Gaurd your Time

{WARNING: NOSTALGIC CONTENT}

Most of my more creative ideas come to me at night in the moments before I fall asleep. I felt compelled to write an article addressing time management and its relationship to this fast-paced and demanding society. I would not consider my compulsion to write this article mere coincidence. This morning, what I planned on sharing was reinforced as I took a break from writing this article to read Chapter 2 of Peter F. Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive.

“Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their task. They start with their time. And they do not start with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally, they consolidate their discretionary time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process:

1.??????Recording time

2.??????Managing time

3.??????Consolidating time

is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

Effective executives know that time is the limiting factor. The output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource. In the process we call ‘accomplishment,’ this is time.”

To understand how far we have progressed in managing our time, we must look to the past as a reference point. My intention for writing this article is to slow you down long enough to help you & offer a glimpse into how simple our workflow can be. Let me share a personal story about my Grandfather's time management methods and how he achieved success in life by understanding the value and significance of being a good steward of time.

In the 1950s, my grandfather grew up dirt poor on a pig farm in the pine forests of central Louisiana. He was the son of a disabled logger turned janitor and no stranger to poverty or hard work. He worked his way through college at LSU as a first-generation college student. Every other weekend he would hitchhike a ride three hours home to help on the family farm & court my grandmother, who was attending Northwestern State. His only two modes of transportation were walking and riding his bicycle until he landed his first job as a school teacher after graduating with his BS. He earned his Masters's degree, then his Ph.D. at LSU in biological sciences. This was when online classes didn’t exist; he had to drive to Baton Rouge on the weekends for four years while my grandmother also taught school and took care of their 1st child. I’ll add that during this chapter, he served three years in the U.S. Army & four years in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He then went on to piece together a rewarding career as director of agriculture extension agents for LSU.

In 1963, doors opened, & he was appointed to a special assignment in Washington D.C. My grandmother also landed a role on the White House staff of Jackie Kennedy, where she was also gifted with two family cats to bring back home to Louisiana.

Forty years later, in 1990, I came into the picture as his first grandson. He wore multiple hats as an adjunct professor at Northwestern State University, headed up numerous associations, & was politically active in the community & state. I spent many days sitting in his office with him as a kid, sipping on a can of A&W root beer to wash down the taste of the circus peanuts that I got from the old vending machine down the hall from his office. This machine took quarters and $1 bills. Fifty cents bought a can of soda, and 35 cents would buy a bag of circus peanuts. He would give me four quarters, and I’d be in heaven. Those were the coldest root beers!

I observed how he managed his desk. He had no cell phone, computer, typewriter, internet, e-mail, or dinging outlook reminders every 15 minutes. His secretary, Ms. Lucille, handled his phone, voicemails & scheduling. She had a computer & was an expert at spider solitaire, minesweeper, & shooting rubber bands at me when I wasn’t looking (I think that was her favorite game).

He ran his desk with:

1.??????A calendar

2.??????A pen

3.??????An old gray filing cabinet

4.??????A standard phone with a cord

5.??????Ms. Lucille

6.??????A Rolodex

7.??????A heavy green stapler that could kill an Elk if used properly

When I was 11 years old, he sat with me on a red oak log one cold November day as we took a break from splitting firewood. (Keep in mind, there wasn’t a need for us to split firewood, he accumulated enough wealth to afford to heat his home without a fireplace, but his work ethic never left him.) He shared a story about his journey through college as a lesson on the importance of opportunity, integrity, education, and time management.

“Son, I used to get up at 4:00 a.m. six days a week. I held down three jobs my freshman year. I ate two meals a day in the cafeteria. I would eat dry cereal to satisfy my appetite for the rest of the day. I took 18 hours each semester & only slept two or three hours per night. I quit one of my three jobs my sophomore year because my boss asked me to work on Sunday. I told my boss that I appreciated my job and wanted to keep it, but I had to go to church. I was given the option to keep my job with the understanding that I must work on Sundays. I knew I couldn’t afford to lose my job but respectfully resigned. A week later, I was offered a job in the library making more money with fewer hours & it afforded me more time to study. I still believe that was the Lord taking care of me for giving my time to him.”

Now, here we are in 2021. We have Google. We have apps. We have Zoom. We have unlimited platforms that can “streamline our workflow,” using the word efficiency as its root selling point. We have thousands of add-ins & widgets at our fingertips designed to outpace the standard human workflow by weaving Artificial Intelligence into our day.

Are we benefitting from this gold rush of workflow software & enhanced AI systems?

Are we accomplishing what we set out to do each morning?

Are we scratching the tasks off our lists with that sense of accomplishment we crave?

Are we managing our emotional & spiritual connection to our work & our purpose with conviction?

Are we over-complicating our workflow & cluttering our lives with unnecessary distractions?

Are you satisfied when you lay down at night? Or are you still cycling your to-do list anxiously in your head?

I want to offer a glimpse into my recent revelation on running a practical desk & managing time with a simple yet effective recipe.

1. If you have an idea, no matter how big or small, write it down! Get that information out of your brain, return to it at a time when you can give it the attention it deserves.
2. If you have a question, no matter who it's for, write it down! Unanswered questions can lead to anxiety & wasted brainpower. Appoint a time for your question & leave it alone until then.
3. If you have a pile of different calendars, apps, & productivity software, scale them back to two if at all possible. We waste precious time by re-entering information into multiple platforms.
4. Productivity apps & services exist for one reason, to make money! There are good ones but do not fall into the trap of thinking you need a phone or desktop full of apps & widgets, as most lead to counterproductive habits.
5. VERY IMPORTANT! Keep your text messages short, concise, & upbeat! Guard the brainpower of yourself & those with which you communicate. They will appreciate you for it & subconsciously associate your name popping up on their phone with good emotions.
6. I’m assuming those reading this are Outlook users. Outlook is full of simple tools, that if learned, used, & leveraged, can make your life much more pleasant.
7. Keep an open calendar. Don’t micromanage yourself with a plethora of micro-commitments & tasks each day. NOT GOOD! We all know you never meet each of those deadlines, & it leads to subconscious feelings of failure & dissatisfaction with yourself, which in turn bleeds over into the energy you put off on others.
8. Cleanliness! This is perhaps the most important of ALL Outlook habits. When I see somebody's inbox with over 1,000 messages, I hear the nails on the chalkboard start screeching. Clean that mess up! It may seem like a daunting task, but your sanity, productivity, & perhaps your checking account will be forever grateful if you put in the effort. Use the red follow-up flag! Create a follow-up folder and flag anything deemed worthy of a follow-up. This serves two purposes: a) Automatic reminder on the date & time you set. b) It gets it out of your way as you prioritize your day.
9. As you work through your inbox, categorize your messages RIGHT NOW!
10. Create outlook subfolders. I keep everything, but that doesn’t mean I need it in my face clogging up my workflow & slowing me down. Procrastinating never leads to productivity.
11. Assign a retention policy for important documents.
12. Set a deadline each day that your inbox will be clear. My deadline is 5:30 pm. This habit trains my brain that the task is over with for the day, it had its time to be done & I won’t touch it again that day.
13. Eliminate all paper but two types: Sticky notes & a planner
14. Sticky notes: Handy to jot important information down when caught off guard. Stick it to the bottom of your monitor until you have time to add it to your Outlook tasks or Calendar.
15. Planner: I use At A Glance weekly appointment planners. There is a psychology to striking out tasks as you complete them. Also, life is busy, & you are not always able to access your Outlook calendar. Could you write it down in your planner? Make a habit of entering ALL of your planner notes & appointments into Outlook EACH day & striking them out as you add them.
16. ?As you complete tasks or appointments in Outlook, click the Green check completed button. This serves many functions. It creates productive habits; it keeps a record of the completion. It visually reinforces your accomplishment. It keeps you progressing forward, breaking the inertia of the universe pushing back at you.
17. ?If you have a team reporting to you, encourage the same methods, maybe have a workshop to get everybody on the same page. I advocate for encouraging unique methods (everybody does it differently) but give a baseline structure of what's expected. People like structure, & they feel comfortable when their leader exhibits structure & encourages simplicity. You will get major buy-in from your team if you appeal to their emotional connection to saving time & feeling accomplishment.
18. If you have a CRM, invest some time in learning it. Many CRMs are growing more functional with Outlook. Learn how you can capitalize on the CRM/Outlook functionality.

The last thing I’ll leave you with is: Keep it simple stupid! If our grandparents & parents could function at a high level in society with only a few basic tools at their disposal, what's stopping us? Has the world really sped up? Maybe the issue is that we are just faced with more distractions stealing time from us.

Find what works for you. Invest some time in learning yourself & your tools, and cut out all the excess junk that clutters your workflow. Give yourself more time to live life instead of wasting it making a living.

Stay away from heavy green staplers. They hurt when you drop them on your toe & waste desk space.

Until next time.

-Dakota Scoggins