The Reality Regarding Time Management
“In the meanwhile, I work only half-days – just 40 hours a week.”
Does this sound familiar? At the end of a workday you take stock and realize that you were active the entire day and managed to complete a lot – just not any of the things you had intended to get done.
How would you answer the following questions for yourself?
• Do you have the feeling that you react more than you act?
• Do you feel torn between, on the one hand, urgent tasks and, on the other hand, more long-term matters that also need your attention?
• Do you somehow manage to meet your deadlines after all, although you pay the price in terms of many hours of overtime or extreme stress?
If your answer to even one of the above questions was yes, then we have a few exciting topics for the time we will be spending together throughout this book. The aspects described above are the most common ones that come up at the beginning of events on the topic of time intelligence. Many people are convinced that the situation is particularly extreme in their specific environment, which is completely understandable from a subjective standpoint. Interestingly, though, this belief is widely held, regardless of a person’s exact occupation or position. Be it staff or management, be it in the area of banks, business consulting firms, hotels, software developers, government agencies, or the wood-processing industry – it turns out many people are waiting for things to “calm down” again soon.
The bad news is that things are not going to calm down. The world is turning faster and faster. The knowledge available to humanity doubles every five years or so. Modern communication media have changed the world radically and will continue to do so, with ever increasing strength and speed. Do you remember how cell phones and email were originally extolled as devices for saving time? As useful as these technical options can often be, most people, paradoxically, now feel that they have less time, rather than more. How does it seem to you? Do you have the freedom you wish for, the freedom that comes from being in control of your own time?
What’s the Perfect Solution?
Can we offer you the perfect solution? Not really, because each person’s needs are somewhat different and the world is very complex. We have, however, summarized the best strategies, those that have brought improvement for literally thousands of people, based on experience with training and coaching the most diverse range of people – from entry-level employees to managers, as well as world-class experts in their field. Our concepts, principles, and tips will allow you to incorporate your own personal style and to prioritize and pick out the things that are the most appropriate for you personally.
You want to manage more in less time? Who doesn’t want that! Most people, at some point during their lives, deal with the topics of personal effectiveness, time management, setting goals, and saving time. Two reasons typically play a role here. One trigger may be that people notice that the tasks and demands are continuously on the increase, and they wonder, “How on earth can I manage all of this?” It happens often that a department has ten employees, and then one retires and another transfers to a new job. Since these two are not replaced, the department is left with eight employees for the work of ten. If you are familiar with such a situation you are not an exception.
The second reason for people to concern themselves with questions of effectiveness and time management is that they notice, “Somehow I seem to manage everything somehow, but the stress level keeps rising.” One result of this can be the habit of taking more and more of our work home with us – both physically and psychologically. We take some work home with us for the weekend – just to cart it back to work on Monday morning, along with our guilty conscience. Once again, we didn’t manage to finish everything that was expected of us.
Maybe you also know the feeling of being excited when 5 PM rolls around – not because your workday is over, but rather because now you can finally concentrate on the really important tasks without having other people bothering you. The provocative question we would like to ask at this point is this: What exactly were you doing up until 5 PM? Everyone has a day full of emergencies now and then; but if it wasn’t such a day, then most likely your usage of time and your regulation of your own accessibility offer room for improvement.
Introductions: Zach Davis and Juliana Kushner
Before we delve into the topic more deeply, we’d like to introduce ourselves.
Zach Davis was born in Philadelphia, U.S.A. He grew up and went to school in Germany. After studying business administration at the University of Cologne, he worked for KPMG Consulting AG in Munich in the area of human resources consulting. In 2003, Zach founded the Peoplebuilding training institute, also in Munich. These days he is often on the road as trainer, speaker, author, and coach in the field of personal effectiveness. Zach has specialized not only in time management but also in speed reading techniques.
Juliana Kushner was born in Cologne, Germany, and attended school in both Germany and Switzerland. She majored in East Asian Studies at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Juliana has learned a great deal about personal effectiveness through juggling her studies with her many hobbies and activities (music, languages, travel, networking).
Both of us know the feeling, as you do, of being torn in multiple directions, between job-related demands on the one hand and private life on the other. Running a business that has ambitious goals and requires significant time for travel, for example, shouldn’t crowd out being an important and present part of one’s family and circle of friends. If you have children, you surely want to experience how they grow and change. And there are many other areas of life to be considered, such as your own health, in which the activities are very difficult to delegate to others.
For Zach, health is a very important topic. Important activities for him include doing regular sports and eating a healthy diet, something many people perceive to be a sacrifice. They could not be more mistaken. It would be much more sacrificial not to do these things. The reason is simple: if Zach didn’t take care of himself this way, he would not have the energy necessary to handle his work load, or he would collapse on the couch at the end of the week! A fairly typical week for Zach includes three days of seminars and two presentations in various locations, writing an article or chapter for a book, doing a media interview, speaking with his employees and customers, checking contents of some form, preparing a proposal for a potential business cooperation, and more.
Your workweek certainly has its own distribution of activities. Our point here, though, is that most of us bear multiple responsibilities. Nevertheless, it is possible to remain relatively relaxed and find your work to be fun most of the time. Zach has been quoted as saying that he usually “only” works around 45 hours a week.
In working with thousands of people over the years, we have observed many patterns and commonalities:
• in people who are both successful (an individual definition, of course) and very stressed
• in people who are successful and hardly stressed (what an exciting combination!)
• in people who are not successful and hardly stressed
• and in people who are not successful and very stressed (quite a tragic combination)
On the one hand, there are people who are successful and content. They experience fulfillment because they have managed to reconcile, among other things, private life and work. On the other hand, there are people with seemingly the same preconditions who have a much harder time. This latter group often includes people who feel they are caught up in the proverbial rat race.
To the external observer, some people appear to be very successful although they in fact are inwardly dissatisfied. Such situations are often a result of neglecting individual aspects of their lives,