It’s coming – no matter how you try and stave it off, the new year will be here in 27 days.
That means a number of things to a number of people; budgets, performance appraisals, sales targets are just some of the items that are lurking just beyond that January 1 holiday. How to get on top of it?
Start by listing all the items you know are due in the first weeks of the new year. Now start to plan when you will get them accomplished. Take out the calendar, look at the weeks ahead. Wow, already pretty packed right? That’s the problem with trying to get much of anything done during the month of December.
Nevertheless push on. Book in 2 – 3 hour blocks to accomplish those tasks due in the first couple of weeks. On your list of things to do, make a note of all the bits that need to be accomplished in addition to just getting the work done. Is there information you need to gather? Book time with your staff for performance appraisals? Pull together the sales reports? Now get these items booked in the calendar.
Smile and look forward to the New Year knowing your new year tasks are booked and ready to be tackled.
Archive for Time Management – Page 5
This post idea came from my 14 year-old-will-definitely-conquer-the-world daughter. She felt that my readers would need some help getting through the holiday season. Since today is the second day of December, I will cover off two items.
25. Prepare your exhaustive gift list. Make sure everyone you will need to prepare a gift for is on the list so that you avoid any last minute surprises that could have been anticipated. Note on the list what needs to be bought, what you already have and what needs to be made.
24. Check your December calendar and ensure that it is up to date with all the social commitments you have for the month. Make sure it includes any items that you need to take to those social commitments. Book in the time to make/purchase the items you will be taking. Find out who is cooking the Christmas dinner that you will be attending. Is it you?
And you thought you could duck under the radar screen! Sorry my friend, upon review of the posts this year I realized it has been a long time since I confronted the big, ugly enemy of procrastination. Are you a procrastinator? (“Oh yeah” – I can hear you whisper under your breath.)
You are wondering why and what you can do about it? The following list is an adaptation from the book Making Time Work for You, by the Time Guru himself, Harold L. Taylor.
- A procrastinator’s view of time is distorted. With 2 weeks before the due date, you think yo have lots of time to get that report finished. The reality is, no where in those two weeks do you have the 9 hours of time free to actually finish the report. The solution: as soon as you know the report is due – book in the time to complete it. Now book in extra time since we both know it will take twice as long as you think it will.
- A procrastinator is often a perfectionist. The perfectionist is often afraid to start something for fear it won’t be perfect. The solution: get started to that you have lots of time to make it good enough which is much closer to perfect than not done at all.
- A procrastinator often sees tasks as overwhelming. Solution: just do it. Start with any small piece of the project even if it is just five minutes. Break the rest of the project down into bite size pieces that you can manage.
- A procrastinator is often someone who thrives on the adrenaline of crisis and deadlines. If you work in the publishing industry you likely have a busy, rewarding life. For the rest of us, it is important to understand that always running late is inefficient, disorganized and often problematic for everyone else around you. Solution: learn to get your adrenaline kick by getting the project done early.
- A procrastinator is often just plain disorganized. Some individuals avoid starting projects because they are too disorganized to arrange the information and material they need to get it done. In the meantime, they are still scrambling to find the information and material for the previous project or report which is late. Solution: plan ahead. Plan your year, months, weeks and days by blocking time to accomplish your goals and projects.
And you thought you could duck under the radar screen! Sorry my friend, upon review of the posts this year I realized it has been a long time since I confronted the big, ugly enemy of procrastination.
Are you a procrastinator? (“Oh yeah” – I can hear you whisper under your breath.) You are wondering why and what you can do about it? The following list is an adaptation from the book Making Time Work for You, by the Time Guru himself, Harold L. Taylor.
- A procrastinator’s view of time is distorted. With 2 weeks before the due date, you think yo have lots of time to get that report finished. The reality is, no where in those two weeks do you have the 9 hours of time free to actually finish the report. The solution: as soon as you know the report is due – book in the time to complete it. Now book in extra time since we both know it will take twice as long as you think it will.
- A procrastinator is often a perfectionist. The perfectionist is often afraid to start something for fear it won’t be perfect. The solution: get started to that you have lots of time to make it good enough which is much closer to perfect than not done at all.
- A procrastinator often sees tasks as overwhelming. Solution: just do it. Start with any small piece of the project even if it is just five minutes. Break the rest of the project down into bite size pieces that you can manage.
- A procrastinator is often someone who thrives on the adrenaline of crisis and deadlines. If you work in the publishing industry you likely have a busy, rewarding life. For the rest of us, it is important to understand that always running late is inefficient, disorganized and often problematic for everyone else around you. Solution: learn to get your adrenaline kick by getting the project done early.
- A procrastinator is often just plain disorganized. Some individuals avoid starting projects because they are too disorganized to arrange the information and material they need to get it done. In the meantime, they are still scrambling to find the information and material for the previous project or report which is late. Solution: plan ahead. Plan your year, months, weeks and days by blocking time to accomplish your goals and projects.
This is a follow up from my earlier post on Organizing with Depression. Holiday time can be, for many, many people far from a joyful celebration of anything. For many people it becomes an overwhelming time of year that they learn to dread and fear. Celebrating holidays both and home and in the business environment comes with many expectations that some people simply can not meet. Does this sound familiar and contribute to your feelings of overwhelm? Hlidays come with:
- extra food that maybe you have been trying to avoid all year to loose weight
- expectations of gift giving that maybe you can’t afford or don’t have the energy to arrange
- visits with family that perhaps aren’t your favourite friends
- multiple distractions (lunch/parties/people collecting for gifts) at the office interrupting attempts to put together projections for next year
Whatever contributes to your blue mood and feelings of overwhelm, the first step is to acknowledge the problem. Next take a good look at what you can control and what you can’t. Can’t avoid the office party? Can you control the length of time you are there or whether or not you nap before hand to ward off fatigue and frustration. With the downturn in the global economy, gift giving is going to be a very serious financial trial for many, many people. Can you pear down your list? Consider making a contribution to a charity in lieu of sending gifts to clients – then send them a card that discribes your gift on their behalf.
Take back control of what you can. It will help that blue be a little more rosy.
In you live in the northern hemisphere, north of about 60 degrees, you have contemplated at some point putting snow tires on your car. If you live in the southern hemisphere, south of about the same latitude or in the mountain ranges of other continents, you have also contemplated snow tires and maybe have chains to go with them.
Now since changing tires, like checking the oil, is a regularly occurring event, why is it that many of us end up in the “tire queue”, with coffee and newspaper – for several hours – after the first snow fall each year to get those tires put on?. You would think we didn’t know that winter was coming!
Ok, now for everyone in any hemisphere who owns a car – snow tires or otherwise:
- Open your calendar.
- Mark in the next date your car service is due.
- Mark in the date your car service is due after that and every date to the end of the year (2009).
- Go to November 7 (May for the folks down under)
- Mark down “Change car tires”.
- Close calendar.
- Smile!
Adjust the dates if you are a little farther north. The point is that next year you will be in a short queue and have the tires changed before the snow. You will be organized, smiling and taking that coffee and newspaper to your son’s hockey rink/daughter’s dance class and enjoy his/her game/practice. Enjoy!
When I was a student, no one carried an agenda. When I entered the business world, everyone carried a day planner. Nowadays, many school boards create day planners or agendas for the students in their schools. Many day planner publishing companies provide planners targeted specifically for students.
Trying to get a student to use a day planner is a much harder task than just finding one to use. If, however, a student can learn to use the tool on a regular basis they will also learn it is a powerful tool to stay organized and give their brain a break from having to keep a lot of schedule and due date information. Here’s some tips to help get your student on top of their agenda:
- Have the student enter into the day planner all the regular activities in their week such as hockey practice, soccer, dance or band practice.
- Have them enter in all the irregular schedule items such as holidays, band concerts or vacations. Most of these items are booked many months in advance and are available from the program organizer.
- Encourage them to write in all their friends’ and family members’ birthdays. Why? Often there will be parties booked around these dates and with the dates booked in the agenda a student can anticipate a gathering of friends or family around the birthday date. With the heads up on their agenda, they can also budget their funds if they wish to go out to celebrate a friend’s birthday.
- Encourage them to keep the agenda with them in their back pack or hand bag at all times. Then it will be available for reference when the opportunity to babysit comes up or when a party invitation arrives.
If you are in the habit of holding meetings, make sure you commit to using and sticking to an agenda. Make the purpose of the meeting clear along with the time you expect that objective to take. If necessary, time out the items on the agenda to ensure you and your meeting participants keep to the time allotted for the meeting. Keep this a habit and people will be happy to attend meetings that you chair.
Simple concept isn’t it: be prepared. If you were a Boy Scout or Girl Guide, you would have memorized this motto along the way somewhere.
In application to business and time organization, the concept is no different. The more you can prepare ahead of time, the more relaxed, organized, polished and professional will be your presentation and performance. By preparing your material ahead of time, and confirming everything is ready in advance, you will also be able to avoid most technical hangups, forgetting things, or other people forgetting things.
Because you are a professional business person, your dates are already carefully mapped out on your daytimer right? Good. Now schedule in preparation time well in advance. Finally, follow up by scheduling in time, no later than the day before, to confirm that everything and everyone is in place. Now you can relax.
So often we struggle with those not-so-fun tasks that every job, business, company can claim. If you work in a SOHO it might be organizing your receipts to send to the book keeper. Oh, you do your own book keeping and the receipts are still in a box/envelop/pile on the desk?
Here’s a strategy for tackling that not-so-fun chore: schedule, subdivide into bites, conquer.
Start by scheduling some time to tackle the job. Without a Level 10 Intention, its not going to happen. By scheduling time on the calendar, you can at least get your intention close to 10.
Next divide the project into bites, something you can chew without choking. Maybe start by sorting the receipts into months and filing them into separate envelopes one for each month. Already separated? Try dividing or labelling them into your expense categories. Can’t find the receipts? There’s you first bite: spend the scheduled time collecting all the receipts you can find in your office and put them into envelopes, one for each month of the year. (Try an accordian file and you don’t need to worry about labelling the envelopes!).
Too often we fail to accomplish a task because it never gets scheduled into our calendars. Other bits and pieces of our business gobble up the day, the week, the month. If the task is an unpleasant or difficult one and you are procrastinating as a result, you probably find yourself doing almost anything else than sitting down to tackle it. Schedule a date with yourself to take it down.
