There Ain’t No Such Thing as Time Management!
By Brad Warren, MA

That’s right, you can’t manage time. Despite all the workshops, software programs, PDAs, and personal planners available today, you can’t really manage time. I say what you do manage are people’s promises and commitments (as well as your own) made in time.

A co-worker promises to have a report to you by three o’clock on Tuesday, you make a commitment to attend your daughter’s soccer game on Saturday, and so on. We make promises and commitments to do something within a certain time frame and that’s what we manage, not time itself.

So if that’s true, how do we manage our promises? How do we organize ourselves to get more done in less time, and with less stress as well? Here are five general principles that I have found extremely useful to help me be productive and effective:

1. Have a planning system and use it religiously. And by “system,” I mean something more than just post-it notes and scraps of paper. It can be a PDA, a software program, or pen and paper planner. Your system should:

Work for you.
Be simple to use.
And be the one system tool you use (don’t lose it!).

Having one planner at work and one at home is confusing, not to mention that we always forget to write down our promises in one or the other and wind up missing an important event; either business or personal. (Oh, I forgot to ask: You do have a personal life, don’t you?)

2. Set goals, both short term (daily, weekly and monthly) and long term (quarterly, annually, and beyond).

The best goal setting formula is the SMART system: specific, measurable, attainable, action-oriented, realistic, and time-bound.

Describe your goal in non-jargony ways so that anyone can understand it. Make it measurable so you know if you reached it. Able to be accomplished by you (with assistance from others) and action oriented; meaning sub-goals or milestones along the way. Make it a stretch, but not so unrealistic that you’ll fail, and have a due-date, a specific deadline, or a “by-when” date.

Your goals should also be written down and shared with supportive others. Brain research shows that the mind would rather move toward a positive goal than run away from or avoid a negative one, so state your goals in positive terms, e.g., “I eat healthy, nutritious food” is better than “I will stop eating jelly doughnuts.”

3. Determine your priorities. You can’t do it all, no matter what they say. So what’s most important to you? This is not what’s most urgent. Some questions I use to help sort this out are:

What’s the best use of my time right now?
If I could only do one of these things on my list today, which one would it be?

Then work on that task until it’s done (completion frees up energy), then begin on the next. In the words of Goethe, “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” Or, in the words of Steven Covey, “Remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing!”

4. Schedule a week at a time. Again quoting one of Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” Look at what you’ve got planned for Friday. How does that impact what you’ll do on Thursday? On Wednesday? Tuesday? Today? Look into the future and plan backwards to the present.

And rather than prioritizing your schedule, try scheduling your priorities.

Efficient is doing things right, but effective is doing the right things. The greatest leap in my productivity and effectiveness (and satisfaction, too) was when I went from daily seat-of-the-pants planning to a very focused process of planning the entire week every Sunday evening. Try this weekly planning process for the next three weeks and if you don’t see a dramatic improvement in your productivity, I’ll refund your money.

5. Complete the day before you go to sleep. Look at your to-do list. Check off all the things you accomplished and congratulate yourself for doing what you did, not lamenting what you didn’t.

Reschedule those things that need doing by transferring them to another day; seeing if they can be delegated to someone else; or dropped, if they are no longer relevant.

Then go to sleep with a clear mind, uncluttered by thoughts of all the things you have to do. They’ll still be there in the morning. You’ll be much more refreshed and capable of handling them after you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep.

The key is to make and keep your promises and hold others accountable for theirs. I promise you a richer, more rewarding life if you do, and you will become a Master of Time Management in the process.

Brad can be reached at brad@bradwarren.com or 510-537-0107. Website is www.bradwarren.com

(First published in the July, 2000 issue of Perspectives.)

Author's Bio: 

Bradley K. Warren, BS, MA

Using a very practical, down-to-earth approach in both his coaching and training, Brad brings over 25 years experience in a number of fields to his work. Utilizing a lot of humor and audience participation in his custom designed seminars, he gets the job done by working closely with the client in the beginning to figure out “the gap” between where the participants are and where the company wants them to be at the end of the training. Likewise with his coaching clients, Brad spends a significant amount of time up front determining what the clients’ goals are, and then designing a program to reach those goals. He believes that the client drives the agenda – Brad is the coach/trainer, the client is the performer.

Brad offers one-on-one coaching with entrepreneurs, executives, and sole proprietors to hold them accountable, provide structure and support, and impact their effectiveness and productivity. He requires that clients sign on for a minimum of 6 months of coaching, believing that they need to make a real commitment to the process in order to derive any benefit. After an initial intake, homework assignment, and a possible 2-hour face-to-face session, Brad then works with them either weekly or bi-weekly over the phone for the next 6 months. As a testament to his success, most clients stay on for much longer than that (2-3 years is not uncommon).

In addition to his graduate work in counseling, Brad has hundreds of hours of training as a mediator and negotiator, as well as being certified to teach a number of courses for other training organizations. He has also studied coaching with Patricia McDade of the Entrepreneurial Edge, and is a certified Corporate Business Coach from Corporate Coach University. He has served as a volunteer mediator with the Hayward Area Mediation Service, is a founding board member of the Berkeley Dispute Resolution Service, and was the Vice President of Professional Development for the Mt. Diablo Chapter of the American Society for Training and Development.

Brad’s earlier career included 10 years as a teacher of New Games and cooperative sports, where he taught students and other teachers the fundamentals of a win-win approach to sports. He also produced a nationally distributed video entitled Parachute Games. He also spent 5 years working with a clinical psychologist and a mediator, marketing their services to the corporate world while conducting seminars and mediations as well as coaching clients on career and business development. He also spent 6 years leading seminars for the Fred Pryor Seminar Company, and has taught in front of over 40,000 people throughout his career in 27 of the United States as well as 19 foreign countries.

Brad enjoys traveling nationally and internationally, working out at the gym, reading, and spending time with his wife and 18-year-old daughter, especially camping and hiking. He has a BS in Philosophy and Psychology from MIT and an MA in Education from the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a certified negotiator and mediator with National Center Associates, and is certified to teach the Tony Alessandra Platinum Rule Workshop. He also is versed in administering and interpreting the DISC Personality Profile as well as the Workplace Motivators Profile, and teaches negotiation skills, how to achieve work life balance, time management, how to design and deliver powerful presentations, how to run better meetings, stress management, customer service, communication skills, and conflict resolution.