18 Apr Time Management
What Is One Of The Biggest Lies In Business?
Christopher Hart here from Transforming Lives Coaching and Consulting. Today’s topic is going to be about probably one of the biggest lies ever spoken, time management, manage your time. So we’re going to dig into that today, we’re going to talk about the importance of it, why is it a lie, how do we really get focused, and how we optimize our ability to operate on a high level both for ourselves in lead-by-self as well as helping others do as well.
So last couple of posts we were talking about getting people into purposeful and consistent action, and we talked the other day about the how… two days ago we talked about the why and how the how and the why come together, and the actions and the conversations that we do and we have with ourselves and with our people that really allow us the opportunity to maximize the potential of our people in our businesses and organizations. And so we looked at the why, like behind every why needs to be a great how, and behind every great how needs to be a powerful why. And the how is the plan, whether it’s your economic model or it’s your business plan, it’s how you’re going to carry out the goals that you establish for yourself, your business et cetera.
Now I think one of the key elements of either the economic model, your business plan, the how, the key elements of the how is consistency, like for real estate agents that are following the MREA, the economic model tells us how many homes we need to sell, whether they are buyer’s side, seller’s side, and how many appointments we need to go on, how many agreements we need to take, whether it’s buyer agreements, or seller agreements. And interestingly enough once you start to nug it down and then divide it by 12 and understand like how many of those appointments and agreements and units you need to sell monthly people look and they go “Oh that’s easy, I just need to sell two properties a month,” or “I just need to take four listings a month. That’s easy, I take one listing a week. I’ve taken a listing in a week before, I’ve done it a couple times. I’ve done it numerous times.”
Well the important part is to understand yeah that’s two units sold or four listings taken or one appointment a week over a sustained period of time, that’s why we talked about the consistency part a couple of posts ago because the only way your plan is going to come to fruition is if that consistency element is properly adhered to because remember, it’s two listings a month sold over 12 months. And so what we’ve come to understand is like alright let’s just look at 12 month period of time, like we’ll call it life. Life tends to show up, holidays, vacation, sick kids, flat tires, you know all the reasons and excuses that we give to ourselves, other people, and other people feed us as to why they don’t hit their goals, so what we want to understand is how do we drive the consistency piece. I apologize for somebody’s car alarm going off in the neighborhood.
So how do we drive the consistency piece?
To be consistent we need to have a proper grip on ourselves, it’s not time management. You hear a lot of people running around going “Oh I need better time management skills…that person needs to have better time management skills,” or “Why didn’t you hit your goal this week? Oh well you know here’s what I’d tell you, you need to be better at time management.”
Let’s be clear about something, there’s 60 seconds in every minute, 60 minutes in every hour, 24 hours in every day, seven days in every week, typically four weeks to every month, 12 months to every year. That’s time, you don’t get to manage that, God does. Time is going to tick whether there is world wars going on, whether there is peace, whoever is running the world, countries, time is going to tick one second at a time, one minute, one hour, one day, one week, one month. It is what it is, you don’t get to manage that, God does. So time management is a lie, you cannot manage time. The only thing you can do for yourself and your people is manage yourself through time, so if I’m going to use myself for example it’s Chris management, it’s Brad management, Cynthia management, Tony management, Keith management, Joy management. All the people that are reading right now it’s how do you manage yourself through time. And so some people will say “Oh yeah I’ve got a grip on it, you know every day I make a to-do list.” Yeah a to-do list, let’s be clear about to-do lists. There’s always something to do, there’s probably more to do than you actually have time. And so if that’s the case then that could easily overwhelm us, and for many people it really does. They run around, they’re like “I have no time.”
Bullcrap! You’ve got 24 hours in a freaking day, how do you not have time? What you don’t have is a grip on what’s important within those 24 hours every day. You see you think sleeping 10 to 12 hours is important, that’s fine, I’m not here to tell you otherwise. It’s your life you get to live it, but the problem is if you’re going to sleep 12 hours then you only have 12 hours to get everything done; and here’s the reality, it’s not even really about getting everything done, it’s about getting the most important things done.
So what does that look like?
The very first step of Chris management, Brad, Cynthia, Tony, Keith, Joy and whoever else is watching, how we manage ourselves through time, first thing we need to understand is prioritization. What’s a priority in my life? What’s a priority in your life? What are the elements that you look at and say “You know what these things are a priority.” So let me share with you my priorities, and so this is going to be a couple of video series of how we walk through this. So I’m literally going to walk you through how I prioritize myself and my life and then how I tend to show up in time based off of those priorities.
I have six priorities in my life and these are them in order of precedence:
First one is God; second one is health; third one is family; fourth is business; fifth is fun; and sixth is wealth. Those are the six areas of priority in my life by prioritization, and here’s how I explain them. God is first and foremost in my life, it’s just part of my spiritual beliefs. You can believe whatever you want but in my life He’s ultimately more important. There’s nothing more important in my life. So He takes first.
Second is my health because here’s what I realize, without my health I don’t get to… I can’t carry out what I ultimately want for my life, so I have to take care of my health.
Third is my family. Outside of God, outside of my health, my family is more important. Guess what? Yes my family is more important than my business. Some people have a hard time with that.
Fourth comes my business. Why? Because my business supports my family, it supports my health, supports what I believe and want to accomplish in the God realm of my life, so my business is important.
Fifth is fun. Why it’s fun on my radar? Because there was a period of time where I wasn’t having fun, and I was achieving and I was making money but I was still kind of like “Something’s missing.” And someone who cared enough about me to kind of help me analyze my life caused me to realize that I don’t do anything for myself, and so where does Chris show up in Chris’s life? And that’s something I needed to make a priority, so I did.
Sixth is wealth. So what’s the difference between business and wealth? Business is how I earn money, how I work for money; and wealth is how money works for me, it’s how it’s …the business takes care of the now, the wealth takes care of the future.
So those are the six areas of importance in my life. And the interesting part is once I identify those six areas of importance then there are some steps that I’m going to take, and I’m going to show you over the course of the next couple of videos of how those tend to show up in our life and how we prioritize them. But at a very broad perspective what I want to show you is it allows us the understanding of making the best decisions possible because here’s what we understand, our options that we have in life are going to determine the decisions that we make. So choices/options determine decisions that we make in life, and our decisions are going to define our destiny, so choose wisely. Decide wisely because it’s going to identify or it’s going to define what your future is going to be.
Well guess what? As soon as I identify those six important areas of my life then that’s how I create and analyze my decision-making process, so all of the quote/unquote things that “need to be done,” well guess what? I don’t focus on all the things that need to be done, I focus on the things that have to be done based off of the six important areas of my life. And here’s what else I’ve learned about life, there’s always going to be these out… external, out factors and pressures in your life. See when you start to become an achiever and you get stuff done…different terminology, I’m just trying to be… not use foul language…when you start to get stuff done in your life, and maybe even for other people, more people want your time. “Hey Chris do you think you have time for …Hey Chris…” You start getting the Hey-Chrises, the Hey-Tonys, the Hey-Keiths in your life. And what I’ve learned is some people they’re so kind hearted they become these quote/unquote “Yes people.” I was one of them.
What do you do when your time is already competed for?
Like your schedule is already full and yet you have all these people that say “Hey Chris… do you have time for… you think you can help me out with?” Or “Do you want to do this?” And so where people tend to fail in their ability to achieve at a high level is they start to become yes-people, they start saying yes to everything. And here’s the reality guys, like if you want to succeed, if you want your people to succeed at a high level they need to understand how to manage themselves through time and first how to prioritize what’s important in their life or in their business day because there are sub elements to that that apply to this. And so when there’s always this last minute problem or a deal is falling apart or a Hey-Chris, when you prioritize and then eventually start to block areas of time in your calendar to meet the goals in those important areas of your life, then you have something to evaluate off of. Prime example, if I’m serving at church on a Sunday and maybe friends or something call me up on a Saturday or couple days before and they say “Hey Chris we’re going out on the boat this Sunday, we’re going to leave around 8:00 o’clock. We’re going to meet at the marina at 8:00, it’s going to be fun, bring your family. You guys should come, you guys should come.
And I’m like “Man that sounds like a really great time, going on a boat all day, going swimming, maybe fishing. That sounds like fun.” But I’m going to be serving at church. Now here’s how I do my analyzation process, here’s how I analyze whether I say yes or no:
Fun, what number is that on my prioritization list? Oh that’s five. Supposed to be serving a church, well that’s part of my God prioritization, that’s one. “Hey sorry guys.”
“Hey man you can always serve at church.” “You’re right, I can always serve a church, and I do when I can; and I can always go on the boat, but this Sunday I’ve prioritized that block of time to serve God who’s number one, and fun is number six… or five excuse me.
But then again that doesn’t mean that I don’t have fun, it just means that if there’s a weekend where they call me up and like “Hey we’re going on the boat this Sunday,” and I look at my calendar, my calendar doesn’t have anything in there, I go “I can fit some fun in because that’s important in my life.” What else am I going to do? Sit around the house, power wash the patio and watch football and maybe eat hot wings and get fat? No I’m going to go have fun.
So this is the first step of how do we actually execute consistent and purposeful action, and understand that time management is a lie. It’s Chris management, it’s self management, it’s how do you manage yourself through time? Well the first step to managing yourself through time is you need to prioritize what’s important to you, that’s the self piece.
In the next post we’re going to talk about what’s the next element, how do we take it from the prioritization in our life into where it’s actually time blocking and managing all that. So I’m literally to walk you through the steps. But what I want to leave you with is here’s how you create that prioritization element in your life. You’re going to have to sit down, get in a room, go out to a lake or something where you remove all distractions and you just sit down and you ask yourself “What’s important in my life?” And identify four, five, six, things; don’t go crazy, you don’t need to identify 10 or 15, if you’ve got that many things that are important in your life then maybe you need to give me a call and I can help you with that. But find four, five or six, and then just play the prioritization game like “Is this one more important than the next one?” No. Okay then that one takes a higher precedence. And then just identify which elements of your life are important by precedence, that way you can find what is the most important and what’s sixth on the list of importance, not saying it’s the least important, it’s just sixth on the list compared to everything else.
So I challenge you to do that tonight, it shouldn’t take you long, maybe 25, 30 minutes at best, that way you can start walking through the exercises with me in the coming days, and they actually speak to you and maybe in a couple days from now you actually have that plan that can help you, which is what? Level Two leadership, lead by self.
So leaders this stuff is important, it’s Level Two leadership applicable, it’s Level Three leadership applicable of how we lead other people in the one-on-one environment, and even Level Four leadership which is how we lead others, groups of people. Because here’s the thing, you can’t tell people that they need to get their stuff together which is manage your time or manage yourself if you don’t even have a grip on yours. If you can walk into my office, you can call me, I can take a snapshot of my calendar on my phone and it literally walks me through my day because it becomes my boss, and that’s the best part about what I believe about my life is my only boss is my calendar and I created that. So I created the calendar for what’s important to me, what I want to achieve and what I want my life to look like, and then I block periods of time on my calendar, and then I just allow my calendar to tell me what it is I need to do next. And then if something’s vying for my time I have a very easy decision making process, I just compare each one and say which one is more important which is going to get my time at this moment, I know what to say yes to and I know what to say no to.
So hopefully we’ve brought some value to your leadership journey, your life, and hopefully those that you’re leading on a daily basis. So stay tuned, and we’ll walk you through these elements that can help you lead by self, lead another, lead others, and lead leaders who can lead people and really make a difference in your life, those that you love and those that you lead. So just remember lead strong, God loves you, so do I. Have a great rest of your day.
About the author:
Over the course of 8 years, Christopher Hart went from an enlisted Private First Class to a Commissioned Officer-Captain. In 2005, Christopher chose to move on from his military career to focus on starting a family and embarking in the world of entrepreneurship. Christopher’s passion is now working to help others be the BEST version of themselves and helping them Lead others to the same!
To learn more about Christopher Hart or to get in touch with him regarding a coaching program you can email him at Ch***@Tr***********************.com
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