Got Email? Of course - what manager doesn’t? We know managers who get 200 (or more!) emails every day. Email is a necessary evil in the corporate management world, and highly effective managers know how to get the most out of their email WITHOUT spending too much time on it. In our latest podcast, we talk about how to make your technology work for you, and how you can spend less time on email while getting more done.

Also, thanks to Tom Comeau for mentioning us during his interview on the Cranky Middle Manager Show. The kind remarks are very much appreciated. For those of you who haven’t heard Wayne’s interview of Tom, you can find the show at the The Cranky Middle Manager Website.

Mark made reference during the podcast to the process of setting-up multiple “in-boxes” in Outlook. Here is a PDF document outlining the steps Mark uses to set those up.

When Peter Drucker died last year, I was saddened that I had never had the privilege of meeting him. Whenever I read his works, I was stunned by their simplicity and power. It seemed to me that he could cram more insight into a well-written sentence than even John D. MacDonald. I had always hoped to sit down with him for even just 15 minutes, to ask him 2-3-4 questions. Perhaps the highest praise I could give him is that I would have taken a week off to simply come up with the best 2-3-4 I could. That’s how precious that time would have been to me - to make THAT 15 minutes valuable, I would have taken a week.

In part I fantasized about taking this week to prepare as a way of paying homage to him. If you’ve read The Effective Executive, you know why. Drucker’s first insight in the greatest management book ever written is that the most precious resource an executive has is TIME. The effective executive knows where she spends her time, and that her time is spent on the RIGHT THINGS.

Which brings me to saving you and your company a lot of money.

Whenever I’m engaged by an executive to coach them, one of my first (if not THE first) actions is to request their schedule for the previous 3-6 weeks. I want an answer to a question I don’t want them to hear me asking: what is it that you DO? How do you spend your time? Because what you DO really IS what your priorities ARE.

Let me say that again, differently. Your “priorities” are what you DO. The inferential proof of what’s important to you is how you spend your time. Your BEHAVIOR is the pigment on your life’s strategic canvas.

I usually set the calendar aside, and then in our first meeting, I ask them one or more of these questions: “What are your priorities? What do you consider most important in your role? What do you see as the primary responsibility of your role?”

Shortly after I’ve spent my first day with an executive, I review their answers to my questions. Then, I compare their answers with their schedules.

90% of the time they don’t match.

When I review with my clients what they said their priorities were, versus what their calendars proved they actually were, the primary emotion, once we fight through disbelief and dissembling, is embarrassment. The smart ones get something powerful from this: the disparity between what they know their jobs to be and what they spend their time doing is the primary source of their dissatisfaction in their role.

How does this insight save you and your firm $5,000?

Because you don’t need to hire me to show you. Do it yourself, today. Put a half hour on your calendar some time today. (Oh, you’re not that busy). In the first 5 minutes, set up Outlook (or whatever) to begin printing your daily calendar for the past 6 workweeks. If you have a light enough daily schedule that it will all show, print your calendar in weekly view - it’ll go faster. We’re not measuring busy-ness here.

In the next 10 minutes, write down your answers to the questions I asked above. Take only 10 (uninterrupted) minutes. It’s unlikely you’re going to come up with better stuff after 10 minutes. I’ve asked this question 500 times, and that’s how long it’s taken. Don’t think back over your calendar and ‘infer’ your priorities from what you’ve been doing…that’s cheating. If you want to look at your job description, fine. If you want to look at your metrics, fine. Whatever. Just write down what you think your priorities are.

In the last 15 minutes, compare your calendar with your “priorities.” One rule I DO apply to this exercise is that unscheduled time does NOT get credited to ANY of your stated priorities. If you’re someone who says that you only schedule times for meetings, or things that require other people, you probably don’t like this rule. I’m sorry about that. But like I said, I’ve done this several hundred times, and I’ve watched people just like you work. If your time is unscheduled, you are SPECTACULARLY ineffective and inefficient. (It’s because you don’t treat time as your most precious resource, so you squander it.)

If that last point gets under your skin, I’m both sorry and a little glad. It’s not the embarrassment many of my clients feel, but hopefully, it will energize you to take control of your time. You can buy Drucker (link below) to learn more.

In half an hour (plus the time it took to read this post), you’ve learned one of the most powerful lessons my clients pay me $5,000 for.

Let me know how things go when you start behaving around your stated priorities.

It’s a privilege to serve you,

Mark

Manager Tools link to Peter Drucker’s the Effective Executive

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Why We Like This Book:

This is the only personal productivity book you ever need to buy. If you even use this SIMPLE process half way, you will become 2-3 times more efficient. If you’ve ever felt like you have a million things to do rattling around in your head, this book is for you. Mike and Mark are both HUGE fans, and we’re BARELY scratching the surface. Buy this book.

Time management is a fallacy, we like to say. Time doesn’t need you to “manage” it - it’s been getting along just fine without you for billions of years. We can’t manage time. But what we CAN manage is what we do with that time. And yet, the overwhelming evidence is that managers do NOT “manage what they do with that time.” There’s a shocking CHASM between our behavior in this area and our knowledge of what to do. In fact, Mark recently blogged on how busy everyone says they are, which irritates him. He looks at their calendars, and there’s no EVIDENCE that they’re busy. There are vast swaths of unscheduled time!

Peter Drucker, in the first prescriptive chapter of his seminal work, the Effective Executive, says it best (of course): “The output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource. In the process we call “accomplishment”, this is time … Of the other major resources, money is actually quite plentiful … People … one can hire. But one cannot rent, hire, buy or otherwise obtain more time.”

So, the question is, how can managers start to become more efficient about using the time that each of us has at our disposal? In fact, that’s a great way to state it: STOP disposing of your time! It’s not only your most precious resource, it’s also your most perishable!

This cast will get you started doing just that.

Today, we cover the second in a two-part series of podcasts on Time Management. If you’re new to the show or you didn’t listen to last week’s podcast, it’s probably worth while going back and listening to the previous show first. Otherwise, you’ll be joining the conversation half-way through and we all know how comfortable that feels.

We recommend 4 1/2 steps to analyzing your use of time

1. Roughly Assess Your Time - absolutely *no* materials other than pen and paper allowed!
2. Capture Your Priorities
3. Do a Rough Analysis
   (part b, only for the truly commited) - Do a “Drucker” Analysis
4. Put Your Number One Priority on Your Calendar

That’s it! We walked through steps 1 and 2 last week, today we cover the remainder.

One of the lost arts of the corporate world in the past 20 years is how to work with an administrative assistant. While we won’t argue that a great deal of the “leaning out” of corporations has been a good thing, working with admins effectively is one of the painful legacies of the cutbacks.

Of the executives who are assigned admins, our experience is that very few know how to use them well. There are many ways that the fantastic opportunity an admin offers are squandered. But in virtually all cases, the fundamental failure of managers who execute this responsibility is that they fail to delegate enough to the admin.

We start a series of casts on administrative assistants this week. In our first installment, we discuss the basics principles that will guide your thinking.

These casts will either help you do things right when you get to the point where you’re assigned an admin. Or, if you have an admin now, these casts will help you re-invent the relationship, making it what you always thought it should be.

After you’ve listened, you’ll want your admin to hear it.

This week, we continue our series on working effectively with administrative assistants. Given that this is part 2 of 3 parts, we’ve obviously had a lot to discuss on the subject.

This week, we finish (finally!) our series on working effectively with administrative assistants.

Also, for all of those who went to Podcast Alley and voted for Manager Tools, thank you very much! We achieved a long-held objective of getting in the Top 10 list of all podcasts. We don’t know how long we’ll stay there … but we’re enjoying the moment. And we owe that to all our friends here on Manager Tools. Thank You!

Here’s a brief outline of the 3-part Series:

1. Part 1
• The Role of the Executive
• The Role of the Admin
• The Single Biggest Roadblock
2. Part 2
• Managing the Executive’s Schedule
3. Part 3
• Managing the Executive’s Office
• Managing the Executive’s Relationships
• Managing the Executive’s Administrative Deliverables

You know you’re a manager - really, truly in a role of managing others - when you get frustrated that things don’t happen as fast as they used to. “Gosh, why don’t they GET IT? Can’t they SEE what kind of pressure we are (I AM) under?” What is taking SO *(@((&$^*@^Q@*#% LONG?”

That’s what all that extra pay is for.

If you’ve wondered whether it’s just YOUR team, it’s NOT. We find a lack of a sense of urgency to be pandemic. Most managers spend time complaining about this very thing when we coach them. Executives quickly forget how easy it is to stop draining the swamp as a manager when you keep getting bitten by alligators.

What can you do about it?

Well, rest assured, it’s NOT about “firing your team up” with speeches or exhortations. It’s certainly not going to happen if you “light your team up” with a shotgun blast of “you people have no sense of urgency!!!!”

You know why?

Because most managers are one of the core causes of the problem.

In this cast we tell you why, and how you can solve your problem within two weeks.

Today, we finish up our series on building a sense of urgency in your team.

Here’s a brief outline of the Sense of Urgency series:

1. Ask the right questions
2. State the deadline … don’t ask
3. Know how to combat bad answers
4. Accelerate all deadlines
5. Use passive updating
6. Feedback every time … every time
7. Use dates and times
8. Capture the deadline
9. To heck with the critical path
10. Leverage your admin

Happy Holidays, everyone! And thanks for helping make this year one of our personally rewarding years ever!