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[ Administrative Assistance ]
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If I only had more time...
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by Phil Stella
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If you regularly look at that overflowing plate you call your job and sigh in painful frustration, you aren’t alone. We’re all being challenged to do more with less. More work, less time -- more projects, less resources. These days, strategic time management is critical to our survival.
To be successful, you’ll need to add “time manager” to your job description. If you can’t have more time, maybe you can make better use of the time you do have.
Value Your Time
The late Peter Drucker, father of modern management science, put it best: “Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.” Benjamin Franklin’s succinct observation is a close second: “Time is money.”
Before you can begin managing your time more strategically, you need to value it in tangible terms. Go beyond your hourly wage to what your level of skill and experience would command as a freelancer in your market.
Let’s use $120 per hour to make the math easy. With that figure, each minute you spend is worth $2.00. Now you can ask if each task you do each day is “worth the money.” And while something that wastes five minutes a day may seem too trivial to deal with, that’s $2,500 worth of your time in a year.
Time managers on the Varsity squad usually know where their time goes and what kind of a return on their investment they get. While no two projects or even days are the same in what we do, you can get a basic sense for your categories of time use.
Keep track for a whole day in 15-minute increments. Log what you do, along with any interruptions, for three or four days over a two-week period. Then, categorize time use based on tasks and indicate a relative priority for each of those tasks.
The result: You’ll have some basic data on where you spend this valuable resource and your ROI. Look for time wasters -- tasks or situations with poor ROI -- and determine how to improve them.
Armed with your time log data, you can now plan each day to get the best results. Create a daily “to-do” list that is specific, flexible, and comprehensive (see sidebar for details).
Even Varsity time managers don’t necessarily get everything done in a day that they plan to do. What got them on the Varsity squad is the ability and commitment to make sure that what they did today was more important, necessary, or even politically smart than what they didn’t do today. Those leftover items become priorities for another day.
Don’t Just Say No
Wouldn’t it be great if all your projects were laid out in a linear fashion with no overlap? No such luck. Video departments typically juggle several projects at the same time at various stages of production. As you plan the timeline and deliverables for each one, make sure you juggle activity to keep several balls in the air simultaneously. This takes even more effort on your part, but it’s worth it.
One trait many Varsity players share is a high level of skill and comfort with assertive communication. Even when a boss or customer wants to add something to their to-do list, they know how to say no when that’s the correct answer -- and live to tell about it.
But they don’t just say no. They also explain why the answer is no, and when the answer can be yes, and negotiate win-win solutions whenever possible. And when the answer should be yes, it is yes. Assertive time managers are also uncommonly courteous and respectful and subtly encourage others to value their time.
Take a look into your time management toolkit now. Did you add any new planning, analysis, or assertive tools? Did you find some new or better ways to use the tools you already have? Are you motivated to put those tools to work for you? Go for it -- tryouts for the Varsity team take place all the time. Good luck, I hope you make the squad.
Phil Stella runs Effective Training & Communication, Inc. and is a veteran video writer/producer, communication skill consultant, and coach. Contact him at (440) 449-0356 or etcpjs@aol.com.
Build a better ‘to-do’ list
Make your plan for tomorrow at the end of today or first thing tomorrow. Review it several times a day in light of changing priorities and revise accordingly.
Don’t try to list tasks in descending order of priority -– too much rewriting throughout the day. Instead, attach a relative priority to each task (A, B, C or 1, 2, 3, etc.), no matter what order they appear in on the list.
Indicate estimated time to complete in fractions of an hour so the math is easy. After completion, indicate actual time and compare it to your estimate. If the gap is more than 20 percent, review and analyze later.
Add any unplanned tasks to the list as you do them so your list is a comprehensive record of the day’s accomplishments. And keep your lists as a data source for your monthly reports and as a basic paper trail if an issue arises.
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