The concept of time is manmade, yet as the centuries passed, the lone town church bell that marked the end of another work day somehow became the need to manage every second of every day. As a result, we have blurred the lines between work and life. We have a choice every day in what to do with the twenty-four hours that are staring us in the face. I’ve been anal retentive and a consummate time management teacher—and student—for many years. Yet, I don’t wear a watch. No, I don’t use sun-dials, but we are surrounded by devices that tell us the time. It’s on cell phones, computers,
and even in my small New England church bell tower, which chimes every hour.

To me, time is the present, not a device. We can’t live in the past, we are only in this very moment, and we can make the future better by managing our present effectively. Time management is all mental. It’s about commitment, routine, flexibility, adjustment, and planning. I gave a person I mentor specific instructions to do something to develop herself. She agreed it was reasonable, and committed to doing it. She didn’t do it. Her exact words were, “I didn’t do it because I didn’t have time.” That’s too bad. It doesn’t hurt me, but it also doesn’t develop her. I can’t force her to do it, but she couldn’t commit to finding herself thirty minutes a month for her own growth. We create our own self-limitations. We say we’ll do tomorrow what we really want to do today.

It’s time to take back your work day. Today is about self-reflection in order to understand what else you need to control your work day. This comes from understanding what’s holding you back, thinking it through, having the right conversations, and taking action to improve. Time management is a requirement for all levels in an organization. If you think you don’t have enough time to invest in improving your own time management, think again. There are only twenty-four hours in the day. They should not all be devoted to work, but if you don’t manage the work piece, you can’t balance the personal piece. Start immediately.

In time management terms, that’s now.

Thomas B. Dowd III’s books available in softcover, eBook, and audiobook (From Fear to Success only):

• Down the Chute: A Toboggan Tale (children’s book)
• Now What? The Ultimate Graduation Gift for Professional Success
• Time Management Manifesto: Expert Strategies to Create an Effective Work/Life Balance
• Displacement Day: When My Job was Looking for a Job…A Reference Guide to Finding Work
• The Transformation of a Doubting Thomas: Growing from a Cynic to a Professional in the Corporate World
• From Fear to Success: A Practical Public-speaking Guide received the Gold Medal at the 2013 Axiom Business Book Awards in Business Reference
• The Unofficial Guide to Fatherhood

See “Products” for details on www.transformationtom.com.  Book and eBook purchase options are also available on Amazon- Please click the link to be re-directed: Amazon.com

As an immature manager who hadn’t realized how important the people working for him were, I would come home every night saying that I should be paid extra for babysitting. I even moved my computer from the front of my desk to the back corner in an attempt to reduce the volume of questions. It didn’t help, but I did quickly gain a reputation for being unapproachable (I will remind you that I wasn’t ready to manage people). I was moved out of the role, but
that’s a story for another day—it does end well (see The Transformation of a Doubting Thomas for details).

Why was I so frustrated with people asking me questions to solve customer problems or wanting my attention in order to build a stronger employee-manager relationship? It took some soul searching, but I did figure it out. What I found was that I allowed one-hundred percent of my time to be swallowed up by others who were dependent on me, and I found myself not knowing when or how I would get everything else done. If you’re a parent or even have pets, you may know the feeling that we sometimes just need a little time alone to do what we need for ourselves.

What I learned was that I simply had to create that time. It didn’t have to be long periods. Whether it was a quick five-minute breather or going to a quiet office to write a performance appraisal, that time made me concentrate on the task at hand. As a result, I became more productive and could then give one-hundred percent concentration when I returned. The built-up frustration of wanting to do something only to encounter obstacles because of the pull from those depending on us hurts our relationship building, and our time management.

When it makes sense, put up your own “Do Not Disturb” sign when you absolutely have to get work done. This can be literal or figurative, done with an online indicator for instant messaging, for example, or by walking away from your desk. Either way, proactively let people know that you’re temporarily not available. If you’re on vacation, turn on your out-of-office message. You can also practice just letting your phone go to voicemail and allowing emails to come in without an immediate response. Next, turn off the distractions that can take away from your actual work. Don’t sneak a peek at Facebook—your friends will still be there later.

You can be more productive and reduce frustration and interruptions by simply being obvious about your availability—people will respect it. Let people know that you’re temporarily not available, but that when you return they will have your undivided attention.

Thomas B. Dowd III’s books available in softcover, eBook, and audiobook (From Fear to Success only):

• Down the Chute: A Toboggan Tale (children’s book)
• Now What? The Ultimate Graduation Gift for Professional Success
• Time Management Manifesto: Expert Strategies to Create an Effective Work/Life Balance
• Displacement Day: When My Job was Looking for a Job…A Reference Guide to Finding Work
• The Transformation of a Doubting Thomas: Growing from a Cynic to a Professional in the Corporate World
• From Fear to Success: A Practical Public-speaking Guide received the Gold Medal at the 2013 Axiom Business Book Awards in Business Reference
• The Unofficial Guide to Fatherhood

See “Products” for details on www.transformationtom.com.  Book and eBook purchase options are also available on Amazon- Please click the link to be re-directed: Amazon.com

I received a panicked phone call from a colleague one day who said she had taken on additional responsibilities and that she felt she was drowning, her nose barely above water. She was crumbling under the weight of her responsibilities. After she’d calmed down, she asked the simplest question of all: “Can you help me?” Whether she called me or someone else, she had become self-aware enough to know her work performance was suffering. Self-awareness is a powerful tool.

Too many people wait until it’s too late to ask for assistance. You don’t need to complain, you need to look for solutions. If you find that these solutions or other time management tools you’ve tried aren’t working for you—keep searching. Telling someone it will get done still doesn’t get it done, until you find the time to do it. If you’re falling behind, be strong enough to get assistance. You don’t want to wait for a time study to figure out what you do all day! If you don’t know, ask a peer, ask a boss, ask a mentor, even ask a stranger, but make sure that you ask. I realize we’re in a do-more-with-less business world. We
hesitate to talk with people about the time crunches we’re under. We don’t want to be considered weak, inefficient, unproductive, or other negative connotations that can hurt our professional growth. Work not getting done, however, will be a much bigger problem over time.

It’s time to do some soul searching. Is today the day to ask for help with your own organization and time management skills? Even if you want more time to implement these strategies, set an actual deadline to do another assessment. If you reach that date and are not at the level you expected, make that the day to ask for help. As stated in an earlier blogs, the concept of building a strong enough relationship with someone to have this type of conversation is critical. Invest the time now to build strong relationships with those people around you who can help. Discuss challenges with your manager and other co-workers, and even people you mentor with to get sound advice. Silence will only hurt you. Communicate with your manager and the appropriate
people within your organization relating to what’s on your plate. It may take time to reach a solution, but it always begins with self-awareness.

Thomas B. Dowd III’s books available in softcover, eBook, and audiobook (From Fear to Success only):

• Down the Chute: A Toboggan Tale (children’s book)
• Now What? The Ultimate Graduation Gift for Professional Success
• Time Management Manifesto: Expert Strategies to Create an Effective Work/Life Balance
• Displacement Day: When My Job was Looking for a Job…A Reference Guide to Finding Work
• The Transformation of a Doubting Thomas: Growing from a Cynic to a Professional in the Corporate World
• From Fear to Success: A Practical Public-speaking Guide received the Gold Medal at the 2013 Axiom Business Book Awards in Business Reference
• The Unofficial Guide to Fatherhood

See “Products” for details on www.transformationtom.com.  Book and eBook purchase options are also available on Amazon- Please click the link to be re-directed: Amazon.com

I used to work in a credit acquisition department where we were making lending decisions for customers every day. The customer would send in an application, and we had to make a credit decision based on multiple factors like previous credit and financial history. Every effort was made to build consistency, but there were always situations when we would be on the fence due to the subjective nature of the job. Do we approve it, decline it, or ask for more information from the customer? The easy decision was to ask for more information, but even then, some information that came back still left us in the fog. Our job was to make sound decisions that didn’t put the bank at risk, but we still had regulations and certain internal deadlines that forced us to make some kind of determination. We called these final decisions endlines. We had to endline and stop waffling. Right or wrong, we had to make an educated and informed decision before the application was considered past due.

In your professional life, it’s important to realize that procrastination is not an option. There are decisions that have to be made. Effective today, you will learn to make endline decisions. You obviously want to gather important facts to make important decisions. However, there are some decisions that aren’t important. Certain emails may be sitting in your inbox that you’ve read twenty-five times in the hope that something can be done to deal with it. Have you engaged the right people, have you escalated the situation, have you gathered the right facts? In the touch-it-once mentality, leaving it in your inbox doesn’t solve the problem. A decision still needs to be made. Being decisive
and attacking problems head-on will always save you time and effort. If you’re in the habit of leaving items unattended because you find it difficult deciding what to do, now is the time to commit to changing that habit. An unofficial rule of thumb for me is to consider a maximum of five business days before simply making an endline decision—give or take, based on the circumstances. Even if you choose to delete it with no actions, you still have to make a decision. It’s been a week already! As long as you understand the ramifications of your decisions, you will
start to build the right habits and reduce the volume of these endline decisions significantly.

Thomas B. Dowd III’s books available in softcover, eBook, and audiobook (From Fear to Success only):

• Down the Chute: A Toboggan Tale (children’s book)
• Now What? The Ultimate Graduation Gift for Professional Success
• Time Management Manifesto: Expert Strategies to Create an Effective Work/Life Balance
• Displacement Day: When My Job was Looking for a Job…A Reference Guide to Finding Work
• The Transformation of a Doubting Thomas: Growing from a Cynic to a Professional in the Corporate World
• From Fear to Success: A Practical Public-speaking Guide received the Gold Medal at the 2013 Axiom Business Book Awards in Business Reference
• The Unofficial Guide to Fatherhood

See “Products” for details on www.transformationtom.com.  Book and eBook purchase options are also available on Amazon- Please click the link to be re-directed: Amazon.com

I used to have a person work for me who managed a small group of employees. She was great with people, but lacked effective organization skills. We had been working on these skills, and I had seen some improvement. I then sat down at her desk one day and looked behind her. Her credenza had been left open, and obviously was not intended for me to see.

She was a file hoarder. She had mountains of unfiled paperwork, personnel files, and who knows what else, hidden in the pile. She said she would get around to it. So, we set a deadline. I came back the day after the deadline had passed; her credenza looked very much the same. She said she’d tried, but it was too much and she didn’t have time. As stated throughout this book, we do have time; it’s just a matter of what we do with it. The simplicity of putting the files behind her to get to them later turned into a pressure-filled ticking time bomb that still had to be addressed versus a series of quick actions. The mess was a big concern. Think about the fact that personal information in the files was accessible, potential follow-up items were left unattended, and
that there were possible audit issues depending on what was in the pile.

She saw a stack of work that became psychologically difficult to attack. Her strategy was avoidance. I’ve rarely seen this strategy work. I saw a series of immediate and small tasks that could be completed quickly, enabling her to gain efficiency in the future. We tackled it together—in less than thirty minutes. In daily life, we often put off things that appear to be burdensome tasks, which can take away from our attention to detail and may even cause our stress to increase. Try shifting your mindset, so that you approach tasks as they come up with the same urgency you associate with tasks after you’ve let them build. If you have always filed and saved immediately, you’re on the right path. If you don’t, then today is the day to start.

When something needs to be filed, do it immediately—or, depending on your position, delegate it immediately—whether it is a paper, email content, or anything online that needs to be saved, recorded, and/or filed. In order to maximize your efficiency, it’s important that you know where things are at all times. Knowing that it’s under the third pile to the left may work sometimes, but this is about consistency. How you file and where you choose to put things is up to you. The goal is to have an organized methodology.

Thomas B. Dowd III’s books available in softcover, eBook, and audiobook (From Fear to Success only):

• Down the Chute: A Toboggan Tale (children’s book)
• Now What? The Ultimate Graduation Gift for Professional Success
• Time Management Manifesto: Expert Strategies to Create an Effective Work/Life Balance
• Displacement Day: When My Job was Looking for a Job…A Reference Guide to Finding Work
• The Transformation of a Doubting Thomas: Growing from a Cynic to a Professional in the Corporate World
• From Fear to Success: A Practical Public-speaking Guide received the Gold Medal at the 2013 Axiom Business Book Awards in Business Reference
• The Unofficial Guide to Fatherhood

See “Products” for details on www.transformationtom.com.  Book and eBook purchase options are also available on Amazon- Please click the link to be re-directed: Amazon.com

I had only been in the real world working for about six months. I was doing decently on the phones, and was promoted to a job with more responsibilities. I was still on the phones, but we had more meetings to discuss strategies. I showed up to my first meeting without a notebook, paper, or any other way to retain the information. My boss called me out on it; I have never gone to a meeting again without something to keep notes.

According to culturalorientation.net, retention rates for adult learning varies based on the teaching method, but dips as low as five percent for lectures. Individuals learn best when they are actively engaged and taking notes. Culturalorientation.net noted in their article that, “As Confucius said nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, ‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember.’”

Since that day, I’ve been a consummate note taker. What does this have to do with organization and time management? It has to do with follow-up, prioritization, and execution; adding everything to your calendar and ensuring that you’re actually doing what was discussed right the first time!

If you have not consistently brought something to take notes with during meetings, start immediately. Always take a notebook (laptop or anything to take notes!- paper or digital- it doesn’t matter) to meetings, and actually use it. The value isn’t the notes staring blankly back at you. The significance comes into play when you invest the time to go back and read them—and take action. Just as you would when taking action on emails, it’s important to do the same with notes. Go back and refer to them to determine whether any actions need to be taken. Do you have questions that still need to be asked, or is clarification or confirmation still needed? Do you know if you were specifically asked to do something? If yes, mark it accordingly, and immediately add it to your calendar to get it done. I use markings for items that require immediate action to ensure that they stand out. Then, I immediately begin the transfer from paper or even tablet to a calendar. For those who prefer note-taking directly online, you’re even further ahead. I prefer actual written notes because I’ve found that the writing and transferring of information has helped my retention rates significantly, but use what works best for you. What is important is that you don’t simply take notes and then ignore them—that would be a waste of time.

Thomas B. Dowd III’s books available in softcover, eBook, and audiobook (From Fear to Success only):

• Down the Chute: A Toboggan Tale (children’s book)
• Now What? The Ultimate Graduation Gift for Professional Success
• Time Management Manifesto: Expert Strategies to Create an Effective Work/Life Balance
• Displacement Day: When My Job was Looking for a Job…A Reference Guide to Finding Work
• The Transformation of a Doubting Thomas: Growing from a Cynic to a Professional in the Corporate World
• From Fear to Success: A Practical Public-speaking Guide received the Gold Medal at the 2013 Axiom Business Book Awards in Business Reference
• The Unofficial Guide to Fatherhood

See “Products” for details on www.transformationtom.com.  Book and eBook purchase options are also available on Amazon- Please click the link to be re-directed: Amazon.com