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The 12 Week Year — Chapter-17: Take Back Control of Your Day
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Chapter 17 Take Back Control of Your Day One of the barriers that our clients often cite when explaining what keeps them from achieving more of what they are capable of is a lack of time. The lack-of-time reason is so common that it seems very real, yet more often than not, it is a smokescreen that covers over the real barrier. In fact, what most often keeps you from being exceptional is not a lack of time, but the way you allocate the time that you have. I know that sounds like semantics, but it’s an important distinction. Here is an encouraging story of how time blocking allowed Annette Batista to balance competing demands on her time and still excel at what was most important to her. It has been almost two years since I first read the 12 Week Year. I devoured it and applied the principles not only in my home business but on a personal and professional level as well. My 12 week goals were to be on pace each 12 weeks for the yearly award given to the top performers and to begin to homeschool my child. In order to do this I knew I needed a good plan. I am an Outreach Counselor. In that role I educate clients about their medical benefits; I assist them in choosing a medical plan and doctor for themselves and/or their children as well as a dental plan and dentist for their children. To meet my goals, each month I have to complete 650 phone calls and conduct 100 home visits. I also have to do presentations at local agencies, attend health fairs and community meetings, and do a minimum of 15 community contacts each month, 8 of which have to be done face to face. I have an area of six zip codes to cover in two counties. I worried how I would get all this done. What could I do daily that would get me where I wanted to be by being steady and consistent? My
profession is demanding and rewarding at the same time. I am also a wife, mother, and grandmother. Becoming intentional about my plan in order to achieve everything I wanted to do would be critical. Time blocking effectively helped me to reach my goals. I use buffer blocks each morning, usually for one hour from 7:30 A.M. to 8:30 A.M. to check my email, send out an encouraging word to my colleagues and then prioritize my contact lists by order of importance. I then move on to the time blocks that I schedule each day to perform my key activities. For the next four hours, 8:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. each day, I either make phone calls or home visits. These time blocks help me to stay on top of my very demanding workload. My time blocking works so well that by Tuesday when I’m supposed to start calling my daily lists, I have already completed them. My weekly call lists are usually completed one to two weeks early each month. Next come my breakout blocks. After lunch each day, I start homeschooling, which takes me exactly three hours to do. Teaching gives me a break from work. I like teaching and my son enjoys learning. The different subjects we cover—Bible, Language Arts, Science, Math, History, and Geography—provide a great way to tune into several different options within my breakout block. So things are not mundane and boring. When homeschooling is done I finish my day with another buffer block wrapping up with a few calls, data entry of what has been done for the day, and checking my email one last time before the day ends to make sure nothing major is pending for the next day. Using the disciplines of time blocking in the 12 Week Year, I have been able to work ahead. Sometimes even two weeks ahead. When I have gone on vacation I have been able to enjoy it because I know I won’t have things “pending” or undone when I get back. I have taken ownership of my plan. I have chosen to excel. My choices have gained me the respect of my manager and supervisor as well as my colleagues, family, and friends. All this being said, I not only accomplished my goal of earning the Outreach Counselor of the Year Award in 2011—I also received that
award this year (2012), something that has never been done before. On a personal level, my husband and I are applying this to our finances and are determined to be out of debt, with the exception of our mortgage by December of next year. We will accomplish in 12 months what would normally take 18 to 36 months. Effective time use can be the difference between mediocre and great performance. The problem is that the world is rife with potential distractions and interruptions that arise non-stop throughout the day. A study conducted by Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois found that after being distracted from serious mental tasks by things like emails or instant messages, the typical Microsoft worker took an average of 15 minutes to get back on their original task. Further, a 2005 time-use study published by Basex, a business research firm, concluded that 28 percent of the average professional’s time in a day was spent on interruptions and associated recovery time! That’s about 11 distracted hours in a 40-hour week! The choices that you make on how you spend your time, ultimately create your results in life. The great people, the giants of history whether in politics, culture, art, science, religion, or any endeavor you can think of, had no more time in each day than you do. What they did with their time made all the difference. The breakdown lies in your moment-by-moment choices. Most people make choices that increase their short-term benefits and minimize their short-term costs. In 2011, the average American spent 2.8 hours a day watching TV. That’s 12 percent of our lives—and that number does not include the hours spent on the newly available entertainment devices such as smartphones and tablets. We often watch TV to escape and to relax. We do it partly because it’s easy; we don’t have to do anything except change the channel. TV may be beneficial in some ways, but helping us to live a life of significance isn’t one of them. Sometimes the choices you make are not as obviously low-value as your TV and couch time. Some of your choices may make it seem like you are staying busy when in reality you are choosing to avoid your more important, and often more difficult activity. This tendency shows up everywhere in our lives and includes things like following up on emails and
messages rather that tackling the more difficult, but higher-payoff activities like making sales calls, exercising, and confronting difficult relationship problems. Spending leisure time and doing comfortable tasks is undoubtedly healthy in moderation, but when we consistently choose comfortable activity, we are dooming ourselves to lives lived far short of our capabilities. Eventually the excessive time we spend maximizing comfort in the moment leads to inevitable delayed costs and unrealized achievements. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Eventually everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.” To become fit requires discomfort, to earn a significant income requires discomfort, to become great at anything, requires you to pay the price. To accomplish what you desire will take sacrifice. The number-one thing you will need to sacrifice is your comfort. To become great, you must choose to allocate your time to your greatest opportunities. You will have to choose to spend time on the difficult things that create your biggest payoffs. To be great you will need to live with intention. That will require you to be clear on what matters most, and then to have the courage to say no to things that distract you. You will need to guard your time intensely, delegating or eliminating everything possible that is not one of your strengths or does not help you advance your goals. Based on the talents that you have developed and honed, you have certain strengths and weaknesses. Your strengths and weaknesses taken together, impact your ability to produce the results you seek. Many people spend significant amounts of time and energy attempting to eliminate their weaknesses. In general, striving to reduce the weaknesses that limit your results is worthwhile and noble. Everyone has weaknesses that they need to shore up to be successful; however, a weakness will rarely become a strength. If you are not in a role that plays to or magnifies your strengths, you are probably in the wrong spot. In reality, it is the focused and concentrated application of your strengths that will produce your greatest achievements. Successful individuals work to their strengths. Truly outstanding performers have gone a step further and work to what we call their unique capability. Unique capabilities are one or two things you do absolutely the best. They also tend to be the things that
you enjoy doing. Whether you know it or not, your unique capabilities are responsible for your greatest successes and joys throughout your life. To be your best, you must intentionally align your time and activities with your strengths and your unique capabilities. When you do, you will also experience a new and ever-increasing level of performance and satisfaction. To achieve this level of performance will require that you carve out time for the strategic—those actions that are important, but not necessarily urgent. Strategic activities don’t typically have an immediate payback, yet they create substantial returns in the future. To stay focused on your strengths, you will need to manage your interruptions and keep the low- payoff activities to a minimum. Performance Time Effective time use is one of the five disciplines of the 12 Week Year. In combination with the other four—vision, planning, process control, and scorekeeping—it is part of the proven 12 Week Year execution system. Everything that we achieve in life happens in the context of time. The important things will get done only if you allocate time to them. One of the building blocks of your success is the ability to spend time on what matters most. Performance Time is an easy-to-use time-blocking system that allows you to operate like the CEO of your business and life by spending your most valuable asset—your time—with intention. Your commitment and ability to apply Performance Time is a manifestation of personal leadership. If you live with the intentionality of effective time use, you will become a more effective leader of those around you, and you will build your business and personal success at a faster rate. As discussed in Chapter 7, there are three components that form the foundation of effective time use; they are: strategic blocks, buffer blocks, and breakout blocks. Each of these three time blocks is designed to help you accomplish key activities more efficiently. Strategic blocks are three hours in length and should be scheduled early in your week so that if one gets interrupted or cancelled, you have time to
reschedule it. They are blocks of time when you work on your business, not in it. Strategic blocks should also be scheduled during times when your work activity is typically lowest. One strategic block per week is usually adequate. Buffer blocks are designed to deal with the lower-level activity and are typically between 30 minutes and one hour in length, scheduled one to two times per day. The actual amount of time for buffer blocks will depend upon the amount of email, phone calls, interruptions, and other “administrivia” you normally are required to handle. Breakout blocks are designed to prevent burnout and create more free time. They are three hours in length, and should be scheduled once a week —after the rest of the 12 Week Year is working for you. We recommend that you only have one per month until everything else is working, and you are executing well. In addition to these three categories, you will also want to schedule blocks of time to execute other important activities. Model Work Week In order to allocate your time effectively, it’s helpful to create a picture of a highly productive week—a model work week. In the following exercise you will create a model week, using time blocks for your critical activities. Allocating your time in this way will enable you to generate the success you desire. The intent is to first design a week that allows you to be your most productive, and then to begin to adjust your actual schedule to align with your model week. The model week doesn’t try to eliminate low-value activities from your week; that doesn’t work very well. Instead you will carve out time each week to focus on your high-value, high-payoff activities. If you have a 12 week plan, those high-payoff activities are the actions in your plan. Pencil in your time blocks, beginning with your strategic blocks, next moving to your buffer blocks, then ending with your breakout block. Then, fill in the other important activities that need to happen each week.
Let’s get started. Using the template in Figure 17.1 complete the following 5 steps. Figure 17.1 Model work week.
- Block out 15 minutes first thing Monday morning to review the prior week and to plan for the current week.
- Schedule your three-hour strategic block.
- Schedule one to two buffer blocks each day, Monday through Friday, typically one in the morning and one near the end of the day (e.g., 11:00-12:00 and 4:00-5:00). Remember that the amount of buffer time varies by individual and administrative workload.
- Schedule a breakout block.
- Schedule all additional important activities. a. Client and prospect appointments b. Standing meetings c. Marketing and sales d. Planning e. Required administrative and operational tasks f. Preparation for client meetings and customer service g. Project work
h. Referral lunches i. One-on-one coaching sessions j. Personal tasks Initially, it might seem like there is very little time left in your week. While that may be true, if you’ve done the exercise properly you will notice that all the critical and important activities are accounted for. The items you’ve scheduled are the tasks that are instrumental in achieving your vision and taking your business to the next level. It is crucial that you construct a week that works on paper before trying to execute it. If you can’t get it to work on paper, then there is no way it will work in actual practice. In the end, everything happens in the context of time. If you are not in control of your time, then you won’t be in control of your results. Personal effectiveness is about your intentionality. Performance Time Agendas Following are suggested agendas for strategic and buffer blocks. The agendas will help you leverage these critical time blocks more effectively. Strategic Block—Sample Agenda, 3 Hours Reconnect with your vision: 5-10 minutes. Review your vision and assess your progress. Are you advancing, are you making progress, is there still an emotional connection? 12 week review: 10-15 minutes. Review your metrics. Look at your results against your goals. Inspect your weekly execution score and your lead and lag indicators. Are you executing at a high level and is it producing? If not, what can you do this week to improve? Assess performance breakdowns: 10-20 minutes. Is there a breakdown? If so, what is the root cause? Do you need to adjust your plan, or just execute better? Work on plan tactics: 2–2.5 hours. Use this time to complete tactics from your 12 week plan. Other examples of strategic block activity: Read a book. Take an online course.
Plan for the next 12 Week Year (most often done in week 12 or 13). Buffer Block—Sample Agenda, 30 to 60 Minutes Review and respond to email. Listen to voicemail and respond as needed. Make necessary outbound calls. Follow up on to-do list items. Take quick meetings with staff to answer questions or to plan follow- up. Organize and file work in process and completed items. Identify any new to-do list items and record. These agendas are just samples but notice the type of activity in a strategic block versus a buffer block. Strategic blocks are reserved for the critical, high payoff activity, while the buffer blocks are designed to deal with the low-level, busy work. Performance Time is a unique system for blocking your time out each week. It will help you to allocate time to the things that matter most. What would be different for you if you were consistently able to get more of your most important things done in your life and in your business? Where could you be 12 weeks from now? Three years from now? Often, within just one week of applying the concepts, you will begin to see results, and may feel more in control of your time than you have in years. Thinking Shift Given the value and the limited supply of time, it is interesting that almost all of us have difficulty spending it as effectively as we would like to. Many clients we work with, driven by the natural desire to earn revenue whenever the opportunity arises, will discard their pre-planned schedule without a second thought to accommodate the requests of prospects and clients. They do this repeatedly, seemingly without regard to the long-term impact on their business. In effect, the time that could be spent building their own future is instead spent on building someone else’s. In the final analysis, many of our clients value others’ time above their own. To achieve breakthrough, you must come to think about your own
time as at least as important as that of your customers. Only in this way can you build your business and, ironically, also improve your client service simultaneously. Another belief that gets in the way of effective execution and efficient time use, is that you can get it all done. If you assume that when you work fast enough, hard enough, or long enough you can do everything, you are in for an unpleasant surprise. A study from a few years ago found that the average professional has about 40 hours of unfinished work in their queue at any given point in time. It’s important to realize the simple truth that you can’t do it all; otherwise you will continue to labor under the false belief that you will eventually catch up, and finally get to the important stuff. You will continue to use all of your time on the urgent day-to-day activity and postpone the strategic that is required to create breakthrough and, ultimately, the life you desire. If you frequently defer the strategic work to accomplish the urgent, lower- value activities, you will never accomplish great things. If you work under the belief that you can eventually get the important things done by first working through the urgent ones, you will likely never get to the strategic stuff. The thinking that says, “I will start building my ideal future tomorrow, or next week, or next month,” is fatally flawed. The future you are going to live is the one you are creating right now at this very moment. Reaching a breakthrough isn’t about being incremental. Breakthroughs require a profound change in the way that you work before it shows up in your results. For some, breakthrough results may mean a 20 percent increase in income. For others, it may mean doubling their business. For still others, breakthrough may be taking more time off while maintaining their income. In each case, creating a breakthrough will require a willingness to change how time is allocated. These kinds of performance increases may sound inspiring, but if you are already nearing the capacity of your current system, you may honestly feel that there just isn’t enough time in the week for a breakthrough. Our clients often view higher performance levels as possible for others, but not possible for themselves. Many times they feel that they are already working too hard, and the thought of working harder to earn more is unattractive. They may even have a real fear of success—the fear that says, “My current
system cannot handle the level of activity that will come with greater success.” It seems like common sense to think that you have to work proportionally harder to earn more, but that kind of thinking is exactly what limits what you can accomplish in life. Think about this: People earning $1,000,000 per year aren’t working 10 times harder than people earning $100,000. In fact, they are sometimes working less—but they are working differently. The fact is, you won’t reach a breakthrough if you are not willing to change how you currently allocate your time. To get different results, you will have to do things differently and do different things. Don’t let the mechanics blur the concept. To be your best, you will need to carve out time to work strategically. You will need to find a way to efficiently handle the low-payoff activities. And you need time to refresh and rejuvenate. Team Application As a manager, your communication and actions influence the culture of your team. It is important that your words and actions align if you want to have the greatest positive impact. If you want your team to spend their time with more intention, you need to do so with yours. Create a model work week that incorporates the three core Performance Time blocks and other strategic activity like team meetings and one-on-one coaching sessions, then, commit to working it each week. If you apply the Performance Time system, you are likely to create benefits for yourself as well as your team. Your team will learn that you have intentionality when it comes to your time, and that creates the space for them to do the same. Additionally, if you have buffer blocks at consistent times each day, your team members will know that they can get your attention at those times and will feel that they have more reliable access to you when they need it.
One client of ours in the financial services industry, found that when he applied Performance Time and scheduled his buffer blocks at the same time each day, he improved the service he was providing to his associates. On the surface that may seem counterintuitive. He was now only available an hour each day for spur-of-the-moment questions and meetings with his team. The rest of the day he was focused on working his plan. What he and his team found was that now they could find him each day like clockwork. They no longer had to chase him to get his attention, not knowing if he would be available to meet with them. Now, his team knows when and where they can find him and they experience a higher level of service even though the time windows for meeting with him are limited to an hour each day. A third benefit is that when you apply Performance Time yourself, you will also become more grounded in it and have the standing and the experience to help your team members leverage it. In addition to modeling Performance Time, you can also honor the other members of your team in their application of the system. When they have a strategic block, make it okay to ask you to come back later, and next time try not to interrupt it in the first place. Everything that you and your team accomplish happens in the context of time—use it with clear intention! Common Pitfalls and Success Tips Pitfall 1: You conduct business as usual. It’s unproductive to allow your old time-allocation habits to drive your activity. It’s easy to fall into your old habits because they are comfortable and you can apply them with little effort. To create new results you will have to be willing to pass through fear, uncertainty, and discomfort, and ultimately create new and more productive habits. Pitfall 2: You don’t focus on one thing at a time in your strategic blocks.
Multitasking is seen by many as a virtue. The reality is that multitasking lowers your overall productivity and your results. Instead of increasing your effectiveness, multitasking actually slows you down and increases the chances of mistakes, according to David E. Meyer, Director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. When you mentally push back a primary task and pick up a new task, you increase the time needed to finish the primary task by 25 percent on average. Pitfall 3: You allow distractions to steal your attention. In our modern world, technology can be a major distraction. Each day there are more and more opportunities for distractions and avoidance. Allowing smartphones, social media, and the Internet to distract you from your higher value activities will keep you from accomplishing your goals. Some spontaneity is healthy, but if you are not purposeful with your time, you won’t tap into your capabilities. Learn to isolate yourself from those distractions when there is important work to be done. Pitfall 4: You think being busy is the same as being productive. You can work on email, voicemail, messages, and administrative tasks and be busy all day, but those activities don’t often drive great results in your life. Sure, you’re busy, but are you productive? Learn to prioritize your most important activities and do those things before you work on anything else. Tip 1: Work from a written weekly plan. A written weekly plan that is tied to your 12 week goals keeps you from allocating too much time to the emergent stuff versus the strategic. By working from a weekly plan and following your model week, you are setting yourself up for success. Tip 2: Input your model week into your calendar. Set up your calendar with your model time blocks as recurring appointments. This will eliminate many potential scheduling conflicts from week to week. There will be times that you move your time blocks, but most often you won’t have to. Even if you travel (like I do) or if your weeks are anything but routine (like mine), you will find that spending five minutes adjusting your time
blocks on Monday morning to match your week will probably work for you.