The Hindu Business Line : Manage time with four buckets

Have you ever done the exercise of dividing your ‘desired annual income’ by 2080? That’s the number of working hours in a year, assuming a forty-hour workweek, explains Daniel Harkavy in Becoming a Coaching Leader ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). “If you want to make $1,00,000 a year, that’s about $50 an hour.”

Once you know your hourly wage, it becomes much easier to ask the crucial question whether what you are currently doing is worth doing, says Harkavy. “Does it make sense for me to perform a $20-per-hour activity when I see several $100-per-hour activities on my desk going undone? Most people just don’t think this way.”

Identify your high-payoff activities, he advises. “They are the three to five activities that lie in your ‘sweet spot.’ You do them with excellence. They are your unique disciplines or distinctive skills, abilities that distinguish you from other team members.”

Examples of high-payoff activities for CEOs include ‘sharing vision, recruiting key talent, or networking.’ For COOs, such activities can be ‘budget reviews, coaching managers, or executing the strategic plan.’

A caution, however, is that knowing what your high-payoff activities are, and actually doing them, are two very different things. Discipline yourself, therefore, not only to identify these activities, but also to fill up your calendar with those things. Appropriately delegate, delay, or drop the low-payoff activities, guides Harkavy.

As with budgeting, which demands the tracking of the actuals, so with calendars. ‘Time track’ your week, the author counsels. “For at least five days straight, write down everything you do, in fifteen-minute increments, from the time you start working until the time you go home.”

Thereafter, mark anything that’s a high-payoff with a green highlighter, and all the low-payoff activities with a pink highlighter, he instructs. “Blocking times in your day in which to focus on high-payoff activities is a must if you are to become a more effective leader… if you live primarily in ‘react mode,’ your well will quickly run dry.”

A great takeaway from the book is ‘the daily routine’ that Harkavy proposes, with the intelligent use of four simple words – viz. growth, in, on, and off – plugged into your calendar time slots.

“Growth time is the selling part of your job,” he explains. “It includes prospecting, networking, interviewing, meeting with prospective recruits, and adding value to prospective big clients. It enables your department or your company to grow and helps you and your team to bring value to the rest of the organisation or to the marketplace.”

The ‘in’ time is about administration, when you work alongside the ‘conveyor belt’ of company processes, ‘troubleshooting and making sure that everyone working on the product or the service is handling the prospective client with excellence.’

What is ‘on’ time? It happens when you remove yourself from the daily excitement of running your business, elucidates Harkavy. “Here you look down, as if you were in a helicopter. You observe the activities, the growth, your time spent in the business, and you begin working on it, improving your productivity and profitability.” It is during ‘on’ time that you can read and plan, strategise and think.

The opposite, the ‘off’ time, requires you to set all your work aside, to focus on your ‘life plan,’ the author directs. “Off time for you may fall in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day, at your gym time, at lunch, or when you coach your son’s soccer team in the afternoon. It can also be on Saturday when you are reading a good book on the beach with your family. This is time for you to get recharged.” Get comfortable putting all your activities into these four buckets, spurs the author. “Give each bucket a top-priority commitment, and make sure no one interrupts you when you’re spending time in each of these areas.”