Three steps to a longer day

Feb 18
Life happens at the speed of 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour. There is nothing we can do to change that. We don’t have control over time itself. We can only control how we invest it. So in a sense, time management is a false concept because there is nothing we can do to change time. Maybe we should call it choice management because what we’re really doing is just choosing what we’ll do with the 60 minutes an hour we’ve been given.
When I started writing this, the nerd in me couldn’t help but do some research on why we measure time in 60 seconds, 60 minutes and 24 hours in a day. If you’re curious like me, you can read more about it here. In a nutshell we can thank the Egyptians for the 24 hours and the Greeks for the 60 seconds and minutes.

So if we can’t actually manage time, what can we do to manage ourselves better? There are three steps we can use to accomplish more with the time we’ve been given. It’s not about managing time; it’s about managing choices.

"It’s not about managing time; it’s about managing choices!"
-Russ Peterson Jr.

Step 1: Organize

Information and requests come at us every day and they can come from different sources. The first step is to recognize how you receive your requests. You might get requests from phone calls, voice mails, email, text message, face-to-face meeting, Instagram, Facebook message, or even a sticky note left on your desk. How do people communicate with you to ask you for something? These are the channels you have to monitor for incoming requests. Once you receive a request, you need to put it where it belongs.

Potential destinations for your requests include:

  • Calendar – for requests that require a scheduled appointment or dedicated time

  • To Do List – for items that will need to be completed, but don’t currently have a dedicated time on the calendar

  • Reference File System – digital or physical, some information you receive just needs to be archived so you can easily find it again when needed.

  • Trash – Some information is just an fyi for you or not even necessary. Delete this information as soon as possible.

Step 2: Prioritize

Once your information is organized, you need to decide when to work on it. One customer I worked with years ago admitted to using her email inbox as her to-do list and prioritizing the tasks by which email arrived first! Dwight D. Eisenhower was credited with using a simple process for determining priorities. The method simply differentiated between important and urgent. If all your efforts are determined by what is due next, you are managing your time by urgency. When you manage your to-do list by urgency, your list is actually managing you.

"When you manage your to-do list by urgency, your list is actually managing you."
-Russ Peterson Jr.

Step 3: Execute

Just creating and prioritizing the list won’t make anything happen. Now you have to take action. One simple but powerful tip for executing your plan is to remove distractions and focus on just that one thing for a set period of time. For example, I dedicated 60 minutes this morning to work on this blog post and a couple other ideas. My email tool is turned off (not just minimized!) so I can remove any distractions. Once my 60 minutes are up, I can take a break or maybe even reward myself (Did someone say Round Rock Donuts?) for staying focused on my task.

As a professional salesperson who lived in Houston traffic, I can tell you that organizing and planning my appointments for the day allowed me to have more productive time in front of customers instead of behind a windshield.

I’m going to end this blog post here because my 60 minutes are up and I’m going to go see what’s in the kitchen. 😉

Always learning,

Russ

Can I ask a favor?

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Russ Peterson Jr.
Co-founder, iSpeak