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Top 10 time management tips during recession

Focus, focus, focus. Recession must not mean panic. It means balancing action time and investment time carefully. You must balance 'in' time and 'on' time. Here's how.

1. Understand time

More than ever, when times are tough it is crucial to understand that there are essentially two kinds of time which revolve around the two oft-quoted metrics of important and urgent. 'Important' we will define as anything which is addressing a goal: getting cash in, closing a profitable deal, creating a strategy plan for the next three years. 'Urgent' we'll define as anything which we need now: extension of the overdraft for three days to cover this mini cash-flow crisis, sending a fax to a possible new client who needs a total price list on our product. The time most businesses focus on, particularly in tough business times, is important and urgent: get the cash in the bank, close the deal this week. But stuff which is important and non-urgent such as the strategy plan or sales training tends to get delayed. Don't use the term non-urgent, use the term 'investing' and then it should make a lot more sense. Clearly the offsite meeting is not urgent but it is investing.

Taking a walk at lunchtime is not urgent, but it is investing. Important and urgent is in time, when you are working in your business. Important and investing is when you are working on your business. To survive and thrive you need a careful blend of the two.

2. Identify your on time and schedule it

Your 'in' time will always happen because of the urgency factor. And in challenging times it will have a little stress and adrenaline thrown in as well. As you walk into the office at ten to eight and start clearing email, you will be sucked into an 'in' day. It's not a bad kind of day, but it's a firefighting day, a surviving day; it's not a thriving kind of day. Take your schedule and block out some on time. Time you will preserve at all cost. To invest, to improve, to step beyond the day-to-day stuff. It will of course depend on your role but here are some suggestions:

15 minutes at the start of the day where you take stock, scan the strategic plan and think beyond the day-to-day pressures.

30 minutes at lunchtime where you get out, take a walk and think.

15 minutes at the end of the day where you review success and note key points for later in the week or month.

Schedule further sessions during the week for planning and team meetings. When they appear people will resist but remind them they are investing to make things easier in the future.

3. Stay focused

Have these documents close to you at all times: your strategy plan, your tactical plan and your task list. Do not allow the addictive nature of today's crises to pull you too far from those previously agreed success plans. At least once a week review the strategy plan. At least twice a week review the tactical plan. And each day work on your task list ensuring that it is an appropriate balance of 'in' and 'on' time. Take breaks to ensure your mind and thinking stay fresh.

4. Run better meetings

Don't attend or run a meeting unless it has a clear goal. This goal should be on the whiteboard in front of everyone. Make sure all your meetings have an agenda to keep people on track. Delegate someone to note down actions, each of which should have an owner and a delivery date. Start and finish on time. Invite the smallest number of people possible.

5. Practise kaizen: plan, do, review

As you know, 'kaizen' is constant, continual improvement. A simple model for doing that is to move from being simply a 'do' organization to one which also plans and reviews. Plan the product launch, do the product launch and then review the product launch.

6. Don't just react, make a choice

You will never have enough time to do all that could be done. Accept that. Decide to choose what needs to be done, not simply react. Make that choice by analysis of pay-off and benefit to the organisation. Don't just choose what is easy, what's attractive, who is shouting loudest or what will give you a quick win. Be proactive rather than reactive.

7. Choose by pay-off not just level of crisis

'By pay-off ' means weighing the outcome of what you are doing against your strategic and tactical goals. If you constantly reference your well thought through plans and act in alignment with them, you will reach the higher ground you are seeking. But if you simply react to this minute's problem you'll get deeper into the mire. Make that choice.

8. Get good at project management

Big stuff (e.g. breaking into a new market) tends not to happen as quickly as it should because it is mentally too hard (where do you start?) and difficult to find time. Follow basic project management principles and break it down into smaller and smaller chunks until the tasks become both time and brain friendly. Then get them assigned by owner and delivery date. Before you know where you are you will have both the new product and the new markets identified.

9. Identify and reduce distractions

Your greatest asset is your brain and yet in this world of constant interruptions it's difficult to allow it to do its best for us at times. Eliminate distractions as much as you can. Batch process email, in other words check it and then forget it. Whether you do that once an hour or twice a day is up to you, but for a lot of us it has now become too intrusive. Switch it off, turn away and get on with the main job of writing that proposal. Let your team know there is a part of the day when you are not to be disturbed. Let reception know that there is a part of the day when they should take messages for you. Allow your brain to do its best by reducing the trivia.

10. Use time to make you smarter

You have three potential intelligences. Firstly your neural intelligence, which is the collection of synaptic pathways sometimes measured by your IQ. There's not a lot you can do to improve that: it's genetic. Secondly you have your experiential intelligence. Perhaps you have been through a recession before, in which case you are pretty smart about a lot of ways to handle it. Lastly there is reflective intelligence, the one where you stop and think. This is the intelligence in play when out of nowhere you get ideas and problems get solved. That's why you need your 'on' time: sometimes you need to do less to achieve more.


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