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No Time for Time Management? Read This

Bob Ryan, About Purpose, Inc. ©2006 

 

Goal: Get a grip on your time use, without taking much time to do it

 

Covey GraphThree Areas:

 

Effectiveness (doing the right things)

Efficiency (doing things right)

Delegation (getting others to do the right things right)

 

First, make sure you’re doing the right things.Quickly try this exercise based on Covey’s 3rd Habit:*

 

  1. Jot down tasks you spend a lot of time on in the appropriate boxes.
  2. Now cross out everything in quadrants 3 and 4 – you shouldn’t be doing any of them.
  3. Determine how things in quadrant 2 came to be urgent and assign correcting those errors as activities in quadrant 1.
  4. Resolve to focus 80% or more of your time on quadrant 1 activities.

 

Main principle: Keep your purpose firmly in mind and refuse to be sidetracked by anything else.

 

Second, do the right things in the right way. Take charge of routine tasks.

bullet Only handle a piece of paper once – attend to it, delegate it or toss it.
bullet Get incoming e-mail and telephone calls under control.
bullet Filter all you can
bullet Handle all the rest only once, as above
bullet Buy and use a scheduler – paper, electronic, web-based – whatever fits your personality and skills. Schedule everything – if you can’t figure out how to write it down, it probably doesn’t need doing – at least by you.

Main principle: Be ruthless about being efficient.

Third, get the right people to do the right things right.

 

For any task you intend to delegate make sure you do the following:

 

  1. Articulate expected results that are clearly mission related.
  2. Set clear limitations. (Generally, limit yourself to negative parameters)
  3. Delegate to the appropriate person. (Knowledge, skills and attitude)
  4. Initiate a self-monitoring control system. (Milestones, measures, etc.)
  5. Delegate sufficient authority. (More on delegation Click Here)
  6. Appropriate sufficient resources.

 

Main principle: Help other do the right things right.