Business Insight Zone

Books on time management and personal productivity typically do one or both of two things:

1. Offer a grand theory or system of human achievement; or
2. Offer many small tips and tricks to enhance performance.

Inevitably, there is some overlap. In her book Mindset, which is built around a robust, research-based psychological theory, Carol Dweck offers a number of tips for how readers can apply her insights into the growth mindset in their own lives and work. In his classic work of time management, How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, Alan Lakein focuses on particular techniques, but he hangs these methods onto the grand question of “What is the best use of my time right now?” It’s a tips-and-tricks book, but it centers on a particular algorithm.

Organized for Success is a tips-and-tricks book in the form of a field report. Winston, an organizational expert who also wrote Getting Organized and The Organized Executive, followed around dozens of CEOs and other high-ranking executives to see how they got so much done every day. The result is a bit of a hodgepodge — there’s no grand theory as in Mindset, Steven Covey’s First Things First, or David Allen’s Getting Things Done — but it’s a useful hodgepodge because it supplies so many practical ideas that can be put into effect right away, whether you’re an executive or a worker bee.

Here are some of the key lessons that I took away from this book. Many of them are hardly original, but in my experience we need to be reminded of the basics of high performance over and over.

–Make Decisions – CEOs and other business leaders abide by what Winston calls the “decision-making imperative.” The best ones relish decisions and drill themselves to become great at making them (they build their “decision-making muscle”). Above all, they don’t seek perfection in their decisions, but constant correction in them. The point is to make a decision about a course of action, then start down that path immediately. If you’ll keep in close touch with reality and maintain your enthusiasm for making further decisions, you can make course corrections rapidly whenever they’re needed.

–Establish Priorities – Winston found that, for the executives she tracked, a few big priorities set their daily and weekly agendas. Of course a thousand competing details came up, but over and over these leaders would refer back to their most basic goals for their organizations. Simple to say . . . hard to DO.

–Build Your Focus – This can be stated as simply as “Do what you’re doing.” But again, things that are simple to describe are often hard to do, especially in modern workplaces that seem to enable every distraction while disabling focus. Worse, we get habituated to operating this way; as I write this simple summary post, I’m sitting at my desk at home on a day when the Hoover’s office is closed. Even though I know that this won’t take long to finish, and that there are no e-mails burning a hole in my inbox, I still have to fight the temptation to interrupt what I’m doing, embrace the insanity of multitasking, and “check e-mail for just a minute” — even though I KNOW that it NEVER takes “just a minute” to go through my inbox.

As in the case of the “decision-making muscle,” we can build up our ability to focus over time. As I’ve mentioned before, Winston notes the ability of CEOs to “spotlight-task” rather than multitask: they give their undivided attention to whichever matter is at hand, whether it’s a four-hour budget meeting or the four-minute conversation they have in the hall after the meeting with their CTO. We would all do well to learn this skill rather than fall back on our bad habits of multitasking, which Winston rightly derides.

(By the way, the combination of well-defined priorities and a stern devotion to focused action is embodied in the method of Mr. Ivy Lee, which I referenced in an earlier post about Winston’s work.)

–Harness Interruptions – CEOs are hardly immune to them, no matter how much they wall off time for focused attention on top priorities. When interruptions DO come, CEOs extract value from them. They use interruptions as opportunities to exert influence and make decisions. For CEOs as for the rest of us, interruptions often ARE the work, so we’re well served to use them. (If your experience is anything like mine, think of all the times you’ve chatted with your top-performing superiors when the conversation has ended with their saying, “Here’s what I’d like you to do . . .” That’s on purpose, and it allows them to make use of a simple hallway conversation to move forward on the organization’s top priorities.)

–Police & Eliminate Crisis Thinking – People seldom do their best work when they’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off, yet in many companies this is standard operating procedure. The best business leaders take pains to catch this kind of thinking early and to eliminate it, not by Pollyanna-style denial of bad news, but by constant reference to top priorities, constant decision-making based on the best evidence at hand, and constant follow-through.

–Identify Limiting Steps – Winston is wise, when discussing this point, to reference the work of Andy Grove, the legendary Intel leader who was famous for his strategic vision. We can’t foresee everything about the future, but in many cases we can guess enough about it to make educated course corrections in the here and now. And we should: it’s no good acting suprised when predictable events come to pass, or when foreseeable stumbling blocks do make us stumble.

–Follow Through – Many of the leaders Winston studied displayed a maniacal devotion to keeping their desks and inboxes clear, and credited these habits with helping them keep up with the many projects and plans underway in their companies. Winston extols the virtues of a ruthlessly clean desk, and of using a comprehensive “capture system” — which can be as simple as a paper notebook — for keeping track of one’s obligations.

–Take Control of Your Time – The fundamental observation here is that top performers continually boost their use of timesavers and continually eliminate timewasters. This is an area particularly open to improvement by tips and tricks, so here are a few that Winston recommends:

• Say “I have 10 minutes . . .” & “We may be interrupted . . .” – Savvy executives (and others) say things like this as cues for the people they talk to, whether specifically to shorten interruptions or generally to bring conversations to the point right away. Plenty of people would like to have half an hour of your time, but actually need just a few minutes to communicate what’s vital or elicit a decision.
• Master the fast exit – If you find yourself getting trapped by people who stop in at your desk, try to turn the tables by dropping by to talk to them. That way, you can get in, talk about what’s vital, and physically move on before you’re drawn into a long conversation. (Professor Randy Pausch, who was quite a time-management maven, said that he would sometimes get up and leave from his own office when a drop-in session lasted too long. If all else fails, just retreat to the restroom.)
• Use small blocks of time — In the typical working day, there are plenty of 5- to 15-minute gaps between meetings and appointments; the savvy worker uses these blocks to plow through routine tasks or to keep the inbox ruthlessly clean.
• Keep a time diary — For a week, write down everything you do with your time, without passing judgment on its merit. Sometime when you have peace and quiet — maybe Sunday night at home — go through this diary, asking yourself, “Why did I do all these things?” You may discover all sorts of things about yourself, for example your worst time-wasters or your your best and worst times to get work done. More generally, you’ll have the chance to think about your working days systematically, then design better working actions for yourself, instead of reacting to work situations by chance or impulse.

Organized for Success won’t become a classic of the genre like Getting Things Done or How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. But it does provide useful suggestions, gleaned directly from the working lives of top executives, about how to organize yourself better for success in the corporate world.

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Related posts:

• Top productivity tips.
• Productivity tip: Parse ruthlessly.
• Michael Phelps is like a CEO.

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Category: Books, Productivity