The following article first appeared in the ICAEW's Finance & Management journal March 2009.
Have you reviewed your
own ROI?
If not,
2009 is the year to get your
personal assets working more smartly. Forget
the results by volume approach. Time
Management is just about trying to do more. Progress comes, not from saving
time, but leveraging it. Saving is limited
to the hours you save; leverage allows you to multiply the effort applied.
Here’s
how.
What do you actually want to
achieve?
It’s
imperative that you understand why you are doing what you are doing. What’s it all for? What are your goals? If you aren’t clear, you need to draw up some
well formed outcomes. If
you don’t, you are in grave danger of being efficient rather than effective. Efficiency is
getting things done. Effectiveness is getting things done,
to worthwhile effect, that take you towards your goals. What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is
irrelevant unless applied to the right things.
Pareto and Parkinson
Remember
the 80/20 principle? If
80% of
sales/profits come from 20% of products/customers or
80% of the effects
flow from 20% of the causes
then
Which 20%
of your activities contribute to 80%
of your results?
And then
there’s Parkinson’s Law: a task expands to fill the time allocated. How much do you get done in the week before your
holiday?
Use these
laws together as the bedrock of your leverage strategy. Identify the critical tasks that contribute
most to your goals and then set deadlines.
What
else?
Modelling
Instead of
trial and error get some role models. It’s
not easy to find one person who embodies all your values, beliefs and
aspirations, so put together an inspirational composite. How do they get results? What patterns and behaviours do they use? Look, learn and model.
States of the Mind
Discover what psychologists call flow. Also known as being ‘in the zone’, flow is the mental state of operation in
which the person is fully immersed in what they are doing, driven by energized
focus. An extremely productive state, you’re at your most creative, sharpest, problem
solving best and producing your highest performance. Flow’s greatest foe is interruption; so bag
some blocks of protected time.
Mindfulness is the act of consciously paying
attention, in the present, on purpose and non-judgmentally. The opposite
of being on "automatic pilot’’, mindfulness is efficient, reduces
repetition and aids retention and understanding. Plus the
ability to notice what is going on, as it arises, also fosters flexibility in stressful
situations.
Learning/thinking styles
Once you understand your
preferred styles you can leverage them. Are
you a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learner? Do you like to get stuck-in or
read and plan first? What are your
dominant types of intelligence? Are you
using mind friendly techniques like mind maps to optimise your learning, understanding
and retention of knowledge?
It’s time to work on the job, not just in the job
Time
leverage involves some up-front investment.
It's natural to want to conserve resources but if you don't make that
investment you'll lock yourself into the old way of doing things:
‘if you do what you’ve always done,
you’ll get what you’ve always got’.
Leverage
is the art of getting more done with the same, or less, effort. How far will take you in 2009?
Carol McLachlan, FCA is a chartered accountant,
executive coach and NLP practitioner.
She’s the founder of www.theaccountantscoach.com supporting finance professionals, both individuals and organisations,
in a multitude of development areas:
career planning, work-life balance, time management, performance
enhancement, communication. For more
professional and personal development tips, sign up for your free monthly
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