No Nonsense: Time Management: 50 Tips to Hack Your Time and Get Everything Done

By Karen Tiber Leland and Keith Bailey

Defeat distraction: “Karen and Keith’s easy-to-implement advice will maximize your efficiency and enable you to find more time in your day.” —Tory Johnson, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Shift

Written by a longtime consultant who has served clients in over fifty countries, No Nonsense: Time Management helps you overcome overload and avoid the traps that lead to an unproductive relationship with time. You’ll find smart solutions, powerful habits, and proven time hacks for improving everyday work situations:

•Harness the power of completion

•Stay sane when dealing with social media

•Get a procrastination inoculation

•Play the 80/20 game of accomplishment

•Set goals

•Make lists

•Have more efficient conversations

•Organize your inbox

•Retool your priority system

•Identify your interruptions

•Overcome multitasking madness, and more

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781632657589

Book preview

Introduction

In the late 1980s, the phrase work-life balance began to appear around office water coolers and cubicles everywhere. Today, it's a staple of business books, consulting gurus, and television talk shows. Work-life balance describes the relationship between career achievement (getting ahead, being productive, professional accomplishment) and personal fulfillment (family, friends, hobbies, contribution). But despite all the hype, the last two decades have seen an increase in the average work week from 43.6 hours to 47.1 hours. In addition, a 2019 study from Rescue Time on work-life balance reported that:

21% of working hours are spent on entertainment, news, and social media.

28% of workers start their day before 8:30 AM (and 5% start before 7:00 AM).

40% of people use their computers after 10:00 PM.

26% of work is done outside normal working hours.

For many people, the problem is a catch-22: If you spend more time on your personal life, your work falls behind. But if you spend too much time at the office, your family life and sense of well-being can suffer. Although we don't believe there is a single solution, we do believe that learning to manage time and energy makes a substantial difference in achieving a healthy worklife balance.

The smart solutions, powerful habits, and proven time hacks given in this book come from time-management workshops we have led for corporations over the past thirty years, tens of thousands of employee-attitude surveys we have conducted, a review of the most recent research by some of the leading behavioral scientists in the field, and up-close observations of our clients as they learn to be more productive while balancing their careers and personal lives.

But before jumping in, we think it's essential to acknowledge the great debt we owe to the giants of time management who have come before us. We can all learn how to make the most of our day from these masters.

Learn from the Masters

Throughout history, great philosophers, business masterminds, and even presidents have pondered the question: How can I best use my time? Their answers underlie many of the ways we think about time today. Here are just a few.

The Psychologist

In 1943, Abraham Maslow wrote his famous paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow's idea was that people are most able to cope with the larger issues of their lives (i.e., achievement, creativity, problem-solving) when their fundamental needs (food, warmth, shelter, safety) are taken care of. This hierarchical view of human needs inspired the POSEC method.

Prioritize your time according to the goals that you want to accomplish in life. If you start by knowing where you want to go, it's easier to get there.

Organize yourself by creating structures that allow you to meet your basic need to feel stable and secure in both your finances and your family. This may mean setting up a regular Friday-night dinner with your family or having a certain percentage of your paycheck automatically deposited to a savings account.

Streamline the things that you have to do, but don't necessarily like to do (like chores), by simplifying them or making them more efficient. For example, do all your routine errands (bank deposit, post office, grocery store) in one outing, rather than in separate trips.

Economize by reducing the amount of time and energy you invest in things that are not urgent and that you view as a low priority. For example, you may want to clean out your desk, but don't need to spend a whole day doing it.

Contribute by giving your time and energy back to the community through a charity or a good cause. Many people find that, when they have prioritized, organized, streamlined, and economized, they have a natural inclination to contribute to a larger purpose.

The Business Guru

Stephen Covey, in his best-selling book First Things First (Free Press), tells a story that illustrates the importance of making your most important tasks your highest priority. In the book, Covey describes a time-management teacher filling a mason jar with large rocks and asking his students if the jar is full. When they respond yes, he proved them wrong by adding gravel to fill in the spaces between the rocks. Asked if the jar is now full, the students were not so sure. He then added sand and water to fill in the remaining spaces. When the teacher asked what the point of the demonstration was, the students replied that, if you look hard enough, you can always fit more into your life. No, the teacher explained. The point is that, if you don't put the big rocks in first, they will never fit. Do you tend to make time in your day for the gravel, sand, and water, but never find time for the big rocks?

The President

Dwight D. Eisenhower was quoted as saying: What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. This philosophy is the basis for the Eisenhower method of prioritizing, which sorts tasks by the following criteria:

Tasks that are unimportant and not urgent should be done later, deleted, or delegated.

Tasks that are important and urgent should be done now and not delegated.

Tasks that are unimportant and urgent should be done now and, whenever possible, delegated.

Tasks that are important and not urgent should be given a high priority, scheduled, and not delegated.

The Consultant

In 2001, David Allen wrote his best-selling book Getting Things Done and instantly became the first celebrity productivity consultant. His method was based on the idea that productivity is achieved by moving planned tasks and projects out of the mind and onto an external source (paper, tablet, etc.), then sorting them into actionable work items. There are five pillars to Allen's method:

Capture everything.

Clarify what you have to do.

Organize by category and priority.

Reflect on your to-do list.

Engage and get to work.

Allen was almost single-handedly responsible for a whole generation of workers learning to prioritize.

The Economist

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist in the early 20th century, is credited with the discovery of the 80/20 principle. Way back in 1897 (before the Internet), Pareto observed that 80 percent of the wealth was owned by 20 percent of the population. Much has changed since then, but Pareto's theory of disproportion is still widely applied to almost every aspect of business, from quality control to time management. Here are some of the ways that the 80/20 rule may be impacting you—and what you can do about it:

80% of your goals are achieved by working on 20% of your tasks. Identify which of your to-do's will move you the farthest toward accomplishing your important goals and make those a top priority.

20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. Learn to recognize which of your labors make the most effective use of your time.

80% of the value you receive from business reading comes from 20% of the material. Determine which business publications—magazines, blogs, books— consistently produce the most value and drop the rest.

20% of your co-workers give you 80% of the support you need. Identify who has your back at work, and return the favor in kind. Make a priority of maintaining your relationship with these people and acknowledge them for the ways in which they make your work life easier.

80% of the value your client receives relates to 20% of what your company does. Make the effort to determine the most important measures by which your customer judges you and invest your time in making those top-notch.

20% of your time-management habits cause 80% of your productivity problems. If you really look, most of your time issues can be boiled down to one or two bad habits, like lack of prioritization, multitasking, or procrastination. Identify your worst habits and work on improving them.

The Disruptor

According to his website, New York Times best-selling author Tim Ferriss says he teaches you how to escape the 9 to 5, live anywhere, and join the new rich. That was the premise and promise of Ferriss's book The Four-Hour Work Week. A smash hit with millennials looking to avoid the corporate drudgery of their parent's generation, this book has given voice to the workfrom- anywhere during-the-hours-you-choose crowd.

Now that you know some of the legacy of the great names in the world of time management, there is one thing left to do before jumping in to improve your productivity skills—and that's to assess where you are now.

PART 1

Assess Your Current Relationship with Time

Getting a beat on where you stand today in terms of timemanagement competency can help you determine where you need to go and how to get there. It can also help you assess how far you've come once you take the journey to shore up your skills. Here are four important techniques you can use to take the pulse of your time-management skills.

#1.

Determine Your Current Level of Time Literacy

To get an idea of your current level of time literacy, answer the questions below using the following guide:

1 = Almost never

2 = Once in a while

3 = Frequently

4 = All the time