Own Your time

Professional Time-Management Strategies for a Profitable and Balanced Life

Stephanie Wachman

• Publisher: Life in Balance, LLC
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780997796117
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Time Management

In this book, author Stephanie Wachman, a Fortune 500 executive coach, provides business professionals with proven time-management strategies. Own Your Time provides practical, concise skills for business professionals to become more productive, reduce stress, increase profits and have a more balanced life. The book’s chapters address ways to manage meetings, email, healthy sleep patterns, procrastination, perfectionism and internet distractions. Wachman identifies the most common productivity problems and then provides tested solutions in succinct chapters. Herbookenable readers to quicklyimplement the solutions they needto improve their time-management skills. Wachman’s book is the go-to guide for time management, a book designed to help business professionals worldwide be more productive every day.

CHAPTER 1

THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE

TIME IS THE GREAT EQUALIZER. Everyone has the same amount of time each day. What makes the difference is how we choose to manage our time. Use it poorly and you will face increased stress, depleted energy, and missed opportunities. Use it wisely, and you can find a healthy balance between rest, family, work, and wealth. In many regards, daily choices are about time management—what we do with our lives!

As I reviewed numerous time-management books, I found that many authors theorize from thirty thousand feet above the fray. They assume that if you write a personal mission statement, set the right goals, and use a cool scheduling app, then all will be well.

It’s not that easy in workplace trenches. Personal mission statements don’t help when you’re coping with a hundred emails, Internet distractions, moody kids who didn’t finish homework, and your own tendency to procrastinate. Plans? Goals? Right . . .

It’s also clear that business professionals are desperate for on-the-ground help. In 2013, as reported in the The Wall Street Journal, the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. surveyed fourteen hundred senior executives from the public and private sector about time management. Only 9 percent said they were “highly satisfied” with the way they were using their time at work. One author of the report concluded that, “Time is one of the most precious and under-managed resources at a company, and it seems to be getting more so.” Obviously, the lack of time-management skills is hurting profits.

Time-management problems at work inevitably spill into our personal lives. According to a 2011 report by the American Psychological Association, about half of all American professionals say they don’t have a healthy life balance. Nearly 40 percent of workers surveyed say they are extremely stressed. This is true not only in the U.S., but also in every developed nation.

For managers, leaders, business professionals, and CEOs, time management directly impacts individual performance and company profits. Yet today we face an increasing number of demands on our schedules even though our time is finite. This situation, which is not likely to change, means that we must do a better job of managing our time. That is the only way we can regain control of our lives.

I am a working mother. In my previous career, before I learned to manage my time well, I always felt torn between work and family. I felt like I never had enough time with my kids. I was managing hundreds of sales people and traveling across the country every week. Whenever I was with my family, I was never completely present and I always felt guilty because my mind was always on my work. I learned that managing my time, both at work and at home, was critical for my long-term well-being and my family’s, too.

Time means different things at different phases of our lives and careers. When we’re young we feel like we have all the time in the world. As we get older and have families, all the competing priorities make us feel like we never have enough time. A person with a serious illness will find that time is even more precious. In fact, when I was forty-three years old, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had two young children and I had already made a shift in careers to executive coaching in order spend more time with my husband and kids. I can’t find words to express how precious time became to me as I went through that hard season. Time continues to be a valuable commodity even though I am in remission.

We don’t know what’s around the corner in life. This makes time management matter even more. It’s about how we live our lives. So don’t take the strategies in this book lightly.

If you are struggling to regain balance in your life, this book will help you make long-term and progressive change. As you put these solutions into practice, the weight of the world that sits on your shoulders will begin to decrease. You will begin to feel lighter, more hopeful, and happier.

Time management is a skill that should not take a lot of time to learn! That’s why this book is short. Each chapter provides tips and strategies that you can use to improve your productivity. You can start by incorporating one or two ideas and exercises into your routine. After you’ve mastered those, work on a couple more. By practicing the strategies in the book for a while, you will be able to measure your progress.

I encourage you to use this book as your time-management desk reference. When you start to feel overwhelmed, distracted, stressed, exhausted, or anxious, you can go back to a specific chapter and re-establish a positive strategy. When you find you’ve forgotten a time-management skill, this book will be nearby to help you remember.

You can take a time-management quiz at my website (www.stephaniewachman.com). It will show you where you need help and give you a baseline from which to measure progress. After reading the book and practicing my strategies, you can take the quiz again to see how you’ve improved.

Own Your Time is about taking control of your time and understanding what you need to do to achieve a healthy life balance. The truth is, it is very difficult to get balance in our lives. But if you practice the techniques and strategies in this book you will be more productive, feel less stressed, improve your relationships, and enjoy more of life—all at the same time.

CHAPTER 2

THE WHY OF PROCRASTINATION

I PUT OFF WRITING THIS CHAPTER about procrastination for a long time despite the fact that this was one of the topics I wanted to tackle first. We all struggle with the “I’ll do it later” syndrome. We never lack reasons to put things off until another day, month, or year.

The Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Canada did an online survey about this tendency. They received twenty-seven hundred responses to the following question: “To what extent is procrastination having a negative impact on your happiness?” Almost one person in two (46 percent) said “quite a bit” or “very much.” Around one person in five (18 percent) reported an “extreme negative effect.”

This has been true at times in my career. I once had a job that required me to make more than two hundred telephone cold calls a week. Over the course of seven years, I logged about seventy-six thousand calls. This was the least exciting part of my job. I consistently put it off. As a result, my sales numbers began to slump, as did my confidence and happiness. This led to a downward spiral. The less confident I became, the more I resisted picking up the phone. That resulted in even less self-confidence. I began to feel awful about myself. Then I had to present my weak sales numbers to the company leadership, and the only excuse was my procrastination. I simply didn’t feel like making the calls. Something had to change or I would be out of a job.

I realized that I needed to figure out why I kept procrastinating. I searched for a better understanding of my behavior. First, I realized that I anticipated frequent rejection to my sales calls, which I hated. This caused me to put off the work, which in turn led to failure. Second, it became clear that I didn’t know where to start when facing such a daunting list of calls.

The way I overcame procrastination, in this instance, was to look ahead at the results I really wanted to achieve and to use that vision as my motivation. I wanted to keep my job, I wanted to blow my sales quota out of the water, and I wanted the commission that came with good sales. Once I was clear about what I wanted, then I had to ask myself the question, “What do I absolutely need to do to achieve the outcomes I want?” The answer was to make the calls. I put my desire for success in the driver’s seat and pushed my fear of rejection to the back. In regard to feeling overwhelmed by the huge number of calls, I decided to break the list down into manageable chunks of forty calls per day. Taking small bites was easier than eating the whole elephant. I was then able to start working to achieve some positive results.

In truth, I still didn’t enjoy making those calls. Some were very uncomfortable to make. One time I dialed a number only to find out that the person I tried to call had left the company years earlier. That was embarrassing, especially since I had to continue prospecting on that same call. But after overcoming my procrastination and keeping to my schedule, I won an award for record sales.

Procrastination is a common tendency. It is a way to protect ourselves from something uncomfortable. Fear might be the main cause of procrastination. By avoiding what makes us uncomfortable we don’t have to deal with it. And because we are so easily distracted, it’s far more comforting to fill the time with something else, such as surfing the Internet, watching bad reality shows, or text messaging. Without a clear strategic goal for what we want to accomplish, we will allow distractions and excuses to sabotage our success.

SILENCING THE INNER CRITIC

Coaching professionals have identified another common cause of procrastination. It is called the voice of the saboteur, or the voice of the inner critic. Every client I have ever worked with has had challenges with their inner critic. This voice in our he...