Tag Time management

Can you lead yourself? If not, don’t expect others to follow you

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Author, life coach, and motivational speaker T...

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To be a better leader, the first thing you need to do is to learn to lead yourself. Leadership and learning to lead yourself go together. If you cannot learn this important skills, you will not be able to lead others. Below are some ideas on how to develop this skill of internal leadership.

Ask: “what is the right thing to do?”. Then do it!

Learn to guide your choices, big and small, by asking yourself: “What is the right thing to do?”. And then do it.

At first, it may take extra time. Thereafter, as you will continue with this activity, the new healthier habits will form and you will not need to spell this out question to yourself. You will do “the right thing” by default.

Moreover, as the habit develops, it will become easier and easier, and you will begin to feel and see the difference it makes in your life.

Remember that, most of the time, you already know what is the right thing to do. The trick is in actually doing it. This is what separate top performers at work from under-achievers, great life partners from inferior ones and straight-A students from C students. Imagine the difference it will make in your life if you actually do it?

More importantly, you are doing it and not just expecting others to do the right thing. You are behaving as you expect others to behave. You are taking steps to effectively lead yourself.

Determine the “musts” in your life

This advice is intuitive but was clearly verbalized by Tony Robbins. The reason some people do not go above a certain physical weight or the reason some students do not get B’s but only A’s is because a certain weight or certain academic performance is a “must” for them.

Everyone has things they should do. They know they should do it, they know how to do it, but they just cannot find strength in themselves to do it. The reason for this is because it is a “should” for them, not a “must”. When something is a “must” for you – failure is not an option.

Therefore, examine your life and determine which aspects of your life must be classified as “musts”. Then reinforce those “musts” every day as an activity where “failure is not an option”, until it becomes second nature. Once you break the old habit – based on research old habits take 21 days to break – the new approach will feel more natural to you than the old approach. This simple technique can significantly contribute to success in your life.

For example, imagine that instead of “you should study at least 5 hours a day” you determine that “you MUST study at least 5 hours a day”. Then make sure that you follow it vigorously. Do not allow yourself any excuses.

You are developing your discipline now, so you have to be strict with yourself. You will see that in 2 or 3 weeks it will become a habit. You will also notice how your new positive habit brings you to new levels of achievement, which will give you further strength to continue with your new positive habit.

Thereafter, as you develop the new “must” in your life, you will have the first victory to keep on giving you strength in disciplining yourself.

Determining “musts” in your life and vigorously ensuring that you keep up with them is part of an effort to lead yourself. Incidentally, the goal to lead yourself needs to be a “must” for you as well.

Use one small improvement as leverage for change

Part of the “lead yourself” endeavor is understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and determining the causes of your strengths and weaknesses. If leading yourself and leadership are not your strong qualities at the moment, you need to change your beliefs. Your beliefs affect your actions and your actions affect your results, which further reinforce your beliefs.

If you have a belief that you will not succeed in your “lead yourself” goal – you need to change this belief. One way to change this belief is to achieve a result that will strongly contradict this belief. It does not need to be a big change. It can be something very simple. Just do it to prove to yourself that you can change and that your belief is wrong. Your mind needs evidence.

After you succeed with providing contradictory evidence to your belief, you have a leverage point. Every time you feel that you just cannot do something, always think back to this example to remember what is possible.

For example, take an area which is a struggle for the majority of people. A good example can be waking up in the morning. So many people struggle to wake up in the morning. If you will be a person who always wakes up at the very same time (whichever time this may be) every single morning, on weekdays and weekends, you will have at least one result which contradicts your current belief of not being able to lead yourself.

It may sound like a really simple example, yet it means something to you and that is what is important. You need simple examples to build your confidence and this creates a snowballing effect.

Above are just some thoughts on improving leadership and attaining your “lead yourself” goal. This will give you a good start. Remember that it will not be easy. If it were easy – everyone would be successful.

Now that you have read the article, ask yourself these two questions:

  • Can you trust you to lead yourself?
  • If you cannot lead yourself, why are you learning to lead others?

Take some time to think about this and write down the answers. Use the guide provided above and develop an action plan to lead yourself.

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Drowning at the office…improve your time management with these 15 tips

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The Alarm

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To understand time management, think about what a wise person once said, you can live your life any way you want, but you can live it only once.

We could adapt it to:

“you can live your day any way you want, but you can live it only once.”

If you don’t have an effective time management approach, your days are going to zoom by while leaving you with the feeling that nothing really gets done. Theoretically, it is not possible to manage time. But one can manage what one does with their time. Effective time management approaches are therefore needed. Below are some of the main principles that can significantly improve your time management and productivity.

1 – Do not deviate from your schedule

There are many distractions around you throughout the day. The more you deviate from your schedule to do something unproductive, the less you will accomplish. Be disciplined, develop a daily schedule and follow it. This is crucial for effective time management. If something comes up that is important, incorporate it into your schedule. If something is not important, then stick to your schedule. Remember that more often than not, your daily activities determine your success.

2 – Have programmed decisions

Programmed decisions are decisions made about recurring activities. Such decisions are made once and used every time the need for such a decision presents itself.

For example, if you are a very ambitious and driven individua, a time management programmed decision can be:

“I decided that I must only watch TV up to 5 hours a week, only between the times 6pm to 10pm on weekends”.

Now, all you have to do is to follow it.

Initially every time you think “should I do my report or watch a show on TV?” you will remember that your time management programmed decision does not allow you to have this option. As long as you are disciplined in following through, it will become a habit, and eventually you will not even have this question in your mind.

This example of programmed decisions also offers you an additional time saver – less TV. Another example of a programmed decision can be:

“I must exercise 30 minutes, 3 times a week on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6pm to 6.30pm”.

Now you no longer have to spend any time planning and deciding on when you should exercise. The decision is already made. Time management programmed decisions can save you an enormous amount of time, which can be invested in value-adding activities.

3 – Manage your energy

It is important to do the most challenging tasks when your energy is at a high level.

4 – Respectfully say, “I wish I could help but I do not have capacity”

It is very important not to take on more tasks than you can handle. It is an important skill to learn to say “No” when you do not have the capacity to incorporate additional activity into your schedule.

5 – Keep a positive attitude

This may sound irrelevant to time management, but it is. If you have a positive attitude and see opportunities rather than problems, you will not waste time and energy on worry and regret. Instead, you will focus on solutions rather than problems, and opportunities rather than threats and unpleasant events.

6 -Email routine

Emails can be a significant time waster. It is vital, if at all possible, to set a specific time during the day when you will attend to your emails instead of continuously checking them as they arrive.

You could, for instance, make a time management programmed decision about allocating 10 minutes in the morning to attend to urgent emails and 20 minutes in the afternoon to attend to the rest of emails.

Only respond to emails addressed to you or where your input adds value. The novelty of being copied on thousands of emails soon wears out but the time you already wasted on them can never be recovered.

The morning is generally when you have the most energy. Therefore, it is not productive to spend this time handling non-urgent emails. Do not let other people decide how you should spend your most productive time. You should spend it on the high priority tasks.

7 – The “Pareto” rule (80/20)

The “Pareto” rule refers to the tendency for 20% of your effort to account for 80% of the impact. For time management, it refers to the tendency of 20 percent of your activities to account for 80 percent of the positive impact from your work.

Therefore, it is an advisable and smart thing to identify those activities with the highest impact. Spend the majority of time on them while cutting down or cutting out unnecessary activities (activities with no or very little impact).

For example, if you are a student and your main job is to earn a degree, then you should be spending the majority of your time on things which help you obtain your degree. Focus your time on your studies and cut out things which add no value to your studies. You should definitely not be spending less than 50% of your time on your studies if this is your main objective.

8 – Delegate and delegate often

It is important to delegate what can be done by others. This will save your time for high priority items and gives lower level employees an opportunity to grow. When delegating, it is critical to delegate some authority together with responsibility. That is, you need to delegate the task together with the appropriate level of authority to make decisions. Only such delegation brings real value to both parties. If only the responsibility is delegated but every minor decision about the task is still made by you, then your time will still be used up on this task and the lower level employee will not gain the true developmental benefits that delegation can offer.

In fact, you may spend more time on the task should an extra problem be created due to the poor delegation of authority.

9 – Lower standards for lower priority tasks

Some tasks should just be done at “Good enough” level. Striving for perfection in low priority tasks is generally a waste of time that can be spent on more important goals. Time management is also about eliminating the obsession to make everything perfect, even things that do not need to be perfect.

10 – Alarm snooze time waster

Many people search for ways to get up in the morning. You probably know that resetting the alarm or putting it on snooze in the morning can lead to significant time wastage. Moreover, the quality of your sleep during such periods is very bad so you do not get a good rest.

It is, without doubt, very hard for many people to get up in the morning. It is customary not to hear the alarm or not remember any of the reasons why you should get up before you absolutely must get up. Yet, later in the day, many people regret  lost hours that they could have spent more wisely.

The best way to break out of this insanity is to train yourself to wake up exactly at the same time every morning. Our bodies go through what is known as basic rest activity cycles. When you awake a few days in a row at the very same time – your body will adjust your basic rest activity cycle so that it feels natural to be awake at specific time.

It may be helpful, especially in the beginning, to leave the alarm in another room so you physically have to get up when you hear it.

After you start waking up at the same time every day, a pattern develops, and you may not be able to sleep beyond the  time set by your “body-clock”.

If you miss a day or two and will wake up later than your normal set time, you will have to again train yourself to wake up at the set time and it may be almost as hard to train yourself as the first time. Therefore, it seems better to take a nap during the day if you need extra rest and get yourself out of bed at a set time in the morning.

11 – Group similar activities together

It is important to group similar activities together. For example, if you need to make a few phone calls, it is better to do them all at once. One simple rule that can be used to save time is never to leave your desk for just one thing. In this way, you are forced to group a few activities together before your work is interrupted and, therefore, work will be interrupted much less. This is a simple but very effective time management technique.

12 – Work passionately

Time management can be improved not only by reducing the time spent at the office, but also by enjoying the time spent at the office. Constantly look for ways to be interested and passionate about your work. This way you can do your best work and you can be more focused and accomplish the task faster.

13 – Avoid disruptions

Avoid all kinds of disruptions such as drop-in visitors, telephone calls and emails, magazines and newspapers, and news websites. Those activities can take up a large part of your time if you are not careful. Allocate some time from the least productive part of your day to deal with these type of activities.

14 -Avoid procrastination

There is a saying, if you have a frog to eat, eat it the first thing in the morning and, if you have two frogs to eat, don’t start from the small one.

It is a good time management habit to do the most difficult and unpleasant activities earlier in the day. This way it will be done once and for all and you no longer will have to occupy your mind with the thoughts on how unpleasant and difficult it will be do engage in such activity.

15 – Assign a “dollar” value to an hour of your time

You need to assign a “dollar” value to an hour of your time. Time is an even more precious resource than money, but, for some reason, people are generally more careful with their money then with their time. By keeping in mind how much each hour of your day is worth, you can be much more accountable for the way this time is utilized.

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