I have been recently conducting seminars on the West Coast of South Australia on ‘Risk Management’. This presentation was originally designed to talk about the typical risks we see in businesses such as property damage, personal injury and lack of diversification.
I believe one of the greatest risks we face in life is ‘not achieving our goals’. We don’t end up where we want to end up. This is a major risk.
Often people don’t set goals or spend time on personal financial planning because they ‘don’t have time’. I hear excuses all the time about ‘time’. ‘I didn’t have time to do it’ or ‘time got the better of me‘ or ‘I ran out of time‘ are some of the more common ones. Blah blah blah.
These are just excuses! We’re all granted with the same 86,400 seconds in a day and 168 hours in a week. Not one more not one less. A few years ago there were two people that taught me about the value of time – an Ex monk named Dandapani and a business owner called Rob Nixon.
Rob outlined some of his major rules on time management and I would like to share these with you below:
You can’t manage time you can only utilise time in the best possible way. So it’s not how much time we have but how we use our time. You see it’s never about ‘the time’ it is always about the priorities at the moment. Have you ever noticed that when you’re about to go on holidays you are super efficient. Stuff just get’s done. Have you noticed when you don’t have a pressing deadline you sort of meander through the day?
It’s just human nature to ‘fill the available time with what work we have to do’. The old adage if you want something done give it to a busy person is so true. I recognized many years ago I needed to develop systems to stop wasting time and be super efficient with my time.
Here are my top ways to be super efficient and get more done in my valuable time available:
- I define my top 3 things that are the highest dollar productive activities and just do those
- I think of my week as 14 halves and block time out for 3-4 hours at a time
- It’s my diary (no one else’s) so I manage it – I block time out for holidays, trips, conferences, golf etc 12 months in advance and work around that. I do not let people encroach on my time when I don’t want them to.
- I get rid of toxic relationships – massive time and energy wasters
- I work to feel good about myself – health, fitness, clothing – makes me more efficient
- I deal with emails quickly – no scroll bar and everything replied to same day
- I turn off all email/text/Facebook reminders – the annoying buzz or sound that tells you something has arrived. I am not going to let a device tell me when to look at it
- I don’t return phone calls and play telephone tag – what a waste of time
- I book telephone appointments with almost everyone
- I always always call the person at the allotted time booked – Someone said to me yesterday “I could set my clock to your call”
- I do stand-up meetings – people get too comfortable sitting down
- I have a meeting agenda for every meeting – typically starting with ‘what would you like to achieve out of today’s meeting
- I focus on one thing at a time – multitasking is a load of rubbish
- I have self-imposed deadlines on everything. Always working towards a finite time for the task.