Time Management
Or how to control your destiny in four easy steps
by Philip Siddons

Some people handle their time like they handle their money -- they're always out of it and wished they had more. They were your classmates who invariably waited until the night before the deadline to start their paper. They're the ones you expect to walk in late for company meetings. Once in the meeting, they wouldn't be able to arrive at a final decision and closure on a topic if you told them the building is about to blow up. Thank goodness they aren't chairing the meeting.

It's true. Time management comes easily for some, but for others, time is alien to their spontaneous life. For some, time is a river of life's movement, during which you can accomplish whatever is most important to you before you get down steam. For others, time is something that gets used up ... without prior thought or effort.

Some of us have natural abilities to manage the time periods of our lives, to maintain a sense of movement through tasks in relation to the other tasks of varying degrees of priority. Others of us are process people -- people who like the doing of the task but care little for standing back and analyzing where they are in relation to the conclusion. There are advantages to each type of behavior.

For the process people, unfortunately, the business world is structured the same as school -- there are things to do and there is a limited amount of time in which to do them. Unless you're a gifted artist who produces a painting whenever you get around to it, and makes a few million on each painting, you're forced to be living in the real world of time and task restraints.

In once sense, time is a gift. Life is a gift. You only have to walk down Main street and notice the physically challenged people in wheelchairs or the aging alcoholics, from the City Mission, edging their way past our windows. They've had hard times and the choices they have in their future are considerably less than our own.

So how do we make the best use of our time? How can we control our time -- our lives -- most effectively?

"Controlling" is a word many of us don't like. We don't like "controlling" people and we somehow don't like that word associated with our lifestyle. Life is to be lived, we feel, not controlled. Isn't this dog-eat-dog rat race, typified in the movie "Wall Street," about people who are always out to control everything?

True, there's a lot of "Type-A" heart attack prone power freaks around who are into control, but their problem has to do with controlling others. The last horizon for them is to get control of themselves.

Time management is, first of all, realizing who controls your life. Are you the subject of your life or are you the object of another's? Put another way: Who determines what you do with your time?

"That's easy," we quickly say, "I am in charge of myself." But look, for a minute, at the scenes from the play in which we star.

Scene One. You have a date this Friday. This looks like serious symmetry coming up. Dinner, theatre tickets, .... a clear moonlight in the forecast. By Tuesday you've got your clothing decided. By Wednesday the transportation is figured out. Tickets are in hand and on Friday your life is choreographed like a Broadway smash hit. No ring around the collar here.

Scene two. It's Tuesday morning. In ten minutes you go into a department meeting and you're supposed to present a summary of the work you've been doing on a project. You know a chart or an outline would clarify what has been happening, but in ten minutes? No time for that. "They'll have to be content to sit there and just hear me talk through it. And who ever said meetings were supposed to be interesting or stimulating? Where has the time gone?"

In these two scenes, we were more prepared for our date than our business meeting. Is our manager correct in assuming that since we don't get paid to go out on dates, might we be better prepared for meetings if we didn't get paid?

The point is that we do better with things we feel are more important -- high priority items. But think again about priorities. Where would your date life be without income from your job?

Now all this relates to time management. The basic premise is this: Your life consists of a series of choices that you make. Only you control what happens to your character in the play in which you star. And there are four steps to taking control of your life.

These four things are the key to how you control your destiny, whether it involves being prepared for a meeting or a hot date.

1. Keep a list of what you've got to do

Sounds simple, but surprisingly some people can't even do that. A list means an account of the tasks for which you have responsibility. A list means one place where you can find and refer often to what you must do. Thirty-five scraps of paper of things to do is barely better than keeping no list at all. How many times have you seen an office with about fifteen stacks of paper, each representing a project that demands attention? Piles of work are alright as long as there is one list containing what all those piles represent.

There's the marvelous example of the auto mechanic in the book "Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." The mechanic had his tools scattered all around the garage, and at first glance it looked like a tornado had struck. The mechanic, however, had his own system of organizing his tools and knew exactly where every piece was when he needed it. Appearances are not so important as organization.

No matter what your office looks like, your list should be in one place on one piece of paper, and it should be edited several times a day.

2. Prioritize that list

This is harder than it sounds. It's hard because we already know what is more important. It's just that we like doing some things better than we like doing others. Some parts of our job, (and don't tell the boss), are so enjoyable, you can't believe they pay you to do them. Some tasks come easily for us while other things are pure drudgery -- even boring. Its these monotonous and routine things we tend to put off, even though they often have deadlines attached to them.

Our tendency is to do the things we like first and put off the rest. But remember what your parents said years ago -- "work first, play last." Perhaps a quip from the fairy tale world is more appropriate: "If you've gotta' kiss a frog to marry a prince, kiss the biggest and ugliest ones first." (No relevance to modern day dating.)

The point is to go through that list of things to do and make it clear which tasks are more important to do than others -- even if they might happen to be less enjoyable.

3. Plan when to do them

This gets harder. It involves having a space on your paper representing the day you are planning. It is much better to plan your day the prior evening. That way, you can start the day's work without having to stop and analyze your tasks while the phone is ringing and you've got two people requesting help. To commit time periods of your day to doing the highest priority tasks on your list is 90% of what time management is about. If you look at a person who hasn't got their day's time periods committed to accomplishing specific tasks, on paper, you are looking at a person who hasn't got control of their day. It's like staring in a play for which you haven't got a script. You don't know what to expect nor how to respond. By in large, you don't know your part.

The best practical thing you can do, if you're not used to managing your day's time, is to go out and buy a calendar/scheduler from your stationary store. "Dayrunner" is one of the best I've seen. You can look at the month's appointments at a glance and flip a page to see your day's work mapped out before you. On the "day" page you see the time periods mapped out, with an ongoing list of things to do to, with a priority ranking on the right. The "Dayrunner" costs about $35.00 for the year, but with our computer and a good word processor, you could make your own.

4. Starting

That's the hardest part. You might have your day, month and whole life organized magnificently, but the last ten percent of getting your act together is beginning.

You've heard of "writer's block." That's when people feel they just can't get started -- that they don't have anything to say, or are afraid that if they were writing, nothing would come out. The reason for writer's block lies in the above phrases:
"feel that they just can't get started" ... "afraid that if they
were writing... ." If you started writing you'd be writing. And
once you actually are writing, you are saying something. The
only way to overcome writer's block is to write -- to do it.

But that's true of everything. The trick is to put aside your feelings about "what if" and "what might" and just do it -- to physically begin the task. The rest is down hill.

Benefits

Once you incorporate these four patterns of managing your time, you'll notice a tremendous change in your life. You'll feel more in control of your life. You'll be in more control of your life. You will sense that your life has more worth because you are calling the shots -- in fact, your life will get more interesting. You'll not only be more aware of what is before you, because you are making the choices for your day, you'll feel more free to improvise. Because you have a better sense of what you are choosing to do with your day and week, you'll feel more familiar with your script. And with familiarity comes creativity.

Instead of taking the time to just create a visual chart for your department report, perhaps you'll add a little skit -- involving three others in your department, to dramatize the point.

That's the kind of imagination that one day moves you from having a starring part in the play to becoming the director and producer.

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Author's note: Philip Siddons is the Director of Advertising and
Marketing for a computer firm in Buffalo New York.