A few years ago, I was approached by a company to write a time management course which I would then deliver at a conference for HR reps with the Department of Veterans Affairs. When I asked them what the objectives were for the course (kind of important if you want to ensure the course you teach hits the target) there were none. That made me happy.
I’ve taken a few time management courses throughout the years, including those given by the Covey people. All of them advocate a cumbersome tool or key principles such as “never touch a piece of paper more than once.” None of them worked for me, and as far as I know, nobody else either.
Why?
There is no such thing as “time management.”
Time can’t be managed. It’s nothing we can control. It’s no different than doing a class on How to Manage an Earthquake. You can’t manage it, only your reaction and response to it.
Think about it. There are 24 hours in a day. We all have the same 24 hours. How then do you explain someone who manages to get a host of tasks accomplished in a day while a co-worker in the same job gets nothing done? Time has nothing to do with effectiveness. The only think you can control is your ability to manage yourself in relation to time.
So back to the workshop. Without the constraints of somebody else’s “system”, I put together an outline that addressed all the things that get in the way of a person’s ability to manage themselves in relation to time. Then I simply developed strategies around them. If you figure out what your challenges are, you can implement changes that will solve your unique issues.
Here are the challenges:
- Your personality and style of interaction. All of us are conditioned and “wired” to plan and interact in a certain way. Some folks get very distracted by other people and can’t focus. Others need to be around people and activities to focus. I used my own personality assessment, The Bug Factor™ to give my participants some insight on their style and how it affects them.
- Your ability to plan. Some folks can structure their day around a set plan of events while others need flexibility.
- Your ability to organize. Prioritization is different than planning. Planning gives the sequence, prioritization dictates the order. This is dependent on the task, outcomes, stakeholders, an of course the individual.
- Your ability to direct. Direction is the action steps of getting things done. It’s how to execute the plan. It also involves marshaling other resources to help you. Sometimes this is impacted by a person’s personality, other times by their willingness and need to engage others.
- Your ability to control. The best plans fail if there are too many distractions. By identifying what the distractions will be, you have a better chance of minimizing them by planning for them or avoiding them all together.
Now notice here that I didn’t give you a formula. The tools are there and your job is to pick and choose which ones can solve the problem. I told the attendees to visualize the workshop as a buffet where they could take whatever looked good to them. If you’re hungry for Mexican food, hot dogs won’t do. If your time management challenges are around distractions but you plan pretty well, leave the planning tools alone and deal with distractions.
So all in all it was a big success. The attendees left happy and hopefully are implementing what they learned. The biggest lesson they got (which I repeatedly drilled into their heads) was that “you can’t manage time, only your ability to manage yourself in relation to it.”
This week, think about what prevents you from “managing” time and think of strategies to fix that.