When I read back over the name of this chapter I was not very happy with it. "Self Management"…it makes it sound as if we need to be careful or we might go off the rails unless we are managed properly, that we can't be trusted to stay the course unless there is a specific management plan in place to keep us focused! Surely we are bigger and better than this, surely we don't need a management department in our lives that we are answerable to if we mess up….or do we?
I then began to think about my own life and all the things I had done during my life and the things I had achieved. I thought about my time in college and before that in boarding school and I began to say to myself "well I never had any thoughts about self management then and I did pretty ok" . What about the time when I began my working career did I have a self-management plan then? No and how did I do? I did ok …well I may have struggled a little but in the main I did alright!
And there it is, that’s when the concept of self-management began to make sense for me. I did well in school and pretty well in College with out a self-management system but guess what, I did not need one because it was present anyway. In boarding school everything was regimented and you did every thing by the clock…meals, study, breaks, recreation, sleep etc. The same was true, but to a lesser degree as I started College (at least for me because I lived at home and was probably a slow developer in terms of rebellion) because my parents ran a fairly strict ship and life was quite rigid to the extent that breakfast was at nine, lunch was at 1pm and tea was at 6pm. It did not vary much from that, even on holidays. So again the management of self was in a sense imposed on me so I did not really need to concern myself with it,…. that was simply the way.
As the college years went on I became a little more rebellious and of course along with this came the destruction of the rigid structure, for me at least, if not my family. This was of course great as my independence was being asserted and my fun quotient was on the increase..great. Along with this however came the inevitable struggle for self-management and I began to struggle with exams, deadlines etc. I had to get a grip on myself or repeat each year due to failure…having done this once I did not consider it as a viable option, plus leaving college before my late twenties was definitely an overriding goal!
I needed to return to some of the ways I learned when in boarding school but without the feeling of imposing something on myself, my self-management system had to take me and fun into account. So this is what I did…..
I decided to firstly look at all the things I was doing in my life that was not adding to me in any positive way. In other words if I was doing something, for what ever reason and that something was not giving me a benefit in terms of saving time, or helping me enjoy something or was not getting me closer to something I wanted to achieve then I wrote it in one column. All the things that I was doing that was saving me time or giving me some positive joy or helping me achieve something I wrote in another column.
I then allotted a ballpark time to each of these activities over approximately one week and totted up both sides. I can tell you the result was astounding, I don't remember the exact amount of time I was spending on stuff that was not helping me at all (its almost twenty years ago) but I do remember that it far out weighed the time I was spending on useful things and fun things.
Why was this, what was going on here? I would have thought that if I had been wasting time that it was probably on the fun stuff but no I was wasting time on things like the list below:
Dawdling in the Morning
Not paying attention
Skipping Class
Trying to find someone who's notes I could copy
Putting stuff off till later
Over -organising my notes
Etc etc etc.
You may say, "sure every student does that, its part of college". You are probably correct in saying that but does that mean they are getting the best out their time there and I am not referring to getting the best out of college academically I am talking about the big picture the total college experience. I know that if I had not spent all that time messing about and mis-managing my self at that time I could have had a lot more fun because things would not have mounted up and begun to swallow me. I would not have missed that summer in the US because I had to repeat my exams.
I am not silly enough to think that anything has changed or will change when it comes to students, I am sure it’s the exact same now. For me it is part of the continuous learning path we are all on but how many of us actually learn along that path.
Lets look at my list above again and let’s see how this relates to the working world. As we go through it think about the things you do everyday and the impact that has on your day / life.
Dawdling In the Morning:
How many people are known in the work place for their poor time management skills? It would seem that this is a big issue as it is something I am constantly asked by clients to work on with their teams. What about your friends..don't we all have at least one friend or acquaintance that is habitually late. They will make excuses and say that is just they way they are when of course what they should be saying is that it is the way they have learned to become. None of us are born poor time managers but because of lack of interest or laziness or simply disorganisation we learn this negative skill and others collude with us by accepting it thus we do not have to change it and it ends up being seen as part of personality…”that’s just who I am….”
We are never too old or it is never too late to change this habit. We firstly need to be become aware of our behaviour.
- Take a period of time, say the past month or even week
- How many appointments have you had in that time frame both personal and business related?
- Write the Personal ones in Column A and the business related in Column B
- Now review each list and work out which ones you were in good time for and those you were late for even if its only a minute late (when it comes to self management you cannot let yourself off the hook)
- What is the pattern emerging? What type of appointments do you tend to be good at keeping and which are the ones you tend to let slip.
- For those times when you were on time or early what did you do differently to those times when you ran late?
- Now see how you could implement that behaviour for all appointments regardless of how important or not.
When you do this exercise the general rule is that we tend to be pretty good on the business related stuff and not so great on the personal stuff. Why is this? Surely if we can be punctual on one side we can be punctual on both? Of course that is true but because we feel there is no real consequence to our tardiness on the personal side we become a little concerned. This is obviously not true for everyone but for those that it is true for it has an impact on many other people whether we realise it or not. Our friends get annoyed with us and begin to arrange to meet with us earlier to ensure we actually arrive when we need to or in the extreme case we may be left out of things as we are seen as delayers. In a sense it is better to do the latter than the former as the former is a form of collusion.
This is a habitual behaviour and unfortunately habits tend to grow not diminish, particularly if left unchecked. If this happens eventually our tardiness will spill over to out business lives where there definitely are consequences.
This is particularly true when we consider the way organizational structures are changing we are (and many already have) moving from the traditional hierarchy to a more flatter and interdependent structure. IN the old structure the keys to success were power, order, predictability and control where as success in today’s world is about empowerment and independence rather than being trapped in the organizations management structure. Now you need to develop your own internal management structure ….become a self-manager. Successful organizations now understand that to be truly successful they will need to harness this new breed of individual into a team environment where the buzzword is interdependence and only those individual that can truly be self-managers will succeed in this environment
So what can you do?
You need to break the habit and by this I mean you firstly need to ask yourself are you ready to change and you must be absolutely ready to change because habit breaking requires resilience and persistence . You need to set some goals fro yourself (we will discuss this in the next chapter). You need to talk in a positive way about your intentions to create some great new habits in this area (Chapter 7 will deal with this in more depth). Yon then have to get committed and take action as life will reward action rather than mere intention.
The second item I had in my list was Not Paying Attention:
How often do we go through life not paying attention. Think about the last staff meeting you attended or the last sales meeting you were involved in. What about the last project discussion you attended or a briefing session you went to. At all those times were you 100% attentive at all times? If you are like most people there were probably times when you disappeared from the room for a few moments (mentally speaking) and drifted off to a holiday or a party you attended or reviewing your next task for the day or thinking about that report that needs to be in by Friday etc. We all do this and it at these times that we miss things and its is often these things that we miss that are our opportunities to move forward in our lives.
How much of this do we do when we are listening to others? When I am working with clients I get them to do a self assessment in this area and they are generally shocked to find the kind of results they are getting in regard to this.
Most of us could pay a lot more attention to those around us (particularly in our communication efforts) and to life in general.
Paying attention is all about being in the moment and experiencing reality rather than existing in our heads and experiencing a version of reality that resides there.
An example of this is when we take a walk in the country or along a beach we tend to miss most of what we are passing and if someone was to ask us to describe what we had just seen we would struggle with the answer. For most of us the walk serve only to give us time to dwell on our thoughts and miss the reality of the moment.
I will deal with this in greater detail in chapter 6: A Mind For Success but is is important to raise the issue here as it has a great impact on how we manage our selves on a day to day basis. Consider if we truly paid attention to what was happening or being said at all times how much time we would save in not having to recheck what the message was or discuss with a colleague what the final decision of the meeting was again?
If you find yourself doing this then you are living in your head in a state of trance I would call it and you need to snap out of it. I will give you pointers on this later in the book.
Skipping Class and Trying to copy notes
These two items from my list are simply a reflection on my lack of disciplin and is something I hopefully grew out of over the years and hopefully you do not fall into a similar category for if you do there are much greater issue you need to be tackling.
It was a case of indiscipline but I often wonder if it was indirectly connect to the next item on the list which is Putting Stuff off till later.
Putting Stuff off till later:
This is of course is also known as putting things on the long finger or procrastination. How often have you said “Oh I just have not had time to get around to it”? Everyone uses this phrase at some point in their lives and many use this excuse everyday of their lives.
Today this stops…today is the last day that you will use this excuse because if it is not then the only person you are letting down is yourself.
The question you need to ask yourself is WHY? Why I am putting these things off? What is stopping me from achieving what I need to achieve when I need to achieve it?
It may be down to laziness, poor commitment to the task allowing other peoples priorities take over etc or it may be down to some type of fear. A fear of how long it will take to do this thing, a fear of boredom a fear of this task being difficult etc etc. What ever it is can genarlly be considered a fear or resistance to something.
What is the result of this procrastination? Does it help you to feel better? Does it energise you? If we are honest the answer is most certainly No! The job or task still has to get done but the more we procrastinate on doing it the more difficult it seems to become and the more fuel we give our fear about doing it to the extent quite often that we start to feel stressed when we thing about that thing that we still have to “get round to”.
Let me tell you a story to illustrate what I am talking about
A group of executives are in a room attending a training course and the topic of
Time management comes. The various executives are talking about the pressure they work under and the amount of workload they have to deal with etc. etc. Eventually the discussion comes around to the issue of procrastination and the facilitator asks them why they allow themselves to put things off when they should really be getting things done. A variety of answers or excuses are givern for this un til finally someone says that its because I don’t like doing certain things sometimes because it is tedious or other times its just a difficult task that I don’t really want to get into etc.
All the executives agree that this is case for most people if they are honest about it.
Ah! Says the facilitator …let me ask you this then. What is the worst task I could give you to do first thing in the morning? The group discussed this and had some fun with it but finally settled on a common answer. “To eat a live frog when we got to the office, that would have to be the worst thing” OK..now imagine that you decided to put that on the long finger lets say the end of the day, but you knew that you were going to have to take care of this before you left the office, how would you feel? The group answered with comments like “ I would dread that all day”, “ I would not be able to concentrate on my work” “ I would have to work out someway of getting out of it” etc.
The facilitator asked them what if you forced yourself to deal with the task first thing…you ate you frog first thing, now how would you think you migh feel for the rest of the day? The answers were things like “ it would be a weight off my shoulders”, “ would feel free”, “ I am sure I would have a new least of life”, “ I would be able to focus on my other work without that thing waiting ambush me at the end of the day” etc.
So, said the facilitator, those tasks you are procrastinating on currently , they are your live frogs and you are allowing them to make you feel the way you have described….does this make sense?
Start to eat you live frogs when they are offered and you will change your life for the better….
This story illustrates very well what we all do without even realising it. We tend to put ourselves under greater pressure when we thing we are letting ourselves off the hook.
The next time you are tempted to procrastinate think about this story and then think again.
Over-Organising (my notes etc)
Why was I doing this, perfection, avoidance of the real work or a mix of the two? Be careful of perfection it may not be all it is cracked up to be? What I mean by this is that it does not always need to be perfect for it to be good enough. We live in the real world and sometimes the real world perfection is not necessary. This is particularly true in the business world and specifically when it comes to getting things done through delegation.
