Time Management Factors

Many people complain that they do not have enough time and can never get caught up. I want to share something with you that you might not expect.

 “You will never have enough time for everything no matter how hard you try.”

BEING BUSY IS A GOOD THING

As long as you are in the workforce, work will keep coming your way. If you are adding any value at all to your business, every time you walk through the door of your workplace a new challenge will be waiting. The first step to time management is to accept that you will never get everything done and embrace it as symptom of success rather than a symbol of failure or poor performance.

People who are always caught up and not busy at work usually become redundant fairly quickly and you don’t want to be one of those.

MANAGE YOUR TIME

In order to better manage your time for maximum efficiency, you must understand and admit to yourself that the problem is not a shortage of time...it is ineffective use of time!

The most successful people manage their time effectively, and then take action to accomplish more every day.  Good time managers have a laser-sharp focus on their work and an abundance of energy to get it done.

If you are constantly distracted from your work by outside, intervening forces, you will never manage your time effectively.

If you are lacking in energy and find your work to be drudgery or just too much to handle, you will never get ahead.

When you are often pulled away from the task at hand you will find yourself in a constant state of crisis management which can lead to misdirected action and burnout. If everything around you seems to be going wrong, you need to evaluate why you are being distracted from your real work. It could be that you are being affected by old prejudices, bad influences from co-workers or a lack of clear direction. Anything that distracts you from your primary tasks must be eliminated if you want to enjoy good time management.

If you find yourself having constant interruptions from co-workers or family members that are not directly related to your immediate task, ask them to wait until a more appropriate time. I must repeat that time management requires focus and you cannot focus if you are paying more attention to other people than you are to your own job.

KEEP YOUR ENERGY LEVELS UP

If you find yourself being regularly short of energy, you must evaluate what is causing it, and then do something about it.

Low energy levels can be physiological or emotional. I would recommend that if you are tired all the time, you talk your doctor to rule out any sort of medical condition. If your health is good and you are still lacking in energy, you need to consider whether your lethargy is a result of family matters, personal problems, or a lack of engagement in your work.

When you have low energy levels and low focus, you will procrastinate and show up in body alone. You will hesitate to take initiative to get things done...often until it is too late. It is possible that your procrastination is a result of having little or no belief in your own abilities, perhaps you have a fear of failure, or maybe you have had a negative experience in the past which is preventing you from taking action. No matter what is causing your procrastination, you must push past it because it is one of the greatest killers of good time management there is.

DISENGAGEMENT IS A KILLER

Disengagement can be identified by liberal displays of apathy, excuses and cynicism.

 People who do not enjoy their jobs tend to fall into negative moods which prevent them from enjoying their work. When that happens they will do what my Mom would call “busy-work.” In other words they will do all sorts of unnecessary, ineffective things in order to avoid the important, pressing issues before them. Disengagement is one of greatest killers of time management.

If you are not engaged in your work, you must determine why.  Some causes of disengagement include, (but are not limited to) feeling unappreciated, believing you are overworked or not being paid enough to make ends meet. If any of those things apply to you, there is a good chance that your energy levels are low. If that is the case, you need to make some changes in your workplace situation in order to recharge your batteries and bring your energy levels back to where they should be. That might include speaking with your boss about your concerns and working out a plan for improvement.

FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS

Without energy, you cannot have focus.

So, why do you need focus? When you have focus you:

ð        Are not prone to radical emotional reactions.

ð        You are less likely to become distracted by unimportant things.

ð        You place full attention on truly meaningful things.

ð        You are better able to manage your time.

Once your energy levels are up and you are able to focus on your work, your life will improve immeasurably.

Time management is not about the clock or too much work...Time management is all about you!

All the Best

Wayne Kehl

Hey Leaders, "Life Is A Balancing Act!"

Do you have some amazingly energetic, hard working, loyal employees who work long hours and never complain? Do any of your staff members handle additional roles in the community, on non-profit boards, or with service clubs in addition to juggling work and family duties? Do you have some folks working for you who never want to take holidays and even when they do, they continue working from the beach or airplane while their families are forced to amuse themselves without the presence of their breadwinners for hours at a time?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, trouble might be just around the corner!

Every person on earth needs a reasonable and suitable work/life balance. While they might impress you with their industriousness and loyalty and your firm might be reveling in the fruits of their labors, they are probably working toward an eventual, total meltdown.

Every person has a different level of stress that they can comfortably absorb or disregard before they hit an emotional wall.

• Some people love their work so much that they do not even consider it work. Those are the people who are constantly smiling while they do their jobs.

• Others simply press the outer edges of their emotional control because of insecurity or fear. They are afraid they might let someone down or fail altogether.

• Some employees just look stressed-out, weary, or frustrated at all times. These people are on the edge and close to a complete collapse.

You might think that those folks who energetically ply their trade with smiles all day long because they love what they do, don’t need or want down-time or an actual holiday. You might think those hard workers who apply themselves with dedication to everything they do are well adjusted and simply more capable than the average human being. You might think that weary, frustrated employees are just lazy or ill suited to their work. In each of these cases the bottom line is that all of these people needs reasonable work/life balance and time off to get their minds, and more importantly, their emotions off of their work.

It is up to managers, supervisors and leaders of all kinds to recognize the symptoms of poor work/life balance and find ways to deal with them.

Leaders must always keep track of over-work situations and must never make any employee feel bad or negligent for taking their fair share of time off. Not only will they be doing their employees a favor by assisting them with this chronic, twenty-first century problem but also in many cases, they will be saving themselves and their companies a lot of lost time and lost revenue.

Even those happy, smiling people who love their work and never seem to tire out need time off.

They might be energized by their work, but their total dedication to their jobs is often damaging to the health of their family and personal lives. Without a happy, healthy life away from work, human beings become unfilled and ultimately, unhappy or depressed. Sometimes the pressures placed on them by their neglected families and friends might be more than their psyche’s can handle. If you ignore a happy, hard-worker you might suddenly be faced with an unexpected sick leave, performance dip, or even a resignation from them. The toll taken by total dedication to work has proven to be the undoing of many a potential superstar employee.

Companies of all types and sizes should insist that employees at all levels work reasonable hours and that everyone take the holidays they are allotted each year.

If employees want to work additional hours on a special project, they should be granted additional time off at a more convenient juncture. If they are doing community work that enhances the image of their employer in the community, they should be allowed time during working hours to do it. If they are on holidays, they should be prevented from taking work home with them or from communicating work-related information back to their place of work.

Time off should be considered as important as “time on” in order to assure that employees are happy and healthy well into the future.

If you haven’t spent some time reviewing the down time of your employees and you want to keep them employed and working to peak performance, you should do so now. Have a staff meeting to specifically discuss the human need for time away from work. Emphasize the fact that there is very little honor in diligence that goes so far beyond the norm that it becomes hazardous to future performance. Let everyone know that it is not only the right, but also the responsibility of every employee to take the time off that they are provided. Tell them there will be no extra credit for time-off-not-taken. Most importantly, let all of your employees know that you care about their emotional and physical health.

Good work/life balance is a predictor of longevity and good future performance.

Help your employees to stay emotionally fit by assisting them in finding and retaining the balance they deserve.

All the Best!

Wayne Kehl

Leadership Styles

Learn about the the 3 styles of managers  from   

  Wayne Kehl of Dynamic Leadership Inc.

Managing Your Time In The Cyber World

There is a lot of talk about time management these days. In fact, in these times when technology is bringing new and better innovations to every person on earth at lightning speed, most people have trouble finding time to do everything that is available to them. Business leaders are always on the lookout for new ideas to increase the success of their companies and because there are so many great advancements flying around in cyberspace, they are bombarding their people with more and more information every day. So much information, in fact that people are buckling under the load of it all to the point that workplace stress is rapidly becoming one of the most common reasons for employee absenteeism.

We all must accept that because of the amount of information flying at us every day, we will never be caught up!

It is impossible to get caught up on reading and digesting everything we receive on our computers, so don’t even try. Before we can move beyond the inevitable information overload that technology brings, we must accept that if we don’t learn how to filter the data that we are exposed to, we will never avoid the challenges of the cyber world. As much as the great loads of knowledge that we are subjected to daily will never cease, we must become quite ruthless in the ways we handle it. We must have the courage to discard the useless or almost useless information and retain only that which truly matters to our work. Try this: If you can’t use it to assist you in your job in the near future, don’t read it...delete it or file it immediately!

Technology brings procrastination!

Even the most technologically handicapped of us can sit down at a laptop, a PC or one of the new tablet devices and find ourselves spending hours surfing and socializing. Technology has given us some completely new ways of wasting time that are quite subtle and frighteningly seductive. Facebook, Twitter and Linked in give us outlets for our social needs while also providing valuable information to help us with our jobs and our personal lives. There is a blog available for almost every concept, culture, occupation or opinion in the world and every company on earth that sells anything has a website. The challenge or more appropriately, the goal, should be to eliminate everything that is merely a pleasant pastime and focus on the things that we can actually use to improve our immediate, real-world environment. If you find yourself running out of time, review your day and remind yourself how much time you spent working on your job and how much time you spent staring at your monitor.

Email is time management death!

What did we do before email? ... We sent memo’s on paper via snail-mail or picked up the telephone and spoke with other human beings about our issues. Because both of those options were somewhat laborious and time consuming, we tended to do more things ourselves without outside intervention. Now, with access to cyberspace, whenever we have a question or a thought we spin around in our chairs and send an email. Often we will cc or blind-cc a bunch of other people just to make sure we cover all the possible bases. Then the person who is the primary recipient replies to all and adds a couple of more people to the distribution list just to make sure all of the stakeholders are in the loop. At that point all of the people on the combined distribution lists also reply to all and add a few of their favourite people to the list...And the next thing you know our one, simple question has spawned literally hundreds of emails that are flying around in cyberspace, wasting the time of countless people...some of whom we have never met and never will.

Not only do we waste time reading emails, we waste time waiting for replies to them. In the days before cyberspace when we needed to know something, we took the direct route of a personal visit or a phone call. Now, I find people putting important work off because the person they need information or permission from has not returned their email. When I ask, “Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call them?” I am often told that they don’t want, or will not take phone calls...they prefer to correspond by email. During the past decade I have found myself on several occasions explaining some weighty business subject over the telephone only to be rebuked by the person on the other end, saying something along the lines of, “That’s great. Send me an email explaining what you want and I will be happy to deal with it!” Arrrggghhh!!!

Don’t even get me started on emailed jokes, ads, or chain-letters!

The bottom line is that we have time management problems these days because we allow ourselves to procrastinate and waste time on computer-generated junk mail, spam, indecisiveness, and delays. If you want to move closer to well-managed time, turn off your email, resist the urge to surf, and focus on the job at hand. If you are a leader, impress upon your employees, the need to focus on their work and filter out as much unnecessary cyber-junk as possible. Hey, and here’s a novel idea...Instead of sending multiple emails, pick up the telephone and talk to someone!

There is no shortage of time...we just need to manage it better!

All the best

Wayne Kehl