PRODUCTIVITY

Beating the Clock
Lessons from an efficiency expert
by Kristin Eddy – Executive Travel – 10/01/04

Consider the amazing time-management hurdles road warriors face: An unexpected snowstorm can delay a crucial meeting for days, face-time with direct reports may be nonexistent some weeks, and emails pile up by the hundreds in the time it takes to fly from New York to San Francisco. Executive Travel asked time-management guru Jeffrey Mayer to find some solutions to the challenges business travelers face, by talking with frequent flyer Eric Levinson and looking at ways he could work more efficiently. While the preferred solution would be to travel less (and it took some conversation to conclude that this would not be possible for Levinson), Mayer did find areas Levinson could streamline and habits he could form in order to free up time for himself. Now, how to use that time...?

Before they could begin to talk about time management, Jeff Mayer and Eric Levinson had to manage to find a time to talk.

This kind of conundrum gives Mayer, an expert on the topic and a time-management consultant to executives around the country, his first clues about how his client operates. In this case, Levinson, the desktop applications manager for an international law firm based in Chicago, wanted to set up an in-person meeting with Mayer.

Mayer insisted on holding the meeting over the phone, though his office and Web site, SucceedingInBusiness.com, are also in Chicago. Why waste the extra minutes getting face-to-face with each other, when the telephone put them in contact without leaving either office?

"The ability to communicate is more important than meeting face-to-face," said Mayer, who does most of his business over the telephone, on the Internet and through email. "I don't walk out of the office without a computer."

The problem in this case, which swayed things in Mayer's favor, was that Levinson spends only part of the week in Chicago; the rest of his time is parceled out between home in New York (from which he telecommutes) and visits to the firm's other offices.

So, over the phone it was.

Levinson explained that he felt a little overwhelmed by the time he spent traveling for his job. Living in New York was a personal choice, aided by company executives' desire to spread out senior management for the benefit of other offices.

"I was living in New York when the [job] opportunity came up, and it was decided it wasn't necessary for me to be in Chicago all of the time," he said. The staffers who report directly to Levinson, in fact, include individuals who work from Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. "Our firm is global, and I am able to bring a perspective of the remote offices to the main office in Chicago."

But as anyone can figure out, that means spending a fair amount of time each week heading to and from the airport and on a plane. Though he knows people who only travel on company time, Levinson feels that he should do the travel on personal time, and still arrive in the office around 8 a.m. Once in the office, he needs to maximize the value of his presence.

Understandable. But, Mayer thought, maybe the first thing to do would be to stop spending so much time in the main office.

"Why is it important for you to be physically in the meeting?" he asked Levinson. "What are the most important reasons you have to show up in Chicago? If you can pinpoint those, maybe you don't have to be here three days a week." Maybe, he suggested, more meetings could be held over the phone or Internet. More assignments could be delegated to other staff members. And more responsibility should be placed on staff to show up prepared for meetings, rather than having to spend time going over old business or bringing people up to speed with the agenda.

Levinson, however, sees personal contact as a part of work, however technical the rest of his job description may be. It comes down to, he said, a "comfort level" for the executives he answers to and the staff he manages. For Levinson, this applies to everything from a computer system crisis that affects the company's 13 offices, to a weekly staff meeting where body language and facial expressions often can express as much information as the dialogue in a teleconference.

When it comes to meetings, he said, "You have to assume that people have read the reports. [But] I don't assume they are always coming prepared."

"That is a different set of issues, not time management," Mayer said. "Then you have a reason to get mad."

Levinson described how he places himself on the routing list of job orders to make sure system needs are being addressed and completed.

"Why place yourself on the routing list?" Mayer asked. "That's what your employees are for. You are not letting your employees do their job." Reorganizing how business gets done, said Mayer, also includes "retraining" Levinson's managers to get comfortable with the idea of having fewer meetings.

That part stopped Levinson right away.

"We are a very project-oriented company," he explained. "We always have new projects coming up. And the problem in the technology world is that you can't always predict when there is going to be a crisis.

"[Recently,] we had some pretty severe technical problems," he said. "The really key people were all in Chicago already. They wanted everybody to be in the conference room. It was a critical situation, and my frustration level at being in New York instead of Chicago would have been really high.

"This is not a common thing; it could happen once a month, or it might happen once a year. But there are some people who feel that even if it is not an urgent situation, communication is more effective face-to-face."

Levinson acknowleged that he has plenty of interruptions at work in Chicago, especially with an office located near the kitchen's coffee machine ("people tend to stop by a lot"), but cutting back on regular meetings didn't seem like an option.

"When 98 percent of the people are sitting in the meeting," he said, "It's too tough for me not to be in there." Videoconferencing, which Mayer suggested, is only "selectively available" at the firm.

"If I am not there, I am only getting 70 percent of the information," Levinson said. "Even if I have someone take down the information, I don't have the confidence I am getting 100 percent of it."

As Levinson elaborated the following week, "I know for a fact that when people are in conference calls, the person on the phone may only [be paying attention] about 60 percent of the time. They may be doing work or email while they talk, and that can be frustrating. I want everyone to focus. And once a meeting has been conducted, there are always times when the conference call has been disconnected, but the discussion continues, and I miss out on the impact of what is still going on."

While Levinson hit on the crux of why most of the white-collar world isn't telecommuting, Mayer explained there are still a number of ways for him to manage his time more effectively. The key thing to ask each morning is, "What is the most important thing I should be doing today?" Pick the three to five things that are the most important, and see if they can be taken care of early. Don't schedule meetings in the morning, when these essentials should take priority.

As Mayer puts it, "You need to schedule your priorities, not prioritize your schedule. Most people focus on the stuff that doesn't really matter, and they end up drowning."

Mayer also suggested Levinson look into establishing company blogs, whereby the staff could contribute the kind of specific and free-floating ideas that tend to come up in meetings. And Levinson took Mayer's advice to create a template that his staff could use to fill out regular, uniform reports for distribution to everyone. Then, instead of scheduling weekly status meetings, everyone would only need to get together if a problem arose.

As Levinson reported back a week later, "I thought I would do some reorganization over the areas I can control. The staff actually were all very excited about having one less meeting. But I emphasized that this would only be feasible if everyone turned in the reports on time. This is, in some ways, going to be a little more work for them, because some people are used to coming to a meeting and sitting there and only talking if they have been asked a question."

As Mayer pointed out, "But now you have a paper trail, and they have to be accountable. Your job as an executive and a leader is to oversee making sure they get their job done properly."

While not everyone has total freedom to make the office run according to their own convenient schedule, Mayer insists, "If you want to regain control of your life, you have to fight for your time. No one else cares if you have to get up at 3 a.m. to catch a flight or fight the traffic to get to O'Hare."

"We don't get compensated for going crazy," he said. "We get compensated for doing the work and going home."

All work and no play?

Maybe you don't need to work longer hours to become more efficient at your job. You may just need to fit in a little more play time.

That's the suggestion from a study commissioned by the Hilton Hotels Corporation, which gathered a board of consultants to explore how vacations and the pleasures of relaxation create happier, more productive employees.

Hilton's "Leisure Time Advocacy Initiative" combined the research of a dozen experts on the subject, including academics, sociologists, medical professionals and life coaches, to create the Web site www.myleisuretrip.com, which offers tips for maximizing the pleasures of downtime, from short breaks during the workday to week-long vacations. (Americans might want to indulge more in the latter, as the study found that only slightly more than half of workers take all the vacation days they earn each year.)

"With a healthier balance between work and play, people are actually more productive while on the job, which enables them to put in more quality work time," says Tom Keltner, Hilton's president of franchise development.

The Hilton Corporation, of course, has an interest in encouraging people to pursue leisure activities—perhaps with a stay at a hotel. But those who study the concept of free time say relaxation has serious benefits.

"A lot of the ways in which people use their leisure affect two of the biggest health issues in the country: physical activity and stress reduction," says Geoffrey Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Penn State University's College of Health and Human Development. "There actually are a lot of studies [that] relate leisure to these variables."

"Think of free time as an investment in the self," suggests Craig Finney, professor of leisure studies and recreation at California State University, Northridge.

Suggestions for those important mental breaks range from simply embracing the idea that leisure time is important to concrete tips, such as keeping a "Things I Said 'No' To" list, from which the time saved by declining certain tasks is totaled up at the end of the month and devoted to a pleasurable activity.

And for those workers who limit vacation time in order to seem like more valuable employees, an alternative might be to bring family members along on business trips and try to work in fun activities during non-work hours.

"From a health perspective," Godbey says, "escaping the work environment is a positive thing."

Kristin Eddy is a freelance writer in Northern California.

Need to leverage your time?
Ask efficiency expert Jeffrey Mayer.

This is a lamentation I hear almost daily from people who are inquiring about my consulting services: "I come in early. Stay late. Work weekends. And still don't get everything done." For years, we've all been thinking: Time Management. How can I best manage my time?

Today, time management is pedestrian. If you're asking yourself the question: How do I manage my time, you're asking the wrong question. The correct question is, How do I leverage my time?

The concept of leverage is very simple: A little bit of work generates a great deal of results. You leverage your time by working on, and completing, work, tasks, projects and activities that generate big results. When I think of time and leverage in business, I always come back to the 80/20 Rule.

• 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers.

• 80 percent of your sales comes from 20 percent of your products.

• 80 percent of your headaches comes from 20 percent of your customers/employees.

• 80 percent of your results comes from 20 percent of your activities.

• 80 percent of your time is wasted.

Here are three ways you can make the 80/20 Rule work for you:

1. Do more of the things that work. Identify the activities, projects, people that generate the highest return on your time. Refine what you do. Get better at it. What's the profile of your ideal customer? What words and phrases work best during your sales calls? What activities generate the greatest rewards?

2. Do less of the things that don't work. You'll have much more time when you eliminate the work, tasks, projects and people that take up your time, but don't give you value for your invested time. I call this Addition by Subtraction.

When it comes to business, I'm in love with the telephone. I think it's the most time-efficient tool available. Add travel time to a 30-minute sales call, and it's easy to spend two hours away from your office. And you wonder why you're working so hard.

How many times have you had meetings with prospects who had no interest in doing business with you? Wasted time. Wasted energy. Ask better questions over the phone, and you'll do a better job of qualifying your prospects before you go to meet them. And when you do finally meet them, it's as if you're having your second or third meeting.

The benefit of asking questions before having a face-to-face meeting is that the prospect will quickly disqualify himself when the answers don't measure up to what you think they should be. My feeling is that if I'm going to lose, I would rather lose early than late.

3. Stop doing things that don't have a payoff. In the old days, we used to talk about delegation. I don't want to do this task, so I'll delegate it to someone else. I like the concept of elimination.

We always talk about the importance of keeping a Things To Do list. It's also beneficial to keep a Things Not To Do list. This would be a reminder of work, tasks, projects, and activities that you should stop doing. Leverage your time, experiences, wisdom and passion, and you can make this your best year ever.

Jeffrey Mayer (www.SucceedingInBusiness.com) is the author of many books and training manuals, including Making More While Working Less and Winning the Fight Between You & the Clock.

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