Nexstar Coach's Blog
Time Management for the Manager
I am going to put $86,400 into your bank account every day for you to spend any way you wish. However, it will carry no balance over from day to day. Every day, the bank will delete whatever part you failed to use. What would you do? Withdraw every cent?
See, each of us has a bank account just like this. It’s the bank of time, because every morning, we are credited with 86,400 seconds. Every night, the bank of time writes off, as a loss, whatever amount of this time we failed to use. It will not carry over any balance, and it will not allow any overdrafts.
Shouldn’t we consider spending our time on things that are important, just as we would do with spending our own money?
So, how are you going to find extra time in the day?
Maybe, if we watch Netflix so we don’t have to watch commercials, we would have more time to work on the business. Yeah, that’s it.
No, we just watch another episode. You know it’s true. You know another way to find more time? Turn off the TV. Right?
The idea is, we'll save small fragments of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get done everything we want to do. Sounds great!
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Studies have been done on how people spend their time and how they look at their schedules hour by hour. But the successful people don’t build the day we want by saving time. We build the day we want, and then time saves itself.
Here's what I mean. Let’s say you come home to find that your sewer has backed up into your house, and there is now water and a mess everywhere. If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it is a big, stinky, and sloppy mess. So, you are now dealing with the immediate aftermath that night; the next day, you have plumbers coming in; the day after that, it’s a professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet and sheetrock. All of this is taking away from your time. This winds up taking seven hours of your week. Seven hours. That's like finding an extra hour in the day.
But I'm sure if you had asked yourself at the start of the week, "Could you find seven hours to do ride-alongs?" "Could you find seven hours to mentor seven technicians?" I'm sure you would've said what most of us would've said, which is, "No — can't you see how busy I am?" Yet when you had to find seven hours because there is wastewater all over your home, you found the time. And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.
First, we need to figure out what our priorities are. And now we need to break these down into doable steps and put them into our schedules first. We do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them. We have the power to fill our weeks and days with the things that need to be there.
I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons. Friday afternoon is what most might call a "low opportunity cost" time. Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying, "I am excited to make progress toward my priorities right now." But we are willing to think about what those should be. So, take a little bit of time Friday afternoon, and make yourself a priority list. Then look out over the whole of the next week, and see where you can plan them in.
So, we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? Pull out the phone. Next time you pull out your phone, plan your next week.
Remember, time waits for no one. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift.
Publication date: 6/21/2017
