TIME EFFECTIVE OR DEFECTIVE – PART TWO

Please read part One of this blog first and then complete the Time Effective Template Exercise, to gain the most benefit from this blog entry.

So how did you go with completing the template? To get the most out of the exercise you need to do it for at least 7 days, ideally 14 days! If you did the exercise for at least a week then you should have some very interesting data to say the least!

The first step is to analyse your data in terms of themes. Break down into themes and number of hours you spent on each theme. Make sure the themes are distinct (e.g. team meetings, project meetings, writing reports, HR admin, email etc...) This will give you some great analysis in itself!

Now ask yourself the following from your questions. Be very honest with yourself as it is only you, that you will be fooling ;) -

What are you spending your most of your time, energy and effort on?

Are those tasks absolutely critical to overall achievement of the big picture goals? I.e. The big picture goal may be to grow the business by 20% this financial year – are all the tasks you focused on delivery you that outcome or are they time distracters and wasters?

How important REALLY are the tasks you rated as important, relevant or critical? Be ruthless here! If it didn’t get done what is the absolute worst thing that happens?) If you are convinced that all these tasks are important, then the next question is do they really need to be done by you?

If you have rated the majority of tasks on your list as important talk it through with someone who will play devils advocate for you. We so often kid ourselves about our reality. Getting an external reality check is vital – especially when YOU think you are RIGHT and not fooling yourself!! You may be filling your life with little tasks that you convince yourself are important, to avoid something more significant! Be honest with yourself here, because the only person you are kidding is yourself!

Or are you spending your time on low importance, cumbersome tasks? If so, ask yourself why? What exactly are the benefits of you doing this? ALL behaviour has benefits, even the negative ones like procrastination! Are the tasks even actually worth doing in the first place? We so often waste time on idiotic tasks – like reading a 150 page report that is exceptionally interesting but actually has no application to the achievement of my goal. These things are the greatest time wasters. Facebook and other social media can be put into this bucket. Yes, I know there is a whole industry on how to make money via social media – but are you really making money? If you are making money on social media tasks then one assumes you would have classed it as critical not low importance!!!!


You may have caught onto a theme here. Your thinking and your perception is what is causing you to be time defective! As mentioned in my last blog in literally took me years to get real and work out that time effectiveness is a state of mind, a mind discipline exercise not a process or step by step how to!!!

In his book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey has a great model to help you work through what to focus on as important.

Covey states we each have a wide range of concerns in our lives – everything from our family, health, careers, work problems, national and economic problems etc. This make up your Circle of Concern. The things that concern us make up our Circle of Concern. Clearly everyone’s circle of concern will be unique to them!

There are things within our Circle of Concern, that we have no power over, real or otherwise. The things we do have power over become a smaller Circle of Influence. Control falls into three categories – “direct control (problems involving our own behaviour); indirect control (problems involving other people's behaviour); or no control (problems we can do nothing about, such as our past, or situational realities)”.
To become more effective, the trick is to focus your energy, time and effort to ONLY focus on those things that sit in your Circle of Influence. I.e. the things that we can do something about! Things that you can do and be. As you focus on your Circle of Influence you create more positive, enlarging, and magnifying energy, causing it to increase”.

Basically the model reminds us that any problem is ultimately within, not with-out or external to us! Therefore, we can empower ourselves and create and control our reality. By empowering yourself from the inside-out you permit yourself to be different, and thereby affect positive change in what's out there! For example, I can be more resourceful, I can be more diligent, I can be a better delegator. You then back it up with skills and action and you change your reality!

We can break down things within your control or Covey’s Circle of Influence, to three main areas of focus.

Effective Attitude/Mindset – E.g. Managing your thoughts around fear, motivation or lack thereof, procrastination, perceived importance of tasks, perceived control over the environment, perceived pressure (time or otherwise), seeking perfection when good enough is good enough!

Effective Managing Tasks – Manage your Meetings, Interruptions and Diaries/Schedules

Effective Skills/Behaviours - Setting Goals and Priorities, Delegation, Communication, Discipline

In the next few blogs I discuss how to be more effective in some of these areas within your control.

If you do these exercises and are still having issues with time management, you have a deeper meta program operating that is self sabatoge.  The best way I know to deal with that is through a qualified NLP/CBT Coach.

Good Luck

Are you TIME EFFECTIVE or TIME DEFECTIVE?

Sorry folks for the slight delay in blogging, but my time has been taken up with other more important things. Does that sound rude to you? IF SO, you definitely need to read this blog!!!

Recently I have been pondering the question of whether I am time effective or defective a great deal: a) because I have been uber busy and (b) several of my coaching clients have wanted coaching on “time management”. So I decided that it would be a great idea to do a 2 part series on this thing fascinating thing we all call time management!

Have you ever had a day where you got to the end and was very, very busy, but felt like you had achieved nothing much! Everyone has these days, if you have them more than a couple of times a year, I’d suggest you need to review your time effectiveness strategy.

What is a time effectiveness strategy you may well ask? Well let’s review the whole time management concept. How exactly do you manage time, given that you, nor I, nor any human can technically control it, let alone manage it! And what exactly are we managing? Do people who manage time have more hours in the day, less, what? The FACT IS time marches on whether we do anything or nothing!

So who came up with that ridiculous concept? Anyway, it is more correct to ask “are you time effective and time efficient rather than do you manage your time well?” What makes me say that? Well here’s the bottom line – as we've established, you cannot manage time per se, but you can manage yourself to be time effective and time efficient.

This took me many years to figure out!! As someone who used to be highly time defective and having managed at least 20 other time defectives, I learnt that you CANNOT learn TIME management if you are a time defective! I, like all other brainwashed managers on the planet, used to send myself and my time defective staff on ‘Time Management’ courses at great cost and with great enthusiasm. Only to have one after the other fail and the disappointment mount!

This prompted me to consider the concept in more detail. When I really observed what was going on for myself and others who worked for me, I discovered something very interesting! You cannot become more effective or efficient simply by using someone else’s quick tips or processes! If that were true then everyone on the planet would be super efficient and effective time machines! But alas, look around, who is? You? Your employees? Your boss? How many of these people have been on courses or read in detail about 'time management'???

Well if a course or other people's tips isn't the answer, WHAT IS?? The answer is simple! We can all CHOOSE to become ‘Time Effective’ and ‘Time Efficient’. What I mean by Time Effectiveness is working on things of high importance that move you towards your outcomes and goals. Time Efficiency is about how well you manage those tasks (i.e. completing them in the most productive/economical way).

TIME EFFECTIVENESS is about your belief systems and how you manage the stuff that big thing that sits in between your ears (your mind/brain)! As you will discover in this process, being effective is all about how you think and perceive the world and your underlying belief systems!

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I do NOT advocate training courses for behavioural change unless it is combined with Coaching using Cognitive Behavioural Techniques and/or NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). The reason for that is that what really works to make you more Time Efficient and Time Effective is to identify YOUR personal patterns, behaviours, actions, thoughts and beliefs and take full ownership of them.

It is as simple as you can’t change that which you do not acknowledge! Continual and sustained behavioural change is best achieved through a structured change process like coaching! Our minds and patterns are very strong willed and it takes a great deal of awareness to spot the subconscious/unconscious cleverness of our strategies and to make appropriate adaptations.

So here’s your first exercise....

All I want you to do in the next 5 - 10 working days is observe yourself at work and ask yourself three questions regularly throughout the day (and record as much data as possible). I have developed a simple TIME EFFECTIVENESS Template to assist you: -

• How do I spend my time at work?

• How effective am I being (see above)?

• How have I created this situation?

The more you observe and record the more insight and useful this exercise will be to you!

Good Luck UNTIL next blog :)

Vanessa
My Performace Coach