Time Management and Organizational Skills By Bob Bly Today we are busier than ever. According to a recent article in Reader's Digest, the average workweek increased from 41 to 50 hours. As a consultant, you sell your time and your expertise. Therefore, the more efficiently you use your time, the more profitable you will be. Successful consultants create systems, procedures, and office practices that eliminate time wasters and maximize their productivity. This chapter shows you what those systems are and how to implement them in your office. Setting Your Daily Schedule Productive consultants have schedules and stick with them. Yet, more than 50 percent of consultants don't schedule their daily activities. It's not enough to know the projects you're working on. You should break your day into segments-I suggest using hour increments, although quarter and half days can also work-and write down on a piece of paper the project you will work on during each of those segments. Do this every day, at the beginning of your work day (or if you prefer, create the following day's schedule in the evening before you stop work for the night). Post your hour-by-hour schedule for the day on a wall near your desk with a piece of tape. Or pin it to a nearby bulletin board. Although I may work on a particular consulting project for more than one hour a day, these hours are not necessarily scheduled consecutively. It's up to you. As you go through the day, consult your schedule to keep on track. If priorities change, you can change the schedule, but do this in writing-revise the schedule, print the new version, and post the new one. It's okay to redo the schedule as long as you don't miss deadlines. Some days I redo the daily schedule two or three times, depending on deadlines and inspiration. Why not? As long as you are organized, keep track of deadlines, and allow enough time to finish each job, you will increase your productivity by working on things you feel in the mood to work on. Determining Priorities Can you always work on what you want, right when you want? No. Sometimes, a pressing deadline or an insistent client can mean putting aside a more pleasurable task for something more formidable-even if you don't feel like doing it right now. On the wall of my office near my desk, I have posted a list, which I update weekly. It's called "Rules of the Office," and it reminds me what I have to do to be successful in my business. Rule 1 is "First things first." This means you must set priorities and meet deadlines. For instance, if I am burning to work on a book but have a report due the next morning, I write the report first, get it done, and fax or e-mail it to the client. Then I reward myself with a morning spent on the book. If I did the book first, I'd risk not leaving myself enough time to get my report written by the deadline. The Three Types of To-Do Lists Every Consultant Should Keep The key component of my personal productivity system is a series of lists I keep on the computer. In fact, I have so many lists, that I have a file called "LISTS" to keep track of them. Every morning, I come into the office and turn on my computer. After checking my various online services (Internet, CompuServe, America Online, and AT&T Mail) for e-mail, I open the LISTS file. It tells me which lists I must read and review to start my day. The most important lists on the "LISTS" list are my to-do lists. I keep several, but the three most critical are my daily to-do list, projects to-do list, and long-term to-do list. 1. Daily to-do list. Each day I type on my PC, print out, and post a list of the items I have to do that day. From this list, I create my hour-by-hour schedule. This list is revised daily. I enjoy work and like to work long hours, so I take on many projects that interest me. However, I never take on more than I can handle, so I can continue to meet all deadlines. 2. Projects to-do list. On a separate computer file, I keep a list of all of my projects currently under contract, along with the deadline for each. I review this list several times a week, using it to make sure the daily to-do list covers all essential items that have to be done right away. 3. Long-term to-do list. This is a list of projects I want to do at some point, but are not now under contract and therefore do not have any assigned deadlines. I check this list about once a week, and usually put in a few hours each week on a few of the projects from this list that interest me most. This simple system works. Most of the techniques throughout this book are simple, yet powerful; so don't be put off by their brevity or ease of implementation. I agree with Texaco CEO Peter Bijur, who said, "As soon as you start to introduce complexity, whether it's into an organization or a set of responsibilities, the more difficult it is to operate." I also agree with Hair Club for Men CEO Sy Sperling: "Simple solutions are the best solutions." Ten Steps to Working Better and Faster 1. Use a Computer You don't have to use a computer. But in my opinion, every consultant who wants to be productive should use a modern PC with the latest software. As Breck Speed observes in his book Money Grows on Trees (Cumberland House, 1996), "You can't do today's job with yesterday's tools and expect to be in business tomorrow." Get a PC. Become computer literate. Master e-mail; the Internet; word processing, accounting, spreadsheet, and graphics programs; and anything else that can make you more productive and professional. Doing so can double, triple, or even quadruple your productivity. 2. Become a Specialist When you specialize, the specialized knowledge you amass, the skills you master, and the expertise you build can be used repeatedly on many projects related to your specialty. This allows you to "amortize" your investment in research, education, and training on a particular topic over many tasks. By concentrating on a narrow field of specialization, you maximize your efficiency and can partially escape the clutter of information overload. Generalists, by comparison, spend an enormous amount of time gathering facts and background for projects, only to find most of this data is not applicable to their next project-because it involves a different area, market, industry, or product. What a waste! 3. Get Multiple Assignments from Repeat Clients Marketing professionals know it is five times more costly to make a sale to a new customer than to get another order from an existing customer. Send your proposals to clients you already do business with first. They are more likely to accept your recommendations, cutting down time-consuming persuading and negotiation. 4. Create Project Templates Whether it's a preformatted spreadsheet for doing monthly sales forecasts or a " boilerplate" PowerPoint slide show into which you can quickly import new text for specific presentations, once you create a format, you can use it over and over again. This permits you to do similar jobs more quickly than if you have to start from scratch. So, create standard templates for common assignments and store them on your computer. The work will be easier, and you'll be able to do it faster. 5. Don't Be a Perfectionist "I'm a non-perfectionist," said Isaac Asimov, author of 475 books. "I don't look back in regret or worry at what I have written." Be a careful consultant, but don't agonize over your work beyond the point where the extra effort no longer produces a proportionately worthwhile improvement in your final product. Be excellent, but not perfect. Customers do not have the time or budget for perfection, and for most projects, being 95 percent of the way to perfection is good enough. That doesn't mean you deliberately make errors or give less than your best. It means you stop polishing and fiddling with the job when it looks good to you-and you don't agonize over the fact you're not spending another hundred hours on it. Create it, check it, and then let it go. 6. Free Yourself from the Pressure to Be an Innovator As publisher Cameron Foote observes, "Clients are looking for good, not great." Do the best you can and meet the clients' requirements. They will be happy. Do not feel pressured to reinvent the wheel or create a masterpiece on every project. Don't be held up by the false notion that you must uncover some great truth or present your client with revolutionary ideas and concepts. Most successful business solutions are just common sense packaged to meet a specific need. Eliminate performance pressure. Don't worry about whether your work is different or better than what others have done before you. Just do the best you can. That will be enough. 7. Do Work You Enjoy In advising people on choosing their life's work, David Ogilvy, founder of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, quotes a Scottish proverb that says, "Be happy while you're living; for you're a long time dead." The Tao Te Ching says, "In work, do what you enjoy." When you enjoy your work, it really isn't work. To me, success is being able to make a good living while spending the workday in pleasurable tasks. You won't love every project equally, of course, but try to balance mandatory tasks with things that are more fun for you. Seek assignments that are exciting, interesting, and fulfilling. 8. Switch Back and Forth between Different Tasks Even if you consider yourself a specialist, do projects outside your specialty now and then. Inject variety into your project schedule. Arrange your daily schedule so you switch off from one assignment to another at least once or twice each day. Variety, as the saying goes, is indeed the spice of life. At any time, approximately 70 - 90 % of what I am doing are tasks within my area of expertise. This keeps me highly productive. The other 10 to 30 percent is work in new areas, markets, industries, or disciplines outside my area of expertise. This keeps me fresh and allows me to explore things that captivate my imagination but are not in my usual schedule of assignments. 9. Don't Waste Time Working on Assignments You Don't Have Get letters of agreement, contracts, purchase orders, and budget sign-offs before proceeding. Don't waste timing starting the work for an assignment that may not come through. An official approval or go-ahead from your client makes the assignment real and firm, so you can proceed at full speed, with the confidence and enthusiasm that come from knowing you have been given the green light. 10. Make Deadlines Firm but Adequate Often you will collaborate with your client or even your subcontractors in determining deadlines. Set deadlines for a specific date and time, not a time period. For example, "due November 23 by 3 PM or sooner," not "in about two weeks." Having a specific date and time for completion eliminates confusion and gives you motivation to get the work done on time. At the same time, don't make deadlines too tight. Try to build in a few extra days for the unexpected, such as a missing piece of information, a subcontractor delay, a last-minute change, or a crisis on another project. How to Eliminate Unnecessary Activities That Slow You Down My colleague, consultant Jeffrey Lant, has a full-time personal assistant. When I first learned this, I thought, "He's crazy-why should an able-bodied man have a valet?" Now, I've come around to his point of view. The more hours you spend doing trivial activities, the fewer hours you have for important work. Part of being a productive consultant is avoiding interruptions and putting in the necessary hours. You can't do that effectively if you are dividing your time between too many things. Because you have multiple responsibilities, the solution is to get other people to do as many of the non-critical activities as you are willing to give up or able to afford. My approach is to "offload" non-critical tasks, getting them off my list of responsibilities so I can concentrate on being a productive, profitable consultant. For instance, instead of picking up the kids after school each day, you can have a neighbor who has children in the same school give your kids a ride, and pay her a few dollars each week for car service. She might be thrilled to earn the extra money! With an average life span of 75 years, we have only 27,375 days from the time we are born until the time we die. In addition, since we're asleep for a third of that time, we have only 18,250 days that we're actually awake and active. How you spend this finite amount of time is mostly up to you. To maximize your productivity, income, and output, meaningful work must be a priority. Value your time. "Time is the most precious currency of life, and how we spend it reflects what we truly value," writes Richard J. Leider in his book The Power of Purpose. "Once we have spent it, it is gone forever. It cannot be re-earned." If you prefer to nap, watch TV, or play cards, that's perfectly fine; but don't complain that your colleague who spends those hours in front of the PC is getting more work done than you are. It's your choice.