Effective use of your most valuable resource begins with an honest log of how it’s spent. In last week’s post I challenged you to record your time over a three to four week period. Once you have completed your time-study, the next step is to prune all of the unproductive demands on your time.
In his book The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker recommended that you ask yourself the following three questions to guide this process:
- What am I doing that does not need to be done at all?
- What am I doing that could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?
- What am I doing that wastes other people’s time?
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
#1. Eliminate
It is amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.
Peter Drucker
An important life skill is learning how to say “no,” sometimes even to good opportunities.
Effective people pick their spots. They are very good at discerning what things are truly worth their time and what things aren’t.
Our time is valuable because it is scarce. There will always more things to do in a day than time to do them. Therefore, in order to free up more time for the important things you must look at your time-log and identify everything that doesn’t need be done and stop doing them immediately.
Some habits, like time spent on social media, will undoubtedly be difficult to break. If you need to cut back on your screen time, here are a few tools that may help:
- Freedom is an app and website blocker to reclaim focus and productivity
- Forest is an app that turns focus into a game. Put down your phone, or a tree will die
- Escape logs your time spent on social media and gives you a daily quota
I make use of the wellness app on my phone. The biggest change I made was limiting my access to Instagram to just 10-minutes per day.
After identifying the obvious time wasters in your schedule, turn your attention to the activities that are less so. It may help to ask the follow-up question, “What would happen if I stopped doing that?”
Apply this question to all of your recurring meetings at work. Could a simple written memo take the place of a 30-minute meeting?
What would happen if you didn’t reply immediately to every new email and instead only checked your inbox once or twice each day? How many of those “urgent requests” might disappear all on their own?
#2. Delegate
As usually presented, delegation makes little sense. If it means that somebody else ought to do part of “my work,” it is wrong. One is paid for doing one’s own work. And if it implies, as the usual sermon does, that the laziest manager is the best manager, it is not only nonsense; it is immoral.
Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker clearly had a problem with how some people in his day interpreted the art of delegation. It’s not a means of getting others to do your work. Rather, Drucker believed in getting rid of anything that can be done by somebody else so that you can get to your own work.
In other words, delegation isn’t just telling people what to do. It’s giving complete ownership of the work, results, and recognition.
The ultimate goal is to free up as much time as possible to focus only on the most important tasks that you are uniquely equipped to do.
Some people call this finding your “zone of genius.” It’s the overlap between the best use of your talents and time. But contribution at this peak level is only possible if you’re willing to give up control to others.
Is delegation a habit to be learned by managers only? I don’t think so.
Even individual contributors can find opportunities to leverage the shared knowledge and expertise of their fellow colleagues. What are you spending way too much time doing that someone on your team is better equipped to handle? Is there any reason not to ask for help?
Delegation may also take the form of automation.
Team members at all levels of the organization should strive for automating routine tasks whenever appropriate. What are you currently doing that could be done in a fraction of the time with a short macro or script?
Even if you don’t know how to code, applications like Zapier and IFTTT are making workflow automations significantly easier to implement. Investing the time to automate now could potentially reap big dividends well into the future.
#3. Investigate
A common cause of time-waste is largely under the executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time of others he himself wastes.
Peter Drucker
The third and final question forces us to reflect on the ways that we may be unintentionally wasting other people’s time.
There isn’t a single symptom for this. But a few that come to mind include:
- Constantly changing priorities
- Not respecting the maker’s schedule
- Over communication
- Under communication
- Ineffective meetings
It doesn’t matter who you are. C-suite executives, middle managers, or entry-level analyst. We’re all guilty of wasting other people’s time.
The only way to improve is to ask each other for honest feedback.
We never work in a vacuum. Everything we do has impact on those around us. Only with intentional effort can teams learn how to operate effectively with each other and reduce the friction of collaboration.
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