Getting More Done Faster
“The first thing is to make sure you are in the moment” says ten time tennis Grand Slam winner Novak Djokovic. “That is much easier to say than to do. You have to exclude all distractions and focus on what you are about to do. In order to get into that state of concentration, you need to have a lot of experience, and a lot of mental strength. You are not born with that. It is something you have to build by yourself”.
Leaders are busy people and it is difficult to find time during the day to be “in the moment”. Phones ring, email floods in without mercy, staff want a piece of you, meetings suck the life force out of your day, business social media beckons with its siren song of “look at me, look at me”, imminent deadlines loom. Consequently, you often look back on the day and are bewildered as to where the time went and become frustrated with how little actually got done.
Excluding distractions and focusing on what you need to be doing are learnt skills. It is astonishing to me how few leaders plan their day. When I am teaching leadership to senior leaders and we get to the time management bit, I ask who plans their day – written down and prioritised? On average I would be lucky to get 10% of the participants raising their hands. When I clarify that they are writing it down in some form of numbered order, a few sheepishly lower their hands.
Are they lacking the mental strength to be able to organize themselves? I don’t think that is the issue. It seems to be a general lack of ability to self-organise their day. The first barrier is philosophical – “I don’t want to be locked into a schedule, because mine changes so much throughout the day, there is no point setting priorities which will keep changing”.
There is a breakthrough technology for that called the pencil. If your priorities change, then change the order by re-writing to list. “I can’t be bothered doing that burdensome task”. Well if that erase and re-write construct is too much for you, then we have to wonder why you are being put in charge of people and budgets in the first place.
The reality is the basic order of priorities will only ever change a few times a day and not every day, so the alteration of the order is no big deal, so get over it. The power of setting priorities, in order, is that you can concentrate on the highest value components of your work. When I was at University, I remember one of the professors showing me a cartoon about the difficulties of sitting down and writing. The ironing, the cleaning, the lawn mowing all were given a higher priority, because the writer was afraid to start and looked for escape routes. We do that in leadership – we procrastinate on projects and tasks we should be doing.
The golden rule of leadership time management is “we can’t do everything, but we can do the most important things”. The most high value tasks are those that only we can do – they are not things we can delegate. The key is to concentrate our mental energy to be “in the moment” to complete those highest value tasks without being distracted or hindered. Therefore time must be allocated for the highest value tasks that we have nominated ahead of all the other many tasks. The latter are the lower value tasks, which is where those without a prioritised list, spend the majority of their working lives and are left wondering why they can’t get enough done.
To allocate the time required for the highest value tasks, we need to create block time. This is cordoned off time, no distractions time, no meetings time, no calls or emails time. We seize the highest priority work to be done and we throw everything we have at it, uninterrupted and unapologetically. Allocate time in our diaries for block time by diarising a meeting with ourselves that is set in stone. If we don’t do that we will never be able to marshal the time we need for the highest value projects we need to be working on.
Leaders, let’s stop kidding ourselves - all we have is time and how we spend it determines all.
