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Hey everyone.
Today I want to talk about the three keys of time management and productivity. And this is important not just for you as a leader, but also for your employees and your team. Because when you can follow and implement these three keys, when you can help your team implement these three keys, that will increase your productivity as a leader and of your team.
You’ll get more results. You’ll be a much more high-performing team.
Now the three keys, they’re very kind of simplistic and when I tell you what they are, you’ll be kind of like, “yeah duh.” But the thing is many of us don’t do them or we don’t really think through them.
And if we actually did them then would be so much more productive.
The first key
So the first key of the three keys is to know what’s important. And like I said that’s very simplistic. Of course you need to know what’s important. But often we don’t.
Often our employees, even though they may think they do, they don’t. They may think, not saying it’s their fault or they’re wrong, but sometimes the impression or what they get, what they think isn’t right.
What we think they’re doing might be different. We just have different assumptions, or our expectations is not what they heard, whatever it may be, sometimes what they think’s important isn’t important, sometimes what we think is important isn’t important, and it hurts the productivity of everyone in our organization, and so on.
So, knowing what’s important.
The mission and goal of your company and team
So first, the big part of that is knowing what the main mission and goal of your company is, and what the main mission goal of your team is.
Because what your goal is pursuing is what your effort should be going to. If your tasks aren’t moving you towards your goal, then you may need to reevaluate if they are important.
Your function and key results areas, 80/20
You also need to think about the function if you’re marketing. What is, of course, it’s kind of with your goals, the results that you’re looking for, your measurement, but even like certain with your position, what are you supposed to be doing? What is your responsibilities?
For your position, what are you hired to do? What are you hired to accomplish? Whatever you’re hired to accomplish, that’s what you need to focus your time on.
I believe it was Brian Tracy talked about key result areas, those most important tasks. He even, I believe, said it was three, that most people have three tasks that are most important for their job. And then you can think about the 80-20 rule, the Pareto’s Rule, well, 20% make up 80% of our results.
What are those in our job? What that we do? What are those for our employees? If we can help them know what exactly is the most important, what they were hired to accomplish, what their most important areas, what their 20% is, then if they can focus on it, and if we can help them focus on it, they will be much more productive.
Take a step back
Part of this as you as a leader is taking a step back and making sure when you plan, when you organize for yourself and for your team that you’re looking at the big picture.
It’s easy to get caught in the urgent and the day to day and always doing something that we get caught in the doing things that aren’t productive. So we’ll get busy and we’ll be busy doing things, we just won’t be busy doing the things that are productive.
So that’s why it’s important to, especially as a leader, but even if you’re not a leader, you’re an individual worker, that you take a step back and make sure what you’re doing fits into the big picture, into the key result areas, into the things.
So first of all, you know it’s important.
The second key
Second key… really again, very simplistic, easy, but sometimes it’s easy not to do… is doing what’s important.
And kind of like what I mentioned, it’s easy sometimes if we’re not planning, if we’re not taking a step back and seeing the big picture, it’s easy for us to get caught in the urgent and what seems important.
We get an email, someone comes in, there’s a fire happening, and we spend all our time fighting fires and doing what’s urgent, that we don’t do what’s important. And so we’re not doing our most important task. And so we may go through the day being busy, but at the end we feel like we didn’t accomplish anything because we’re not doing what’s important.
The power of planning
That’s why it’s important, a big part of planning ahead, looking at the big picture, seeing what the goals are, seeing what your most important tasks are, and planning the day ahead so you know what you’re gonna do that day.
And sometimes… it’s not that you can never plan the day of, but it’s so much easier.
If you plan the day before, knowing what’s important, knowing what you can do, you can come in, you have your list, you’ve prioritized your list, you put one, two, three, whatever, however you do it.
Some people calendar, and calendar can be a really good thing, I’m set for this block of time to work on this, this block of time on this.
To do lists can be, depending how you use it, might can be effective, but they also can be ineffective, depending, not trying to get to that debate in this podcast episode, but however you do it, you want to plan.
So if you calendar, you can put blocks of time. Either way, even if you’re using a task list, using blocks of time is helpful. But set blocks of time when you work on the things that you prioritize that are most important and you get those things done.
Because when you come in in the day and you haven’t planned, you don’t have your calendar set, you don’t have your list of your most important tasks and the things you’re going to do, it’s easy to get distracted by things that aren’t important, to check your emails.
But also, it’s hard to sometimes to see the big picture in the moment. Like, okay, what’s the most important thing for me to do right now? Where, in the moment, sometimes it’s hard to see that, so we might either do what’s convenient, what’s easy, or what’s right in front of us, versus what is actually important.
Dealing with distractions
So it’s important that we know what’s important, do what’s important, and part of that too is distractions.
We need to make sure we help ourselves avoid distractions, and also, help our employees avoid distractions. So sometimes that’s having uninterrupted blocks of time. If you can, it depends on your industry and the type of work that you and they do, but if you can give them uninterrupted blocks of time where they can work or yourself, that you can just focus on certain tasks that will make you so much more productive versus always being interrupted by different things.
Even if it’s, not saying you don’t have to check emails. Sometimes the best thing is have set time to check emails. Some jobs don’t allow that, but if it can, that could be good because you’re not always checking your emails, you’re doing your block of time, email, block of time, however you do it.
So those are two of the key result, or the two keys of time management.
The third key
The third one, you could just stick with the two in the sense that you would still be a whole lot more productive than if you didn’t do them. The third one, you can take or leave with it. I think it’s important, it’s a vital part, but it’s not as vital as the first two. But it is vital. You’ll understand when I say it.
So the third key is that you want to always keep growing in the different areas that are important for your job.
And again, kind of simplistic, and you can maybe kind of see why.
You have to do the first two. You’re gonna be productive to a point, but if you can do the third one, that’s gonna even make you more productive.
And so, and it’s important for a couple reasons. First, because you have your key result areas. You have the things that are most important for your job. Make sure that you are strong in those areas.
Make sure your employees are strong in those areas. If they’re responsible for certain things in their jobs and if they’re weak in that, that’s going to hurt them in the jobs if it’s their most important things they’re supposed to do. So if they’re weak in it, you probably want to grow them in it.
Break the bottlenecks
Also, also think about bottlenecks. Sometimes one of those skills may be bottlenecking all our productivity. Or it might be another skill that has nothing to do with it. It could be public speaking. It could be typing. If you or your people have to type a lot and you don’t know how to type, they don’t know how to type.
That’s probably a skill you want to train in that you want to learn, that you want them to learn really well, because that will bottleneck all their productivity because of the typing they have to do for their job. So it’s things like that.
You want to, the more you can overcome the bottlenecks, because once you finish one bottleneck, then there’s going to be another bottleneck, if that makes sense, because you fixed one, okay, you improve, but what else is holding you back after that bottleneck? Okay, let me improve that one and move on.
So you want to keep improving those bottlenecks, because if you do, you’re going to be much more productive, your team’s going to be much more productive.
And of course, kind of going beyond the scope of this podcast, if you think about the productivity of things you do in your business and you’re as a team, what your bottlenecks that are holding you back, if you can improve those, of course, you will help the productive of your team.
Help your team implement the three keys
So, three keys. Know what’s important, do what’s important, keep learning. Make sure you know what’s important for you, make sure your team knows what’s important for their job. And then help them be able to have the time to be able to do their job effectively and be able to focus on those most important tasks.
Sometimes we may say something’s important but then we ask them to do all these other things that really aren’t important.
I mean somebody has to do them but maybe you need to find whose job those are most important for and give them to those people so that your people or whoever has other most important tasks, they can focus on that, if that kind of makes sense.
So you want to try to move tasks to the people whose tasks that’s focused on, that’s what they’re supposed to do most important, as much as you can. That’s not always possible of course.
But the more you can focus on your most important tasks, the more your people can, the more productive you will be.
So I hope this helps, I’ll see you next time.
