The Six Major Time Wasters
There are six major time wasters in the world of work, based on hundreds of studies and opinion surveys. Your ability to deal with them effectively will largely determine how successful you are in your career.
1. Telephone Interruptions
Telephone interruptions lead the list. The telephone rings and breaks your train of thought, interrupts you and distracts you from what you are doing.
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When you hang up the phone, you are often distracted and find it hard to get back to the work in front of you.
2. Unexpected Visitors
Unexpected or drop-in visitors can be extremely time consuming. These are people who drop in on you from within your company, or from the outside.
They disrupt your work, break your train of thought and impair your effectiveness. Sometimes they talk endlessly about unimportant matters and keep you from your work.
3. Meetings, Meetings
Meetings, both planned and unplanned consume fully 40% or more of your time. They can be formal or ad hoc, with groups in scheduled meetings or one-on-one meetings from office to office, or in the hallways. Many of them are unnecessary or largely a waste of time.
4. Fire Fighting and Emergencies
A major time consumer and time waster is fire fighting, emergencies and the inevitable crisis. Just when you get settled in to work on something important, something totally unexpected happens that takes you away from your main task, sometimes for hours.
5. Procrastination
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A major waste of time and life is procrastination, the thief of time. The tendency to procrastinate is universal for a variety of reasons that we will deal with in detail in Chapter Eight.
6. Socializing and Idle Conversation
Socializing takes up an enormous amount of time. It has been estimated that as much as 75% of time at work is spent interacting with other people.
Unfortunately, fully half of this time is spent in idle chatter that has nothing to do with the work. Socializing takes time away from getting the job done.
6. Indecision and Delay
Indecision costs more time than most people realize, especially with paper, correspondence, tasks and people. Indecision wastes your time and that of others.
In this chapter, you will learn several proven techniques to deal with each of these time-wasters, except for procrastination. This subject is so important that we will cover it in depth in the next chapter.
A Quick Review
Let us take a moment to review the keys to effective time management that we’ve covered so far in this book.
1. Change the Way You Think
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First, we talked about “The Psychology of Time Management.” This requires that you make a firm decision to become excellent at the way you use your time. Think of yourself continually as well organized. Visualize yourself as efficient, effective and highly productive.
2. Clear Goals and Objectives
To perform at your best, you must set clear goals and objectives that are consistent with your highest aspirations and your innermost values and convictions. The more goals you set for yourself, the more likely it is that you will manage your time well, especially when your goals are in harmony with your values.
The “Law of Forced Efficiency” says that the more work you take on, the more efficient you will become in completing the most important parts of that work. You will be forced to be efficient just to keep on top of your responsibilities.
This law also says that “There is never enough time for everything, but there is always enough time for the most important things.” Committing yourself to a large number of tasks almost guarantees that you’ll become more and more efficient.
3. Plan out Your Work in Detail
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You need detailed plans of action, organized by sequence and priority for productive work. You will save ten minutes in execution for every minute that you invest in planning and organizing before you begin.
4. Set Clear Priorities on Your Tasks
You must establish clear priorities and always work on your highest value tasks. Apply the 80/20 Rule to everything. Separate the urgent from the important. Always concentrate on the most valuable use of your time.
5. Work All the Time You Work
It is essential that you develop good work habits, and learn to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing, the most important thing at any given time.
Good work habits enable you to produce vastly more than the average person and are the key to great success in life.
6. Manage Multi-Task Jobs
You must think through and carefully plan large jobs or complex tasks that involve several people, using everything that you have learned so far. Think on paper and develop the habit of planning and organizing every detail before you begin.
The Way You Spend Time Today
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How do you use your time? According to time management specialist Michael Fortino, over an average lifetime, you will spend seven years in the bathroom. You will spend six years eating. You will spend five years waiting in lines. You will spend four years cleaning your house. You will spend three years in meetings. You will spend one year searching for things. You will spend eight months opening junk mail. You will spend six months sitting at red lights. You will spend 120 days brushing your teeth. And here’s the big surprise. You will spend four minutes per day conversing with your spouse and 30 seconds per day conversing with your children.
Get Focused and Stay Focused
In order to change some of these ratios in a positive way, you will have to learn how to cut out the time wasters and save time in every area of your life. To save time at work, for instance, you must continually ask yourself questions like the following:
Why am I on the payroll?
What have I been hired to accomplish?
What is my major goal or objective right now?
What am I supposed to do, or be doing at this moment?
What results have I been hired to achieve?
Is what I am doing right now contributing to the accomplishment of my most important goals and objectives?
The most important of these questions is to continually ask yourself, from the time you start work to the time you finish is, “Why am I on the payroll?
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Is what I’m doing right now what I have been hired to do?” The greatest time saver of all is the word “No!” Make it a habit to say “No!” to any demands on your time that do not move you toward your most important goals.
Seven Ways to Deal with Telephone Interruptions
Here are seven ideas to help you deal with the tyranny of telephone interruptions:
1. Use It as a Business Tool
Use the telephone as a business tool. Get on and off it fast. Don’t socialize on the phone when you are working. Make your calls as efficient as possible.
When you were a teenager, the telephone became a social tool for you. It was your connection to your friends and to members of the opposite sex.
You became accustomed to spending a lot of time on the phone in idle conversation. As an adult, you still associate the phone with socializing, with idle chatter. It has become a habit.
However, when you enter into the world of work, you have to break that habit and begin to view the telephone as a means of business communication. You must discipline yourself to use the telephone as a business tool during the hours from nine to five.
2. Have Your Calls Screened
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Have your calls screened. Find out who it is and what he or she wants before you answer. Overcome the natural curiosity that wells up in you when people you don’t know call you. Find out why they are calling before you take the phone call.
3. Have Your Calls Held
Have your calls held whenever possible. Set aside periods of the day when you take no interruptions. Don’t become a slave to a ringing phone. One of the best tactics you can use is to actually disconnect your phone when you are working on something important. If it is important enough, whoever is calling you will call back again later.
4. Set Clear Call Back Times
Get and give call back times. When you call someone and they are not there, leave a message and the time that you will be available to take the return phone call.
When someone calls you and you can’t take the call, make sure that your secretary or receptionist gets a call back time. This is the time when you can get a hold of him or her so that you don’t play telephone tag back and forth.
5. Batch Your Calls
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Batch your calls. Use the learning curve and make all of your telephone calls at once. Don’t spread them throughout the day.