The Time Trap

Alec Mackenzie, Pat Nickerson

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814413395
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Gestión del tiempo

The Time Trap has shown countless readers how to squeeze the optimal efficiency--and satisfaction--out of their work day.

This much-needed guide provides the quick solutions you need be more effective with your time and avoid and escape the so-called "time savers" that don't really work. Backed by decades of research with businesspeople around the world, authors Pat Nickerson and Alec Mackenzie explain how to:

• set realistic goals and make commitments they can keep;
• juggle multiple demands;
• estimate time needed on new tasks;
• pinpoint and combat the most tenacious time wasters;
• protect priorities;
• and upgrade personal productivity for professional success.

Plus, the fourth edition has been extensively revised to include technology-based solutions to the challenges and opportunities we all face in the virtual world.

Filled with smart tactics, revealing interviews, and handy time management tools, The Time Trap is your go-to resource for leveraging twenty-first century opportunities and overcoming challenges to maximizing your work time.

PART ONE

I

Time Management for the Twenty-First Century

CHAPTER

1

Why Time Still Baffles the Best of Us

We've all heard ourselves say it: “There's never enough time!”

Maybe Noah and his family said it, too, as they hurried the paired animals aboard the ark. But, like our forebears of long ago, we all get the same twenty-four hours, the same 1,440 minutes daily. Noah's advantage? His team got a precise deadline, clear consequences, and detailed instructions from a Higher Authority on exactly when and how to proceed.

If you don't feel similarly advantaged, the progress you can make in your allotted time will vary with your culture, your circumstances, and, especially, your choices.

Certainly, having fewer choices would simplify your life. If you've ever lived through a natural disaster, or even a lengthy power outage, you know how it feels to be flung back to fundamentals. Intensely involved, you labor from dawn to dusk on essential survival tasks; you make further progress if you can, by moonlight, firelight, candlelight, or battery power, until well-earned sleep overtakes you. Later, you may remember your effort with pride, but you won't want to repeat it.

DISTRACTIONS, EXPECTATIONS, URGENCY

Why do we seem able to master our time during a crisis, but not on ordinary days? Because of the trio of overarching “supertraps,” from which all the other time traps descend. These are:

How Distractions Drain Our Time

Let's think about your work/life situation today, especially as it affects your time. If you're like most people, your home, car, and office are loaded with modern tools and data resources. You can stay on top of world news at every moment, reacting quickly to any problem or opportunity that may arise. But, should you?

How Crucial Is Connectivity?

How was it that our forebears, unacquainted with high-speed tools and twenty-four-hour connectivity, were able to research, invent, and achieve so many wonders—from cave paintings to cathedrals, from empire building to electric power, from railroads to radium, from gold panning to trepanning—all between sunlight or candlelight, in the “lands before laptops”? Were they gifted with more grit and intelligence than we? Were they stronger, smarter? Or were they blissfully free of the first great supertrap, Trivial Distractions?

Does Multitasking Save or Waste Time?

Look at your situation today. Everywhere, people try to convince the working public that multitasking is a duty at all times. You've seen those drivers in the next lane, commuting to work. If they're multitasking to save time, they use their GPS and radio traffic alerts to enable a last-minute diagonal dash for the nearest exit. They may try to save even more time by tapping out a text message or returning phone calls, all while slurping their Starbucks and negotiating the off-ramp at 70 mph. Will the time they save by multitasking pay off? Or will it vanish in a cloud of sparks when another driver, similarly engaged, suddenly makes contact? What was their hurry, you wonder, shaking your head as you drive smoothly past.

More and more researchers dispute the notion that multitasking saves time: the human brain cannot actually process two opposing thoughts simultaneously, without loss of quality on both streams of thought. Instead, we do better when we handle mental tasks singly and sequentially. We may improve performance by using visual reminders to stay on track and—with practice—we may accelerate the transit from one task to the next. But even then, focus is easily lost.

REAL VOICES

Here's what Ken Mayo has to say about multitasking. He is Web Coordinator/Photographer for The Catholic Health Association of the United States.

I have come to believe that multitasking is counterproductive. While striving to get “good” at it, I found the quality of my work suffered greatly. I now try to focus on one task at a time. If I can't complete something, I at least try to divide the task or project into phases. Then when I return to a task or a project, it is easier to remember where to begin again.

Retaining Concentration

You've probably noticed that you make most errors in those closing moments of a task when your mind has moved on, before your fingers can finish the typing, or your hammer can connect with the final nail. Ouch! If we can hold focus on the first thought, wrap it up quickly, and then move on to the next, we may gain some value. If we list our upcoming tasks in writing or on a screen, keeping it always visible before us, we can accelerate when ready. But, meanwhile, we should give each task our single-focus intensity, not split attention, to save time effectively.

HOW WOULD YOU USE THE TIME YOU SAVE?

At our Time Management seminars, we often ask frazzled attendees how they would use the magical gift of a free hour per day. The majority of respondents sing out “Sleep!”

Does that response surprise you? Sadden you? Or sound just like you?

According to studies by various sleep researchers, American adults now average only six hours and forty minutes of sleep per night—not the eight hours recommended to earlier generations. (Indeed, mattress advertisers tell us to maximize a mere six hours by buying better bedding!)

But how do we spend our time preparing for sleep? Many working adults admit to collapsing after dinner, numbly decompressing in front of the TV, while their kids toggle between social web sites, Instant Messaging, combat games, music players, and homework. Ah yes, homework. For too many kids, physical exercise is taken indoors, using only their thumbs! No wonder they're too spent to get up in the morning!

Joking aside, what would most working adults do with that magical twenty-fifth hour? Let's look at some effective escapes from our time traps.

ESCAPE DISTRACTION: FOCUS YOUR TIME ON A GOAL

If you imagine your “gift hour” given to you at a time of your choosing—not when you are fatigued (as might have justified the sleep response) but at a high-energy time—your best time of day—you might have answered differently. Let's ask the energetic you: How would you use your twenty-fifth hour?

• Work on your latest invention?
• Play a sport, or exercise?
• Visit with friends?
• Play ball with your kids?
• Clean up your room?
• Relax?
• Read, study?
• Meditate, pray?
• Paint a picture?
• Visit a gallery?
• Learn guitar?
• Garden?
• Cook?
• Repaint a room?
• Get a spa treatment?
• Volunteer for a cause you care about?

Add yours here.

Whatever you selected, one thing is sure: you would hold that gift hour strictly for that goal, not permitting any random distractions or subtractions. You'd insist on staying focused on your chosen goal. You'd be clear about your motive for managing that rare gift of time.

If, before going on with this book, you focus on an important personal or life goal currently out of reach, you'll gain a strong impetus to escape any time trap that frustrates you now. So, before proceeding much further, picture that valued goal, keep it modest enough to build or savor in the single saved hour per day…something that would keep repaying you with pride or serenity, not just once, but many times over, in the next few weeks or months. Imagine that hour, reliably yours, every day. Keep it in sight.

What About a Gift Hour at Work?

Suppose people in authority gave you the same option at work—the gift of an hour each day—not to handle their work priorities but to handle yours? What high-value task, important to you or your career, eludes you now because of time demands from customers, colleagues, or bosses? How often have you heard yourself say, “It's just my stuff. I'll get to it when everything else quiets down around here.”

But that quiet never comes during working hours, so you squeeze in unpaid overtime to work on it, unobstructed. Perhaps as you ponder this book, you can add that task to the list of goals worthy of your best time-management resolves.

Expectations: What Should We Do at Work?

“Choose what to do at work? Who is free to think that way?” you may ask.

You! Yes, you have not only the freedom but the duty to choose what to do at work No matter how sincerely you want to excel at service, no matter how customer-focused your company's policies—everyone must, sooner or later, stake out some criteria that will validate the work they are doing eight to ten hours per day.

Consider the following criteria for accepting a new task, and you may realize that you have been using some or all of these measures, all along. Perhaps these criteria have brought you a modicum of the success you now enjoy.

Picture this: an unusual request comes in when your work schedule is already full. A conflict is apparent. You must consider the following questions:

• What is the validity of this new demand? (Its impact or importance, overall?)
• What is its political sensitivity? (Is it coming from “on high”?)
• What is the complexity of the demand? (Are multiple elements involved?)
• What are the costs, risks, or opportunities?
• What options would produce what kinds of distinct outcomes?
• Whose consultation must be tapped for approaches or approvals?
• Finally—what is its relative urgency, compared with tasks on the front burner?

What you are doing here is making a decision: should this task be allowed to compete for your time against other tasks already booked?

When a request is sent to you because you are the “house expert,” or Subject Matter Expert (SME), your expertise may allow you to process those questions so rapidly, easily, and instinctively, that requesters are awed. Soon, however, they'll come to expect your instant response on all topics, familiar or not. Once that happens, you have been typecast; you have stepped unwittingly into the second of the three supertraps, Bowing to Undue Expectations.

ESCAPE EXPECTATIONS: YOURS AND THEIRS

So, how can you pull people's expectation into line with reality? You'd need to figure this out:

1. On what proportion of all incoming work do you need to stop and assess validity?
   • For senior managers, who handle mostly decisions and far fewer routines, the sum of incoming tasks that need validating could exceed 80 percent.
   • For mid-level managers and specialists with a lot of precise but repetitive work, some validity questions may have been settled earlier. But you must still reassess incoming tasks when the size of your workload threatens feasibility. If a demand suddenly balloons your workload by more than 20 percent, you need to question the feasibility of that demand. Except in brief emergencies, you cannot add to a full workload by more than 20 percent without risking blind errors. (You'd be talking about moving to a six-day week for the duration of that task—and we know where that leads.)
2. As a second step, answering the other validity questions—political sensitivity, complexity, cost and staffing—will complete your analysis of task validity.
3. Only now, with incoming tasks validated, should you take up the question of urgency. Unless you're running the Emergency Room, the urgency of a task...