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 Hi folks,

Given my currently 70-75 hr/week work load, I am finding that I have little to no time to do the pre-wiring that I know is so very important for many of of my meetings.  Given that I'm in product dev/mgmt for high-tech, I am often having product requirements meetings with exec mgmt to gain their approval/buy-in on my recommended feature set, tenets underlying a new product, etc.

I'm finding that with my crazy schedule, plus executive mgmt's similarly crazy schedules, the time to do pre-wiring before these review meetings is extremely difficult to carve out (unless I attempt to have offline pre-wiring mtg at 2am :)

Given the current work pace & busyness, does anyone have any suggestions as to how to achieve some level of pre-wiring so the review meetings are not situations in which exec mgmt is looking at things for the first time.  

Would love hear your thoughts and experience around ways you've been able to achieve some level of pre-wiring in similarly such work environments.  

Thank you for sharing your thoughts & experiences,

-PD1900

rwwh's picture
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You seem to have a "time management" ("priority management"?) problem. Of course, it is very difficult to judge your situation completely without actually following you around for a few days. There are some tricks from Peter Drucker that may help: First figure out what the most important things are you should be focusing on, based on your goals for the year (limit yourself to a few, and prioritize). Then, follow yourself around for a few days by having an alarm clock interrupt you every 10 minutes, and at the sound, write down what you are doing. Finally, correlate what you should do with how you are spending your time. Does it match?

The origin of the mismatch in many cases is that people do not spend time on the important things (strategy, pre-wiring in your case) but on the urgent stuff that comes up every day. If you do not take care of the important stuff of the day, you will have more "disaster recovery" to do next month, in a vicious cycle. The breakthrough is realized when you start seeing that many of the urgent things are not important. A dumb example? That TPS report *must* be delivered by 5pm, but then nobody will actually need it....

More reading that may help you: http://www.manager-tools.com/2012/06/parkinson-owns-us

Analyze your 70 hour work week!