Three Words That Will Destroy Your Day

You are having a productive day and plowing through your to-do list.  You’ve blocked off time to start a special project and are on pace to finish well ahead of schedule.   Suddenly, you are confronted with those three little words that can destroy your day: “Got a minute?” 

Most offices have the person that I describe as ”Got a Minute Gary”.  This is the individual that is always approaching you when you’re in the middle of completing an important project and asking, “Hey Eric, you got a minute?” I’ve discovered that they never take only a minute. On a good day, they waste at least 20 minutes of your time. Gary’s sole mission in life is to make you late. 

As you keep reading, you will learn two strategies to effectively deal with “Got a Minute Gary”. If you happen to be the Gary of your office, I hope this message inspires you to change your ways!

Calculate
It’s important to know the value of your time. Knowing this will motivate you to protect it against unscheduled interruptions.   The calculation is simple.  Take your desired annual income and divide by the number of weeks you work factoring in scheduled vacations.   So if your desired income is $110,000 and you work 49 weeks (factoring in 3 vacation weeks), divide dollars weeks and you get $2,244.89.  Next, take the $2,244.89 and divide by the hours you work per week.  Be sure to subtract lunch time.  If you work 50 hours per week and take an hour for lunch each day, you would divide by 45 hours and get $50. In this calculation, your time is worth $50 per hour. 

For many of the people that I work with, their time is worth $100 per hour and up. If you fall into this category and Gary takes up a half an hour of your time, he is literally costing you $50 each time he interrupts you. Every time he shows up at your desk, picture yourself giving him a $50 dollar bill. 

Communicate
When working on a project, let everyone know up front the times of day that you will not be available. This can be accomplished by putting a sign out notification on your email that lets people know the specific blocks of time that you will be out of the loop. Whenever someone emails you they will see the message. 

My favorite approach is the direct one.   When Gary asks you if you have a minute, tell him what you are working on, and offer to schedule an appointment time with him to discuss what he wants to talk about.  Have your calendar ready BEFORE he approaches you. 

You tell him what times work best for you instead of asking him when he is available.  Make sure you communicate when the meeting will start AND when it will end.   Short time windows inspire people to get to the point. 

The appointment will send the message that your time is too valuable to be wasted and will make Gary think twice before interrupting you again.   By calculating the value of your time and communicating your availability, you can avoid those three deadly words for good! 

Sincerely,
Eric M. Twiggs
Your Procrastination Prevention Partner

To access additional time management strategies download my latest ebook, One Moment in Time.

How To Use Motivation To End Your Procrastination

Early in my career, I had a serious problem. I was the new manager of a local tire store and the most important factor for customers when purchasing tires was speed of service. Unfortunately, I had the slowest team of tire technicians in the market. 

I spent most of my days getting yelled at by customers because of the time it took to put tires on their cars. Then one day I noticed an interesting trend. Customers that brought their vehicles to the shop just before we closed got much faster service than everyone else. 

This was because the techs were motivated to get the cars finished so they could go home for the day. They knew that once they got the task done, there was a prize waiting for them. In other words, they used motivation to end their procrastination.  There are two strategies that will help you to break the procrastination habit as well:

1. Create a personal reward system
What is the prize that is waiting on you, once you complete that task you keep putting off? Implementing a personal reward system will give you an answer to this question. For example, treat yourself to a weekend getaway as a reward for completing that business plan that you've been putting off.

Give yourself a deadline and make sure you use a calendar to put both the date and reward in writing. A day at the spa, a trip to your favorite restaurant, and a date to listen to your favorite musical group are other examples of good rewards for taking action. 

At the tire store, I divided the technicians into teams and rewarded the group with the fastest service times with a gift card to their favorite hunting store. I knew that they were avid hunters and that this would motivate them on a personal level. 

2. Create a procrastination penalty system
Procrastination is a silent dream killer because you don’t feel an immediate consequence for your delay. Think about it, when you put off writing that book, there is no game show buzzer that goes off to signal that you are wrong. You get lulled into thinking that everything is fine. 

Therefore, you should create a penalty system that will hold you accountable for following through on your goals. One of the best penalties that I know of is public embarrassment. The key is to find a group of like minded individuals with similar aspirations with whom you can communicate about your goals.

The potential shame of having to tell your group members that you missed the mark will motivate you to take action. Joining a mastermind or networking group can help you accomplish this. Also, stickK gives you the opportunity to publicly post your goals and provides additional ideas for procrastination penalties. 

Back at the shop, I posted each team's productivity results on a dry erase board. The team that did not produce faced public embarrassment and peer pressure from the other techs. Both the goals and the results were on display for everyone to see. As a result, our service times dramatically improved and the store delivered some of the best customer satisfaction results in the market.

If you implement a personal reward and procrastination penalty system, you will notice a dramatic improvement in your results. Just like my technicians, you will produce and not procrastinate! 

Sincerely,
Eric M. Twiggs
Your Procrastination Prevention Partner

PS. If you would like additional procrastination prevention strategies, download my ebook, One Moment in Time. 

The Timesaving “Key” To Your Success

“What got you here won’t get you there.”

- Marshall Goldsmith

I have a habit that drives my wife crazy. When traveling, I accidentally keep the room keys to the hotels. Being the creature of habit that I am, I tend to stay at the Hampton Inn whenever possible. On a recent trip I decided to conduct an experiment. 

I attempted to use the Hampton Inn key from my previous stay in the door of my current hotel. I slid the key and was disappointed that it did not work. The problem was that I was trying to go through a new door with an old key! If you have ever tried to get to the next level by doing what got you to where you are, you can relate to this experience. What then is the key to your success that will save time? 

Who, Why, What
Whenever I get to a new level, I ask myself three questions:

1. Who is currently on that level that has the results that I want?
2. Why are they successful?
3. What do they do that I can duplicate to get the same results?

For example, early in my career I received a promotion to District Manager of a national automotive chain with responsibility over 16 stores. The district assigned had a history of poor customer satisfaction and always ranked at the bottom of the organization in this category. 

Initially, I attempted to solve the problem by doing what made me successful as single unit manager. This resulted in several weeks of frustration and embarrassment as our customer service scores ranked last in the company! I was so frustrated that I scheduled a meeting with my boss to ask him what he thought I could do to improve. 

Instead of answering my questions, my boss asked me the following: “Who has the best customer service results in the company? Why is he successful? What does he do that you could duplicate in your District?" 

After this conversation, I contacted the top performing district manager and discovered that we were doing many of the same things to improve customer service. However, there was one method of communication that he was using with his team that I had been neglecting. Although it seemed minor, I decided to give it a try. Once I implemented his strategy, my district went from dead last, to well above the national average in customer service results within three weeks! 

Asking the Who-Why-What questions were the keys that took me to the next level. Remember, what got you here won’t get you there! If you know of someone that needs the “key”, please forward this post using the share buttons at the bottom of this post. 

Sincerely,
Eric M. Twiggs
Your Procrastination Prevention Partner

PS. For more information that will help you to save time, download my ebook.

How To Procrastinate

“There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”

Brian Tracy

Procrastination is not necessarily a bad thing. Now that I have your attention, let me clarify my point by sharing the following illustration. Several weeks ago while visiting a friend in the hospital, I happened to pass the emergency room. While in the emergency room I noticed an interesting pattern. 

Patients were not being serviced in the order that they arrived. Those that had cold symptoms and minor bruises were forced to wait while the patients with major injuries were taken in immediately. 

There was a Triage Nurse on duty, whose job was to make sure that the injuries with the most urgency received the highest priority. This was not a first come, first served system. The emergency room is a reminder of the fact that your most important priority is not necessarily the first task that comes to your attention. 

Too many of the to do lists that I see are first come first serve. If there is a list of ten items, most people start with the first item on the list. The problem is that the first item may be the least important while item number ten could be urgent. So, how do you determine what is urgent and what can wait? Keep reading and you will learn how to procrastinate. 

Triaging
Triaging is a system for assigning priorities based on urgency. The nurse in the previous illustration is called a Triage Nurse because her main job is to prioritize. 

I truly believe that if you have more than three priorities that you really don’t have any. When I attack my to do’s, I place a star by the tasks that are truly urgent. The star tells me that if there was a power outage and I could not get anything else done, completing this task would make my day a productive one. For me, checking e-mail, checking voicemail, or sending social media communication is not urgent and does not get a star. I can procrastinate on these tasks because they are not priorities. 

Many of the people with whom I work have a habit of checking e-mail first thing in the morning. They react to a message and spend a significant part of their day putting out fires. The problem is that the truly urgent items take a back seat to something that is of lower importance. They either spend more time in the office or ignore what is truly important. 

If you embrace the process of Triaging, you will have more time for your priorities by procrastinating on those tasks that are not urgent. A failure to triage you will cause you procrastinate on your priorities which is never a good thing! So there you have it. If you know someone who can benefit from this week’s message, please share it using the social share buttons at the bottom of this posting. 

Sincerely,
Eric M. Twiggs
Your Procrastination Prevention Partner

PS. For more information on How to Procrastinate, read my ebook. 

How To Balance Work and Family

When I was growing up, the following song was always playing on the radio:

My son turned ten just the other day
He said, "Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let's play
Can you teach me to throw", I said "Not today
I got a lot to do", he said, "That's ok"
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed
And said, "I'm gonna be like him, yeah
You know I'm gonna be like him"

Harry Chaplin (Lyrics from the song The Cat’s in the Cradle;1974)

The Father in this song was always too busy too spend time with his son. In his older years, the Dad tried to make up for lost time, only to discover that his son followed his example by being too busy with the demands of life. The lesson here is that once you lose time, you never get it back. 

Noted author and speaker Jim Rohn said it best when he said that we must all suffer from either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. If you fail to apply the disciplines that lead to a balanced life, you will look back with regret. 

As you continue to read you will learn one of the most important disciplines necessary to balance work and family. 

Automation
Every minute wasted at the office is a minute of family time lost. Surfing the social media sites and processing emails are two of the biggest time wasters. According to a recent office time.net survey, 75% of the respondents reported that they spent at least two hours per day on social media sites. Thirty-three percent admitted to spending two hours per day reading and processing emails. What can you do to put your social media and email on auto pilot, so that you don’t end up like the Dad in the song? 

HootSuite
This nifty app allows you to update Facebook, Twitter, & Linked In at the same time. Have you ever logged onto Facebook with the goal of quickly making a post only to be distracted by an instant message or friend request? Hootsuite allows you can make your updates without the interruptions. 

The Hootsuite feature that I like best is the ability to schedule posts in advance. I simply dedicate a one hour block of time during the week where I schedule up to three weeks worth of updates. 

This habit alone has saved me thirty minutes per day that I would normally spend on social media. I now spend the extra time at home taking my daughter to the playground. 

Email Rules Have you ever struggled to focus on a project because of the numerous email alerts chiming through your speakers? The solution is to set your email rules so that these audible alerts are disabled. This will help you to check your email only at the specific times you set for yourself. 

Even though I subscribe to several electronic newsletters and receive hundreds of emails per day, my inbox is usually empty. This is because I set my email rules so that certain emails go directly to my folders and not my inbox. 

For example, I have a special folder for any communication that I am CC’d on. These emails automatically go to this folder and I can read them at my leisure since they are not addressed directly to me. This habit has saved me an hour per day of office time. 

By Automating my social media and email, I save a total of ninety minutes per day. Ninety minutes per day over the course of the year works out to additional twenty three thousand four hundred minutes of free time to spend with your family. 

If you need specific instructions on how to automate your social media and email, please email me at eric@ericmtwiggs.com . 

Sincererly,
Eric M. Twiggs
Your Procrastination Prevention Partner

PS. For additional strategies on how to balance work and family, get your copy of my ebook.