Robert W Bly - 101 Ways to Make Every Second Count

WAYS To MAKE EVERY
SECOND
COUNT
Time Management Tips and Techniques
for More Success with Less Stress

ROBERT BLY

JAICO PUBLISHING HOUSE

Ahmedabad Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneswar Chennai
Delhi Hyderabad Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai

Published by Jaico Publishing House
A-2 Jash Chambers, 7-A Sir Phirozshah Mehta Road
Fort, Mumbai - 400 001
www.jaicobooks.com

Robert W. Bly

Published in arrangement with
Career Press, Inc.
Career Press, Inc. 3 Tice Road, Franklin Lakes
NJ07417,U.S.A.

101 WAYS To MAKE EVERY SECOND COUNT
ISBN 81-7224-929-2

First Jaico Impression: 2001
Ninth Jaico Impression: 2010

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Printed by
Sanman & Co.
113, Shivshakti Ind. Estate, Marol Naka
Andheri (E), Mumbai - 400 059.

Dedication

To Eleanor Brangan, who taught me how to write

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the staff at Career Press for having in me and in this book... and then helping me to make the manuscript much better than it was when it first crossed their desks.

Contents

Quick Tips to Speed You Up

Do you Really Want to Be Productive?

The 10% Solution for Increased Personal Efficiency

Mastering the Time Management See-Saw

Using Technology to Save Time

Delegation and Outsourcing

Getting Organized

Maximizing Your Personal Energy

Managing Information Overload

Off-loading and Priority Management

Sources and Resources

Introduction

"You may delay, but Time will not."
-Benjamin Franklin, American statesman and philosopher

I'm looking at my watch. It's 8:38 on a Friday morning. By my calculations, I have only approximately 204,400 waking hours of life left. And I intend to make the most of the time still available to me. How about you?

Today, the demands on our time are tremendous. Everyone has too much to do and not enough time to do it. According to an article in Men's Health magazine (March, 1997), 42 percent of American workers believe they are overloaded with work.

We live in the Age of Now. Customers are more demanding than ever. They want everything yesterday. As Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts comments, "We move faster than ever, but never quite fast enough." (The Record, October 27, 1997)

"When our society travels at electronic speed, we fall under the sway of a new force...the power of now" says Stephen Bertman, a professor at the University of Windsor, in the article "Stephen Bertman on Hyperculture." (Future Times, Fall, 1998). "It replaces duration with immediacy, permanence with transcience, memory with sensation, insight with impulse." He argues that this acceleration of change contributes to "a growing sense of stress, disorientation, and loss." On the other hand, if you master strategies for coping with today's accelerated pace, you can meet the demands placed upon you while still having time for yourself.

According to an article in American Demographics (January, 1999), consumers have come to view time as their most precious commodity: "To satisfy today's consumer, you need to do business in a real-time worldone in which time and distance collapse, action and response are simultaneous, and customers demand instant gratification."

"We've learned to live by the Rule of 6," notes Gary Springer in an article in the Business-to-Business Marketer (February, 1998). "What used to take six months, now takes six weeks; what used to take six weeks now is wanted in six days; what normally took six days is needed in six hours; and what used to be done in six hours is now expected in six minutes." Technology, says Springer, is responsible for much of this change.

Downsizing has left organizations leaner and meaner. Thousands of workers have been fired, and those who remain must take up the slack and are working harder than ever. According to a Harris poll, the average work week increased from 41 to 50 hours between 1973 and 1993.

A radio commercial for Bigelow Herbal Tea observes, "We seem to live our lives in perpetual motion." In fact, we're so busy, we don't even have time to eat! For instance, the "lunch hour" is disappearing from the American business world. Workers more frequently eat lunch at their desks. The article "Shrinking Lunch Hours" (The Futurist, August/September, 1998) tells us that 40 percent take no lunch break at all and the typical lunch break is 36 minutes, although many people use that time to take care of personal business rather than eat. Recently I read that cereal sales are declining because cereal and milk can't be eaten in the car while driving; breakfast bars meet that need better.

In her book The Worst Years of Our Lives (HarperPerennial), Barbara Ehrenreich writes:

I don't know when the cult of conspicuous busyness began, but it has swept up almost all the upwardly mobile, professional women I know. Already, it is getting hard to recall the days when, for example, "Let's have lunch," meant something other than, "I've got more important things to do than talk to you right now." There was even a time when people used to get together without the excuse of needing to eat somethingwhen, in fact, it was considered rude to talk with your mouth full. In the old days, hardly anybody had an appointment book...

It's not only women, of course; for both sexes, busyness has become an important insignia of upper-middle-class status. Nobody, these days, admits to having a hobby, although two or more careerssay, neurosurgery and an art dealershipis not uncommon, and I am sure we will soon be hearing more about the tribulations of the four-paycheck couple...

You can't jam 25 hours into a 24-hour day. Time is a non-renewable resource that's consumed at a constant and relentless rate. Once an hour is gone, it's gone forever; you can never get it back.

Yet you can solve most of your time-related problemsnot enough time, too much to do, deadlines too short, bosses too demanding, not getting to your own prioritiessimply by in-creasing the productivity of the one resource you can control: you. As management consultant Stephen Covey notes "The only person over whom you have direct and immediate control is yourself."

Some human resource professionals refer to the people in their organizations as "resources." That's cold, but in a way, appropriate and accurate. You are a resource. You have output. To succeed today, you need to increase your output to the next level without making the resource sick, tired, dissatisfied, or unhappy. That's where this book can help.

101 Ways to Make Every Second Count shows you how to succeed in today's competitive, fast-paced world by increasing your own personal productivity, so you can get more done in less time. Going beyond conventional time management, 101 Ways to Make Every Second Count offers diverse strategies and tactics in order to empower you to gain this productivity boost everything from planning, scheduling, organizing, and eliminating time-wasters, to suggestions on improving life habits that give you more energy so you can work better and faster, to using the latest technology to manage information and communicate more efficiently and effectively.