MATTINGLY GLOBAL

TIME MANAGEMENT MADE POSSIBLE

< new time managing >

New Time provides information on the organization of time.

First, calculate how much money your time is worth. If you work for an organization, calculate how much you cost it each year. Include your salary, payroll taxes, the cost of office space you occupy, equipment and facilities you use, expenses, administrative support, etc. If you are self-employed, work in the annual running costs of your business.

If you work normal hours, you will have around 200 productive days each year. If you work 71⁄2 hours each day, this equates to 1,500 hours in a year. From these figures, calculate an hourly rate. This should give a reasonable estimate of how much your time is worth - it may be a surprisingly large amount! When you are deciding whether or not to take a task on, think about this value - are you wasting your or your organization's resources on a low yield task? Calculating how much your time is worth helps you to work out how whether it is worth doing particular jobs. If you have to spend much of your time doing low-yield jobs, then you can make a good case for employing an assistant.

To-Do Lists are essential when you need to carry out a number of different tasks or different sorts of task, or when you have made a number of commitments. If you find that you are often caught out because you have forgotten to do something, then you need to keep a To-Do List.

Preparing a To-Do List
The solution is often simple: Write down the tasks that you face, and if they are large, break them down into component elements. Continue to break them down until a task's completion is attainable within the allotted timeframe. Do this until you have listed everything that you have To-Do. Once you have done this, run through these jobs allocating priorities from A(very important) to F (unimportant). Once you have done this, rewrite the list in priority order.

Goal setting techniques are used by achievers in all fields. They give you long-term vision and short-term motivation. They focus your acquisition of knowledge and help you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life. By setting sharp, clearly defined goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals. You can see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind. By setting goals, you will raise your self-confidence as you recognize your ability and competence in achieving the goals that you have set.

Goals are set on a number of different levels: First you decide what you want to do with your life and what large-scale goals you want to achieve. Second, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit so that you reach your lifetime goals. Finally, once you have your plan, you start working towards achieving it. Starting to Set Personal Goals. By setting up this structure of plans you can break even the biggest life goal down into a number of small tasks that you need to do each day to reach the lifetime goals.

Activity logs help you to analyze how you actually spend your time. The first time you use an activity log you may be shocked to see the amount of time that you waste! Memory is a very poor guide when it comes to this, as it can be too easy to forget time spent reading junk mail, talking to colleagues, making coffee, eating lunch, making your activity log, etc. Without modifying your behavior any further than you have to, note down the things you do as you do them. Every time you change activities, whether opening mail, working, making coffee, gossiping with colleagues or whatever, try to note down the time of the change.

Learning from Your Log
Once you have logged your time for a few days, analyze the log. You may be alarmed to see the length of time you spend doing low value jobs!
You may also see that you are energetic in some parts of the day, and flat in other parts. A lot of this can depend on the rest breaks you take, the times and amounts you eat, and the quality of your nutrition. The activity log gives you some basis for experimenting with these variables.

< get things done >

Author and productivity guru David Allen helps people close what he calls "open loops," the running mental to-do lists that cause all manner of stress. Allen offers this advice for getting it done.:

Capture - Jot down every useful idea - shoulds, want-tos, and need-tos - whenever and wherever you think of them. Always keep pens and pads handy to take notes or you'll resist the process.

Centralize - When you're back at your desk, tear off the sheets of paper - to keep your pad fresh for new input - and toss them into a single in-basket. Process the in-basket daily, as you (should) do with voicemail.

Sort - Devise a system for organizing accumulated notes and ideas. Consolidate similar tasks (phone calls, errands, etc.) and create files for projects, references, and other materials.

Renegotiate - review your lists frequently to ensure you're not missing anything. At least once a week, check your files to remind yourself of all project commitments you have and the next steps for each.

< shorten your commute >

The time-challenged commuter who's already familiar with 511 (dial it), HOV (get in it), and XM NavTraffic (buy it) should also consider this simple tool: a stopwatch. By clocking your drive time each day for a year and changing the moment of departure by 10-minute increments, you could shave minutes off your commute. During a traffic jam, experts suggest you move to the far right lane, which, counter intuitively, flows faster than the left lanes.

< speed up a customer service call >

1. Get the right number. Go to gethuman.com/us for a database of customer support lines and tips on navigating each phone tree.

2. Bail out of voice jail. Press repeatedly, or try combinations of Ø, # and * (ignore the “Invalid entry” responses). Use the option for Spanish, which may yield a bilingual operator. Or call a sales line and ask to be transferred. If you get a voice recognition system, say these helpful words: agent, operator, representative, I don’t know, get human, and help. When all else fails, shout profanity, yell "bomb" or "refund": Some systems rush “angry” callers to an operator.

3. Take names. Once you reach a human, request the rep’s name and operator number “so I can call you back if I get disconnected.”

4. Have pity. Tech support people get screamed at 24/7. If you can make them feel that you’re that one reasonable person they talk to all day, they’ll want to assist you.

< about looking busy >

Dilbert creator Scott Adams lists low-impact ways to look like an overachiever in Wired Magazine's August issue.

Complain that you're totally swamped at every opportunity. Use phrases like "jumping from one fire to another" to make your job sound kind of sexy and dangerous.

Carry a piece of paper wherever you go. To give yourself the necessary urgent facial expression and body language, imagine it’s something incredibly important, like a stay of execution from the governor.

Never clean your cubicle. After all, if you had any spare cycles you wouldn’t let yourself live like a pig.

If you wear glasses, leave an old pair on the desk as though you will be right back. Then go home.

Although we think this is amusing, it is really saying that you hate your job and should think about a new one - really, it's not worth it.

A recent article from Business Week about New Time:

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.
Hence workers pulling into the company's amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren't considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It's O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid.
Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM (IBM ), 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years. In fact, at many companies the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself.
But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. "This is like TiVo (TIVO ) for your work," says the program's co-founder, Jody Thompson. By the end of 2007, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. Starting in February, the new work environment will become an official part of Best Buy's recruiting pitch as well as its orientation for new hires. And the company plans to take its clockless campaign to its stores--a high-stakes challenge that no company has tried before in a retail environment.
Another thing about this experiment: It wasn't imposed from the top down. It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution. So secret was the operation that Chief Executive Brad Anderson only learned the details two years after it began transforming his company. Such bottom-up, stealth innovation is exactly the kind of thing Anderson encourages. The Best Buy chief aims to keep innovating even when something is ostensibly working. "ROWE was an idea born and nurtured by a handful of passionate employees," he says. "It wasn't created as the result of some edict."

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