take over caused drops of a third or more. 

Now, on the one hand, so many of us writing blogs would love to have large audiences; but at what point is it too much?  Only 10% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours a week on their writings.  However to garner that tally of unique visitors one obviously is devoting many hours per day.  This then interferes with vacations and even weekend jaunts. 

Success is great, and today many of us are pumped on adrenaline throughout the day.  However there is going to be a price for that in the long term.  Our bodies were not designed to be on a "flight or fight" alert all day.  Immune systems wear down.  Illness creeps in.

What have you found to be your biggest challenges with technology?  What coping mechanisms have you been able to put in place to deal with continuing demands throughout your days?

Reclaiming a Home Office--Who Has the Time?

As summer wraps up, those of you who work from a home office and also have school-age children are probably eagerly anticipating being able to change your time management strategies and increase your office productivity.  Having children around requires a great deal of multitasking.  Daily business also requires a great deal of multitasking.  The combination definitely equals stress.

Once the children are back in school you expect some relief.  But then reality sets in and you are looking at backlogs of filing as well as overflowing inboxes, both paper an electronic.  Your children get to make a fresh start every year.  How often do you manage to totally clear the decks and begin again?

Organizing often gets put on the back burner because it seems there are more important things to do. Even though you rarely have free time, it is still the best practice to set aside one or two days and create some new systems before plunging into the next season of work.  You will quickly recoup any hours that you devote to getting organized now.  The alternative is working from a backlog that continues to nag at you, creates guilt at not getting it all done, and then builds up more stress.

Take the time now to make a fresh start.  What strategies have helped you that could benefit others who are currently struggling with this seasonal backlog and change?

Space Management Improves Time Management

One simple technique to improve time management processes is to locate items where you will use them.  Doesn't that sound simple?  Yet how often to you forget to do this?  And how often does this add stress to your life?

The importance of this system begins to manifest itself from early childhood.  Parents complain about children's toys being scattered around the house.  The reality is that the toys will be wherever the main action is in the house, regardless of how neatly a distant playroom may be set up.  A better time management and space management system would be to arrange a location for the toys where they will actually be used rather than constantly returning them to the out-of-the-way spot that the child does not play in. 

Adults work on the same principal.  Have you ever spent time hunting for your keys because they weren't where you could grab them on your way out the door?

The same situation applies in the office.  What materials do you use on a daily basis?  Keep those close to you.  What do you use on a weekly basis?  --On a monthly basis?  The more frequently you use something, the closer you want it to be.  Every time you get up to find the 3-hole punch you are sharing with your group, you are taking valuable minutes and also creating an interruption, both for yourself and those around you.

No one has extra minutes, or hours, to spend unnecessary time on "traveling" to a designated spot when that area could be positioned in the vicinity of where you would most likely use something.  Make sure your workspace and your home are designed so that you can easily reach what you need frequently.  It is worth the effort to group items according to their use.  Save time now and eliminate some of the stress brought on by having too much to do.  Simple space management skills will improve time management processes.

Stepping Back in Time

So many people reminisce about the "good old days."  Those good old days might only be a few decades ago.  Could it be that we wax nostalgic because everything was simpler?  You didn't see homes drowning in material possessions, and most people actually stayed away from business activities on the weekends.  People 50 years ago probably were not better time managers but the sense of urgency and overload was muted because information traveled at a slower pace and didn't follow you into restaurants and on vacations.

Last week I left Houston and went back to visit family in New York.  We lived in Manhasset on Long Island, just two towns outside of Queens.  For me, this is a stepping back in time.  The house I lived in from 8th grade on is still owned by my stepfather.  He had finally conceded and put in two window air conditioners.  However they were never turned on while I was there.  Although the temperature didn't go above 90 degrees, the humidity was pretty high.  For him that is bearable, versus the cost of electricity for running them.  It's not a question of money, but training instilled from early childhood to spend only for what you must have.  He figures I'm from Houston so I should be able to handle the heat.  Of course, in Houston there are sometimes only a few minutes a day that we are not climate-controlled. 

The second stepping back in time that I noticed was how many businesses in this little but very upscale town have been around since 1960 and earlier.  With small companies swallowed up by bigger companies, which in turn are swallowed up by the biggest companies, it is comforting to see familiar names on the stores along the main street.  They may have changed ownership, but the facades still sport those names, none of which are a chain.  I felt really good every time I could point out that this store or that store has been here all along.  There is a continuity.  I can "go home" and find that many things remain the same.  On the other hand, I miss the stores that have changed along the way.  I want them to be there for me.

What is missing today?  I think we still want roots and a sense of belonging over time--things that we often fail to establish  with our mobile and increasingly isolated society.  I also see how many of my clients want to and need to escape from the relentless demands on their time.  There is so much going on now that it's tough to stay current and still take a break.  Oh, for the "good old days"....or at least the occasional trip back in time.

Organizing for Travel

Packing for a trip should get easier the more often you do it.  If you want to be very organized when traveling, you can even use checklists for each trip.  Yet I find that the more organized I am, the more I pack because I'm trying to envision every possibility.  How many times do you wish you had brought along something additional? 

This happened in packing for my Las Vegas trip this week.  The temperature was averaging 107 degrees, and I was not doing any presenting to groups.  It was strictly an informal trip. How simple is that for packing?  "Small" outfits for torrid desert temperatures seemed fitting.  That was fine until I stepped into our hotel.  I think we had the coldest hotel in town.  The dining areas were really frigid, especially the buffet.  It must have been geared to ensure that there was no lingering. 

That first evening I was scouting out the junk souvenir shops wondering if they had a cheap sweatshirt.  I certainly didn't need another one and didn't want to invest much in it but was rethinking the way I had packed, wishing I had jeans and sweaters despite the 107 degrees.

With almost every indoor venue being climate-controlled, it has become so much more difficult to pack for traveling--or even to just go out for dinner.  While the outside temperature may not vary much, that switch from indoors to outdoors makes it hard to know what to bring along.  This can occur in any season.

One definition of being organized is being ready for any opportunity.  Adapting this definition to replace "opportunity" with "situation" can certainly lead to more packing.  Who is actually more organized--the one with the small duffel bag or the larger suitcase?

"A Stitch in Time..."

The old saying was, "A stitch in time saves nine."  Recently I did something on two separate occasions with regard to shopping expeditions that would validate this statement. From a time management point of view, I had meant to save time but instead ended up turning an extra five minutes into additional trips consuming more than an hour each.

The issue was trying on clothes, deciding which to purchase, heading for the cash register, and being sidetracked by another item--impulse buying.  I would add that new item to my soon-to-be purchases.  Instead of going back and trying this new piece on, I decided it should be fine. I really didn't want to spend the time returning to the dressing room and trying on one more thing--another five minutes. I continued to the cash register, paid for everything, and then after I got home found that there were problems with the last items that I couldn't have noticed without actually trying them on.

Each time I had to find another day to head back to the store and return the last pieces I had chosen and not tried on because I didn't want to take the time--five minutes versus the hour that needed to be scheduled to get to the store again.

On top of this, I am not a shopper, contrary to the female image.  Shopping chores rank at the bottom of my favorite things. I definitely qualify as a "kamikazee shopper" for the most part.  I have my list, I head straight to those places, and I'm out as fast as I can.  That may be part of the reason I didn't want to take the time to try things on twice.  Yet what a time savings that would have turned out to be!

As a productivity consultant, I started thinking about how many things we do every week that have the same result, both at work and in our personal lives--for instance, ignoring a small drip in the ceiling when it rains and then ending up with a flooded room and major bills. It's tough too fit everything in we want to do.  Organizing and prioritizing our daily routines do help with this.

Can you think of anything you neglected that would have taken a few minutes at first but then turned into a major project?  What can you do now that will only take a short while and save you more time later?

Right vs Left Brains in Tracking Time

Destination: Organization is the title of my new book, due out in the next month. This has been one of my priorities for 2006.  While the overall process has been smooth, one part did accent the differences between right-brained and left-brained dominating personalities. 

At the start, after working with Barbara Hemphill, author of the "Taming the Paper Tiger" series as well as other publications, who had said that one thing she has always regretted was giving up control of her first book, I decided to follow the independent publishing route by using a book facilitator to handle all the details involved, such as finding editors, illustrators, printers, deciding on the type, format, etc.  This way I got to have the creative input and final decisions but do not have to spend time finding the right connections.

Several people who had already gone through the book authoring and publication process told me that the hardest part comes after you have written the book.  While I may not agree with that, it does take a lot of additional time to go from manuscript to publication.  This effort definitely comes under the heading of project management.  Because my daily focus is on time management, when someone gives me a date that they will be submitting a design to me, I fully expect to see it on that day, or at least hear that there is a delay.  When the day(s) go by without messages or returned calls, it's frustrating. I can handle delays, or a slowdown in the creative process, but I would like to be advised. Otherwise I'm wondering if something happened, and the project is off. This is not the first time I've worked with gifted, creative people who juggle multiple projects within their own time frames, and frequently changes dates for work promised. 

I recognize that I'm dominant left-brained. I might be booked for a speaking engagement a year in advance, so I know where I'm headed most of the time. Yet I'm very flexible when clients have a need to rebook a date because I know there's so much going on in everyone's lives.

The end is in sight for the wrap-up of the project, and it is actually on target for what I projected in January, which is an August publication date.  I did figure in the little delays, but that does not make it any less difficult when you try to coordinate pieces of projects. While I really like the work my illustrator did with the book, I would be hesitant to recommend him to others because of the frustration due to the lack of communication in keeping me advised of where he was on the project.   

What are your experiences as a dominant right- or left- brained person dealing with the opposite in a business situation?