time management

No B.S. Time Management

April 6, 2019 By Kat

If you like advice straight and blunt, Dan Kennedy will give to you. In his book, No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, Dan does not hold back from laying down the law when it comes down to how to manage time effectively. He is such a stickler for time, and while you may scoff at his unconventional methods (i.e. using a fax machine), his numerous achievements at running multiple businesses and writing numerous books is no joke. He protects his time and gets sh*t done.

It’s a sizable book at 240 pages, I read the eBook version and found it was quite gripping. I couldn’t wait to read more. It got a little bit dry in one section – Chapter 14 where it became a rant about taming technology, but I stuck through it, finished it, and thought it was overall a worthwhile read!

If you are protective about guarding your money, you should be even more protective about your time! I am guilty of letting time slip by innocuously as I endlessly scroll through my phone, sigh.

How He Manages Time

Anyhow, he emphasizes understanding the worth of your time – even calculating how much each hour and minute of your life is worth. He talks about setting firm boundaries and not allowing “time vampires” to suck away your time. Example of a time vampire: someone who often drops by your office just to ask you something that ends up taking a lot of your time.

Even though he is running multiple businesses and has many private clients, he only has 1 staff person – his assistant who works on the other side of the country. He works from home and contacts her every once in awhile. The reason she is not in the same physical space as him is because then he would get interrupted a lot more. By being in different offices, they limit communication to the specific methods – faxing, FedEx documents back and forth, short check-ins. He used to have a staff of over 40+ people and go into the office on a regular basis. However, he found that when you’re too available to your employees/team, then they ask you for things that they could have figured out themselves. So he finds it best to work at home (no commute and less interruptions) with just one staff person on the other side of the country.

He also guards against interruptions by not having a cell phone. Yes, that’s right, he doesn’t have a cell phone. He did try having one once, but got so frustrated with it after 2 weeks that he threw it out his car window and never had one again. He also doesn’t have email. Yes, pretty crazy! He does his work through fax, FedEx packages, phone call appointments, and in-person consultations. It took me awhile to wrap my head around this that he wasn’t actually kidding.

He even has these strict communication rules with his clients, where they need to setup appointments ahead of time. His phone appointments are 20 minutes long, so that he can squeeze in 3 meetings into an hour. And once a month, he has these phone call days, to take care of all these calls. If there’s an emergency, the clients contact his assistant who will triage it appropriately. He requires his clients come to where he’s located, so he can save time by reducing air travel time and fatigue.

While I found some of his methods very strict, I do see the value in having those firm boundaries so that he can have as much uninterrupted time to do deep focused work. He describes the benefit to his clients in this way: when they’re meeting (on the phone or in-person), they have his FULL ATTENTION. Whereas if he was available 24/7 by phone, then they would only receive his partial attention because he could be in the midst of doing something else.

I have to admit, Dan Kennedy has seriously thought about the costs of everything – the cost of travel, interruption, context switching, etc.. By being intentional about how his time is used, he is able to have more time to relax at the racetrack in the evenings or spend time with family.

Similar to what I had learned in the last book I wrote about on The Power of Full Engagement, being extremely efficient with your time DOES NOT mean working all the time.

Dan Kennedy has budgeted time for the projects and clients that are important to him and budgeted time to enjoy life as well. That sounds like a good deal to me.

Quotes From the Book

Here are some of the quotes I wrote down:

“If anything, the passing of time has stiffened my resolve about safeguarding it, wisely investing it, enjoying it, and bringing upon any who would steal it, waste, or abuse it.”

“Is what I am doing, this minute, moving me measurably closer to my goals?”

“Just as the person who cannot tell you where his money goes is forever destined to be poor, the person who cannot tell you where his time goes is forever destined to be unproductive- and, often, poor.”

“One of the most significant things that you can control to a great extent, is association- your choices of whom you permit into your world, whom you give time or invest time with, and whom you look to for ideas, information, and education.”

“To get anywhere with an idea, you must concentrate ALL your thoughts on ONE task at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until they are brought into focus.” -Alexander Graham Bell

“There is only one success- to be able to spend your life in your own way.” – Christopher Morley

My Takeaways

One suggestion he made is to have clocks in every room of your house. Then you won’t lose track of hours passing by. You’ll always be conscious of what time it is, so you can know if you’re on track or need to move onto the next thing. I usually use the clock on my phone, so my action item is to buy more clocks for my place!!

I’ve also decided to use timers more often for my work. If I take an afternoon break or a lunch break, sometimes I’ll set a timer so that I don’t get too carried away. In addition, I’ve gone back to using Toggl and even downloaded the app on my phone too for when I’m not doing laptop work. (See earlier blogpost where I talk about Toggl.)

If you’re feeling frantic / pressed for time, here’s the book if you want to adopt some new time management techniques: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs

For more thoughts on productivity and priorities, check out some of the episodes on my podcast What Kat Found Out, also available on all major podcast players.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I would recommend this book regardless.

Slowing Down to Speed Up

January 15, 2019 By Kat

I used to have a tendency to live life a million miles a minute. If there was a blank spot in my calendar, where I wasn’t physically meeting someone, I would fill it up with something else. I didn’t account for driving to/from places, and I didn’t account for being tired from going to an event or driving somewhere farther away. So I would pile in many things into my schedule for a single day, and when that day came, as I was rushing from place to place, I would get so tired and wonder why I agreed to all of those things in the first place.

For awhile now, I’ve been working on slowing down my life. Although my mind is very curious and wants to try and experience all these great things, it’s hard for my body to keep up. I realize that scheduling so many things into my calendar wasn’t giving me time to rest or even sit down and breathe. And I needed that alone time to process what just happened or to think about what I wanted to do next.

Having such a full schedule also robs us of the chance for spontaneity in life. On one hand, having a full day of plans already booked is great and time-efficient, but on the other hand, there’s something wonderfully glorious about a blank day with nothing on the calendar. I love those types of days because they are full of possibilities and full of surprises and joy.

I’m not saying that we should just slow down to a sloth’s pace and be couch potatoes for life. I just believe that slowing down to rest helps us get back out there and do our work at a much faster pace. By recharging (before we burn out), we can re-energize and be productive, and then go back to resting – like a sinusoidal curve.

When we slow down, we become more intentional with our time. We may realize that certain things cause us stress or anxiety, so we can adjust or remove those things from our schedule. Then we can have more energy for things that we want to focus on – for that particular time in our life. And the things we want to focus on will also change over time like a sinusoidal curve. There are seasons of life where we focus more heavily on career, then we focus more on health, then family/friends, then back to career, etc..

So in a world where “being busy” can sometimes be a status symbol, I am rejecting that notion. To me, not being busy is a luxury. We don’t need to fill up all our time with activities. We don’t have to be 100% productive all the time. We don’t have to do everything we’ve ever wanted to try in this immediate moment. Instead of cramming 10 things into 1 day, we could aim to do 3 things slowly and but enjoy them in the process.

What speed are you operating at these days?

It is a mistake to think that moving fast is the same as actually going somewhere.”
Steve Goodier

How to Stay Focused & Manage Your Time

October 10, 2018 By Kat

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a procrastinator. I’m also super ambitious and have tons of things on my to do list. But it’s hard to gather the energy to do what I need to get done, especially for the more challenging tasks that I’m not sure how to do yet.

I’ve tried all sorts of routines and things to stay on top of my tasks. These are the tips that worked best for me.

1. SETTING A COUNTDOWN TIMER

I use the countdown timer in Google search on my computer. You can use a physical timer or one on your phone if you prefer. I set it to 30 minutes and then start working on a task – like writing this blogpost!

That makes me feel like I have a short term deadline to get the task done, instead of feeling like I have all afternoon or an infinite amount of time. Otherwise the task will drag on and fill up the entire space that I allow for it.

If I start to feel antsy and want to do something like get up to get a snack or take a break, I’ll tell myself that I can do it after the 30 minutes are up. Hence it reduces distraction because the timer is running. Seeing the timer jolts me back to focus at the task at hand.

If the task takes longer than 30 minutes, then I can reset the timer, but then I’m conscious that now it’s taking me an hour. And so on, if I need more time. This is helpful rather than letting hours slip by unconsciously. If I reset it a couple times, then I realize I should hurry up because it’s taking longer than it should. Or maybe the task is too big and needs to be split up into parts that can be done in smaller time increments.

2. TRACKING TIME SPENT PER ACTIVITY

At the end of the workday, do you ever think, “Wow, where did the whole day go? I got nothing done!” Well, I’m sure you got something done, but maybe not the right priority item.

In any case, tracking what you did and for how long can bring you awareness of where your time is actually going. I use the Toggl website, which is a free tool. You can start/stop/pause the timer when you change activities. I’m not the best at remembering to always start the timer, but you can go back and add entries if needed.

I wish I could be better at tracking everything because Toggl has this cool aggregate report where they show you a breakdown of what you spent your time on for the week. As you can see, I got lazier with tracking as the week went on. It’s hard to remember to track things when I’m driving around and not sitting at my computer. In the column on the right, it also shows what you spent the most time on.

Anyhow, Toggl has a bunch more features like tracking multiple projects, tracking for a whole team, track billable hours worked for a client, etc… There’s so many features, I haven’t dug into them much yet. I use the basic free plan. I don’t know if Toggl has a countdown timer, so I use it in conjunction with Google’s countdown timer.

3. PLAN AHEAD OF TIME

In the SELF journal I use, there are 30 minute time slots to schedule each day from 6am – 9pm. The 30 minute slots are really important than just a big old blank space for the whole day. I find the 30 minute time slots force me to be very specific and account for what I will do throughout the day, instead of hand waving approximately how I’ll spend my time.

Hence I started planning my days the night before, trying to block out time for eating, gym, cooking, meetings, content creation, even accounting for driving time to get to places.

I definitely don’t follow the plan exactly, but sometimes I try to pencil in how long actual tasks took so that I can learn how much time to allocate for them next time.

One thing I learned is that my morning rarely goes as planned in the journal. -_- And that sleeping past my alarm makes me go off schedule as well. Ah well, tomorrow’s another chance to stick to the schedule!

CONCLUSION

Trial/error with these different techniques is the only way to figure out if they work for us or not. It often requires repeated attempts at the same technique to get it to work.

I’m still grappling with how to manage my time. Time is our greatest and most precious resource. So I hope that by all this planning, tracking, observing, and reflecting, I can get a more realistic view of how I spend my time and be more intentional about how I use it.

Alright, well checking the clock, I’m 10 minutes overtime already, so it’s time to wrap this baby up and go take a break! 😛

What techniques do you use for managing your time? Would love to hear what works for you!