Is Zen a word that you occasionally use? If you stress the word occasionally, I would answer yes to this question. Especially if we were discussing a topic like the benefits of time management.
Zen teaches that the potential to achieve enlightenment is inherent in everyone but lies dormant because of ignorance. It is best awakened not by the study of scripture or the practice of good deeds, but by breaking through the boundaries of mundane logical thought. To be successful in the battle of getting things done you certainly break through these boundaries.
Related post: Lessons Learned in LIfe … Class Contiues Daily
Nothing else can be managed if time is not managed. Pretty tough quote by Peter Drucker, but if you think about it carefully, you will agree. Getting things done doesn’t come easy and it starts and ends with productive use of time.
Getting things done is all about the ability to plan and control how you spend the hours in your day to effectively accomplish your goals. Poor time management is related to procrastination, as well as problems with self-control. Skills involved in managing your time include planning ahead, setting and prioritizing goals, and paying attention to what you have accomplished.
Before going further in telling you how to be more productive in getting things done, let me tell a story to set the stage. The story is really an effective analogy and here it is:
This story is about a big game prize. Your prize winnings is in the form of a daily deposit by your bank into your account. Each morning your bank would deposit $86,400 in your private account for your use.
However, this prize has rules :
Everything that you didn’t spend during each day would be taken away from you.
You may not simply transfer money into some other account.
You may only spend it.
Each morning upon awakening, the bank opens your account with another $86,400 for that day.
The bank can end the game without warning; at any time it can say,”Game Over!” It can close the account and you will not receive a new one.
So what would be your plan of action?
You would buy anything and everything you wanted right?
Not only for yourself, but for all the people you love and care for. Even for people you don’t know, because you couldn’t possibly spend it all on yourself, right?
You would try to spend every penny, and use it all, because you knew it would be replenished in the morning, right?
ACTUALLY, This GAME is REAL …..
Each of us is already a winner of this “prize”.
Only instead of money, this prize is TIME.
Each morning we awaken to receive 86,400 seconds as a gift of life.
And when we go to sleep at night, any remaining time is NOT credited to us.
What we haven’t used up that day is forever lost.
Yesterday is forever gone.
Each morning the account is refilled, but the bank can dissolve your account at any time WITHOUT WARNING …
SO, what is your plan of action for this precious commodity each day? What is your plan of action for getting things done with your time?
Those seconds are worth so much more than the same amount in dollars. Think about that and enjoy every second of your life, because time races by so much quicker than you think.
Benefits of time management … start spending, but spend wisely.
It often feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all the things we want to accomplish, let alone find a moment to relax. The demands of work and social life, combined with our basic needs for sleep, food, and exercise, can quickly add up and overflow, producing the sense that time is constantly slipping away. Time may be limited, but it doesn’t have to always feelthat way. New research suggests that our state of mind can change the way we perceive and experience time, and in turn, make us happier and more successful in getting things done.
Have you read Stephen Covey’s book “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”? The figure below is Covey’s now quite famous “time management matrix” from this book. If you have read the book, it will be familiar to you.
Covey’s Time Management Matrix
His focus on the time-management matrix is part of Habit #3 – Put first things first. Here he argues that we need to spend our time and effort with the type of tasks listed in the second quadrant (Important and Not Urgent), as these are truly important to us and are not done, ineffectively, at the last minute.
Most importantly, this habit, as with many “step-like” programs, will only be successful if you first achieve the earlier habits. In this case, both Habit #1 – Be Proactive, and Habit #2 – Begin with the end in mind, must be established.
Habit 1 and Habit 2 build a base of necessity and purpose, respectively. First, by acknowledging our responsibility in life to make and own our choices, Habit #1 establishes us as responsible, active people world. With this established, Habit #2 provides the focus for this type of action. With Habit 2, we answer the question, “What is my purpose?” We establish our mission and the vision for our actions.
So in addition to Covey’s time management matrix, follow these additional tips to help you in getting things done:
Organize your plan
In order to have your priorities lined up for each day, make a list of things that you have to do the night before and evaluate the importance of those projects. By committing your priorities to paper, you psychologically enter into a contract with yourself because it creates a greater responsibility in your mind to get these things done.
Benefits of time management in the workplace … start the day early
Coming up short on time toward the end of the day? Get started 30 minutes early. It will give you some breathing room with the day and start the day with important alone time. There’s nothing better than starting the day fully organized and ready to go. It could also give you some time to re-think today’s priorities.
Do you know your priorities?
Know your priorities
Plan to spend at least 50 percent of your time engaged in the thoughts, activities and conversations that produce most of your results … quadrant 2 tasks.
Keep the focus on quadrant 2 tasks
Oftentimes, we don’t do the essential things that need to be done because we get sidetracked — in many cases by tasks we’d rather be doing. In order to avoid this trap, it’s important to keep the focus on the plan of attack on quadrant 2. If you notice more than an occasional task in quadrant 1, it is important to put better effort in planning.
Work to the plan for getting things done
When you can visualize how you plan your day to go, you can cut back the down time. Got enough work done? Put some time in the gym or talk to your family. If you can schedule and plan accordingly, you’ll never run out of time.
Disadvantages of time management … beware interruptions
Plan time to be pulled away from what you’re doing. It will happen, as it happens to us all. Accommodate these interruptions in your plan.
Can you be realistic?
Be realistic
When you’ve created a plan and a schedule, it’s important to be realistic about what you can actually accomplish in a workday and prioritize accordingly.
Stay organized
Keeping up with an organizer that holds every appointment you have will cut down on any wasted time. Most people think they can get away with just creating mental notes, but that’s not good planning. Keeping your life in order with something concrete will aid in cutting down stress. Tidying your desk and workspace can also keep your work consistent. Plan time to be pulled away from what you’re doing.
Avoid Distractions
Easily the hardest thing to do all day at work is to be able to focus at all times. We all struggle with distraction, but being able to get back on the horse and stay focused is a great talent.
The bottom line
Remember this: everyone in the getting things done business will tell you the same thing – “learn to say no.”It is very difficult to say no until you have established your own sense of priority and purpose.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to learning to learn. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning from all around in your environment.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on mentoring from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Are You Looking for an Extraordinary Fast Track Career
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business.
Is there a secret of how to know yourself? Probably not too many of us. But sharing what we learn with others … well, that may be a differentstory. We should not be strangers to sharing knowledge and advice with others, should we? I recently read a very interesting article from Brain Picking’s Weekly. Ever read from this weekly? Always chock full of interesting reads. Certainly the case here, especially since it is about what Brain Pickings teaches about how to know yourself.
In this blog, I will share the article (reprioritizing the points to emphasize my feelings on their importance) and add my thoughts on each point.
We love to read about learning, especially when people discuss what they have learned over the years. This is particularly when the people are like Maria Popova. Maria is the substance behind Brain Pickings, a highly influential curation of the best content from the web and beyond.
As she describes it, Brain Pickings is “your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology.” Maria is a prolific reader, reading hundreds of things a day and posts the best to her blog and constantly-updating Twitter feed.
Let’s get started with this recent article from Maria in Brain Pickings:
On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as an email to my seven colleagues at one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college. Over the years that followed, the short weekly email became a tiny website updated every Friday, which became a tiny daily publication, which slowly grew, until this homegrown labor of love somehow ended up in the Library of Congress digital archive of “materials of historical importance” and the seven original recipients somehow became several million readers. How and why this happened continues to mystify and humble me as I go on doing what I have always done: reading, thinking, and writing about enduring ideas that glean some semblance of insight – however small, however esoteric – into what it means to live a meaningful life.
In October of 2013, as Brain Pickings turned seven, I marked the occasion by looking back on the seven most important things I learned from the thousands of hours spent reading, writing, and living during those first seven years. (Seven is an excellent numeral – a prime, a calendric unit, the perfect number of dwarfs.) I shared those reflections not as any sort of universal advice on how a life is to be lived, but as centering truths that have emerged and recurred in the course of how this life has been lived; insights that might, just maybe, prove useful or assuring for others. (Kindred spirits have since adapted these learnings into a poster and a short film.)
As Brain Pickings turns nine, I continue to stand by these seven reflections, but the time has come to add two more. (Nine is also an excellent numeral – an exponential factorial, the number of Muses in Greek mythology, my favorite chapter in Alice in Wonderland.)
Here are the nine subjects reflecting my priorities as well as heading descriptors:
Stillness.
How to know yourself … stillness
Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
My take:
No argument from me here, which is why it is at the top of my list. What is more important than your inner stillness and your ability to maintain and grow it? It enhances your ability to broaden and deepen your participation.
Freedom to change
Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right – even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
My take:
It is very hard for most of us to change, particularly when it involves admitting to being wrong. As active learners we should all practice acknowledging we don’t know or we haven’t formed an opinion.
Know yourself meaning … know who you are
When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
My take:
Nothing is simpler than listening politely and just moving on. You must believe that no one knows you any better than you.
Know your priorities
Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night – and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
My take:
In my opinion, we are all attracted to money, status, approval, prestige. Just try and provide balance those attractions with knowing what your deeper rewards are and explicitly examine them in making tradeoffs.
Why is knowing yourself important … expand your presence
Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living – for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
My take:
Would certainly expect this subject from Maria. She is the master of being involved with as many of her loves as possible. I certainly appreciate giving up some perfection to spread where you can contribute more. If I had the opportunity to redo my career, I would definitely put more focus on this goal. How about you?
Be generous.
Be generous
Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
My take:
Could not say it any better. Appreciate every interaction for its ability to understand and be understood. Imagine what could be achieved if each one of us could improve just 5-10 % here.
Spend the time
“Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that – a myth – as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
My take:
As one who did much employeecoaching in his day, teaching patience is one of the most difficult tasks. But it can be the most rewarding for those that develop the skill.
Getting to know yourself activities … magnify your spirit
Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit – it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
My take:
A very interesting way to describe this subject. About 20 years ago I selected 5 authors to magnify my spirit by letting them be my ‘silent’ mentors. They have never let me down.
Learning about ourselves … don’t fear idealism
Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture – which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands – give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want.
But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” – a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial – in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.
My take:
I read this one several times before I could put my arms around what I felt Maria wanted us to take away. What I take away from this is that whether we are a realist or an idealist, the focus needs to be staying our course, while maximizing our value add to others.
The bottom line
Thank goodness for the Marias of this world. Without them, we would be learning at a much slower pace. Thank you for all your sharing Maria.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s teamwork, collaboration, and learning? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a teamwork or continuous learning workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of business. Find him on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
10 Extraordinary Ways for Learning to Learn
Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success
