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Negotiation
Performance Psychology
Negotiating your time
November 23, 2010
Negotiating your time and the amount of time you spend on each job is a pre-requisite to your efficiency. I have been asked by some mentoring clients for guidance on effective time management, and here are some ideas.
Food for thought. It’s more about how you manage your energy rather than your time. Negotiate more time.
Here are some suggestions to make you more efficient.
- To do lists & categorise them
- The 4 D’s – do it; delegate it; dump it; diarise it
- Be ruthless with your time
- Be compassionate with it for other people BUT not time wasters
- When you’ve prioritised it – allocate time in your diary for it
- How closely does it fit in with the business goals
- Size & importance of the actual job/customer
- FBI – fastest, best, impact
- If you were going on holiday tomorrow & could only do 1 thing today – what’s that 1 thing you would do?
- Carpet fitters technique – measure it twice & cut it once because it saves you cutting it twice if you only measure it once
- Listen to your inner guidance – trust a hunch – does it feel right
- Stand up meeting. 15 mins duration. Bill Gates 3 min meetings. Nido Qubein 5 mins
- Quadrant approach see below – urgent, non-urgent – Covey
SMART goals – Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time based.(with the R being relevant rather than realistic as many goals can be realistic but are they relevant to your values or what’s important to you or to your strategic business plans.)
Put first things first – Steven Covey. Urgent, non urgent, important, not important. See book 7 Habits of Highly effective people
| Covey’s quadrant | Urgent | Not urgent |
| Important | QUAD 1 | QUAD 2 |
| Not important | Quad 3 | Quad 4 |
Finally – there is a debate whether this is all about self management because the more we do the more we want to do
We all have 168 hours in a week. Use them wisely
Story – Spread your papers out
Following my last email newsletter on time management Marie wrote to me and said it reminded her of this situation she had been in.
Marie had been up to her eyes in work, she didn’t know whether she was coming or going. She had an in tray that almost reached the ceiling. Anyway a friend of hers said to her why don’t you come in early one morning and spread all your papers out on the office floor. So you can see every issue that you have, individually. Then sort them into important, not so important and if I don’t do it, it won’t matter.
She did this and made a list. Marie just concentrated on the important issues. It made her so much more efficient and got her away from that overwhelmed feeling.
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