CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE DISCIPLINE OF CONCENTRATION

“The key to successful time management is doing the most important task first, and giving it your full concentration, to the exclusion of everything else.”

—Alex MacKenzie

Your ability to manage your time, as much as any other practice in your career as an executive, will determine your success or failure. Time is the one indispensable and irreplaceable resource of accomplishment. It is your most precious asset. It cannot be saved, nor can it be recovered once lost. Everything you have to do requires time; and the better you use your time, the more you will accomplish, and the greater will be your rewards.

Time management is essential to maximum health and personal effectiveness. How much you feel in control of your time and your life is a major determinant of your level of inner peace, harmony, and mental well-being. A feeling of being “out of control” of your time is the major source of stress, anxiety, and unhappiness. The better you can organize and control the critical events of your life, the better you will feel, moment to moment, the more energy you will have, the better you will sleep, and the more you will get done.

The Four Ds

For you to accomplish anything worthwhile, including becoming excellent at time and personal management, requires four key elements:

• The first D is desire; you must have an intense, burning desire to get your time under control and to achieve maximum effectiveness.

• The second D is decision; you must make a clear decision that you are going to practice good time management techniques until they become a habit.

• The third D is determination; you must be willing to persist in the face of all temptations to the contrary until you have become an effective time manager. Your desire will reinforce your determination.

• The fourth, and the most important key to success in life, is discipline. You must discipline yourself to make time management a lifelong practice. Discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you know you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.

The Key to High Achievement

The payoff for becoming an excellent time manager is huge. The ability to get results is the most outwardly identifiable quality of a top performer in any field. In its simplest terms, highly productive people use their time well. Poor performers use their time poorly.

Fortunately, all time manageable skills are learnable. You can develop the habits of time management that you need to enable you to be one of the most productive and highest performing people in your field. The key is to “Form good habits and make them your masters.” Once you form your good habits, they will then form you and determine the direction of your career.

Success in life, in general, is quite rare. Success in business is rarer still. Less than 5 percent of men and women who go into the world of business ever fulfill their true potential. The reason behind this statistic is simple: they do not use their time properly. Time management is the essential skill of success in business and in life.

Time management is really life management. It is the management of yourself. The way you use your time affects everything that happens to you. It tells the world how much you value your life. Start by saying, “My life is precious and important, and I value every single minute and hour of it. Therefore, I resolve to use my time efficiently and well.”

Time management is a series of skills, methods, and techniques. Time management is like riding a bicycle, typing on a keyboard, or playing a sport. You can learn it through repetition and practice until it becomes automatic and easy.

The Psychology of Time Management

The fact is that you feel good about yourself to the degree to which you feel that you are in control of your own life. You feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are not in control of your own life. Psychologists call this concept a “locus of control.” Generally, the amount of control that you feel you have largely determines your level of happiness or unhappiness. A person with an internal locus of control feels that they are in charge of their own life. They feel positive, happy, optimistic, and cheerful. A person with an external locus of control—feeling controlled by a boss, the bills, and the circumstances outside of him- or herself—will feel negative, pessimistic, angry, and often depressed.

Time management enables you to control the direction of your life. Time management assures that your life is self-determined and under your control. Time management gives you a sense of confidence and optimism.

A Definition of Time Management

One of the best definitions of time management is “the ability to control the sequence of events.” Managing your time requires that you determine what you do first, what you do second, and what you don’t do at all. And you are always free to choose the sequence of events. In choosing the sequence of events, you choose much of what happens to you in life.

Determine Your Values

One of Murphy’s Laws says that, “Before you do anything, you have to do something else first.” And before you get your time under control, it is important for you to decide exactly what is most important to you in life. Good time management requires that you bring the control of the sequence of events into harmony with your values, your innermost beliefs and convictions.

Here are some questions you can ask and answer:

1. What do you value most in life?

2. Why are you doing what you are doing, rather than something else?

3. What is your reason for working where you do, at your particular job?

4. What gives you meaning and purpose in life?

5. What do you really want to do with your life?

6. If you were financially independent, and had all the time that you needed, how would you ideally spend your time?

7. What one goal, if you were absolutely guaranteed of success, would you set for your life?

Benjamin Tregoe once said that, “The very worst use of time is to do very well what need not be done at all.” One of your primary goals in life is to find something that you really enjoy doing, and then to throw your whole heart into doing that job well. Even if you become excellent in doing something that you don’t enjoy, you will get no satisfaction from it.

Examine your innermost values and your goals, and ask yourself what changes you could make to bring your time usage and your life priorities more into alignment with each other.

Start with Your Goals

The starting point of excellent time management is for you to become crystal clear about exactly what it is you want to accomplish. You need clear, written goals and objectives, with plans for their accomplishment. You require deadlines and subdeadlines to keep you on track, and to serve as a forcing system that keeps you on schedule.

A goal without a deadline or a timeframe is not really a goal. It is more a wish or hope. It has no energy behind it. Make detailed plans to accomplish each goal or objective. Almost all successful people are good planners. They think on paper. Whenever they have a few extra minutes, they take out a pad of paper and begin drawing up new lists and making new plans.

Time planning pays off as much as 10:1 in time savings. List every major and minor task that must be accomplished to achieve the main goal. Organize the activities in terms of time and priority. Which must be done first, and which is most important?

Review your plans regularly, and revise them when you receive new information. Be willing to make whatever changes are necessary to deal effectively with your current situation. Napoleon Hill once wrote, “The primary reason for failure is not making new plans to replace an older plan that did not work.”

As Peter Drucker said, “Action without planning is the cause of every failure.”

Think on Paper

Just as a pilot uses a checklist before taking off, top time managers think on paper and always work from a list. A list gives you a track to run on throughout the day. It enables you to measure your progress and helps you avoid the major time waster of distraction.

Make up a list of everything you have to do in the coming week. Write down what you have to do each day, preferably the evening before. Doing it ahead of time allows your subconscious mind to work on your list overnight. Often you will wake up with ideas and insights to do your job even more efficiently.

Just as a business strives to achieve the highest return on equity (ROE), your job is to achieve the highest “return on energy” (ROE). One way you accomplish high returns is by working from a list. Every minute spent in planning saves about 10 minutes in execution. According to time management specialists, it takes about 12 minutes per day to write out a list, but these 12 minutes will save you about two hours each day (120 minutes) in actually getting the work done—a return on energy of 1,000 percent or more.

Once you have made up your list, refuse to do anything that is not on the list. If something new comes up, write it down before you do it, because act of writing down a new activity puts it in proper perspective with other things that might be more important. As you work through your list during the day, cross off each item. This simple act of crossing it off gives you a feeling of success and forward movement. It motivates you to work even more efficiently and effectively and get even more done. At the end of the day when you look at your list and see how much you’ve accomplished, you will feel effective and productive.

Set Priorities on Your List

Start by using the 80/20 rule on everything you do. Remember that 20 percent of what you do accounts for 80 percent of the value of everything you do, and 80 percent of your results. If you have a list of 10 tasks to complete in the day, two of those tasks will be worth more than the other eight put together. Always focus and concentrate on your top 20 percent.

Use the ABCDE method of time management, which is based on the fact that something is important to the degree to which it has significant potential consequences. Something is unimportant to the degree to which is has low or no consequences at all.

Go over your list and put one of these five letters next to each item before you begin:

• An A task is something that you must do, with high potential consequences for doing it or not doing it.

• A B task is something that you should do, when you are caught up with your A tasks, and have only mild consequences for doing it or not doing it.

• A C task is something that would be nice to do, but which has no consequences at all. Whether you do it makes no difference to your company or your career.

• A D activity is something that you can delegate to someone else. Even if you are comfortable doing it, and you’ve done it in the past, you must delegate everything that you can to free up your time to do just those things that have important potential consequences.

• An E item is something that should be eliminated altogether. It may have had some value in the past, but now it is unimportant. It may be fun and easy, but it is largely a waste of time.

Once you have organized your list with the ABCDE method, revisit the list and number each A item. Assign to it the values A-1, A-2, A-3, and so on. Do the same with your B activities. You then begin to work on your A-1 priority and discipline yourself to do nothing else until this item is completed.

You can do your B and C tasks later, but only when your A tasks have been completed. Never give in to the temptation to clear up small things first. Start on your A-1 task and then concentrate single-mindedly until it’s complete.

Stay on Track

The most important question in time management is “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?” Ask yourself this question continually throughout the day, and make sure that whatever you are doing at that moment is the answer to this question.

When you first begin to ask yourself this question, you may find it a bit of an irritation. As Denis Waitley said, “Most people do things that are tension-relieving rather than activities that are goal-achieving.” Because people tend to follow the path of least resistance, most people prefer to do what is fun, easy, and usually unimportant rather than to tackle the major tasks that can make a significant difference in their lives if they do them first, and do them well.

This principle of priorities applies to your whole life. Sometimes, the most valuable use of your time is to spend it with your family at home in the evenings, or to go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep instead of watching television. What matters the most is for you to ask yourself this question regularly, and then to discipline yourself to do that task and nothing else. This habit alone will enable you to rapidly increase your productivity, performance, output, and life satisfaction.

Key Result Areas

An excellent question to ask and answer is, “Why am I on the payroll?” What exactly have you been hired to do? What are the specific, measurable results that your success and promotion depend upon?

Every job usually has about five to seven key result areas. These tasks are the ones that you absolutely, positively must accomplish if you are going to do the job you’ve been hired to do and get the results that are expected of you. An excellent exercise is for you to make a list of everything that you feel you have been hired to accomplish, and then take this list to your boss. Have your boss organize the list by his or her order of priority. Then, always work on what your boss considers to be the most important thing you could possibly be doing, achieving the most important results you could possibly be achieving.

As a manager, have each of your staff members come to you with a list of the reasons they feel that they are on the payroll. You should go over this list with each staff member and help them to set clear priorities on the most important work that they could be doing. From then on, manage by priority. The greater clarity that a person has with regard to what is the most important thing they could be doing, the happier they will be and the more they will accomplish.

Another question with regard to key results areas is, “What can I, and only I do that, if done really well, will make a real difference to my company?” Every job has certain things that only the person in that job can do. If that person doesn’t do them, no one else will. But if the person in that job does them, and does them well, it can make a significant difference to both the company and to that person’s career. What is it, or what are they?

Single-Minded Concentration

Concentration and single-mindedness are perhaps the most important of all time management skills. They are central to all great achievement. Your ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing at a time is a true measure of your desire, decision, determination, and discipline.

Focus means that you are absolutely clear about the most important task that you could be working on at the moment. Concentration means that, once you start on your most important task, you discipline yourself to continue working on that task until it is 100 percent complete. Persevere without diversion or distraction. Your ability to concentrate single-mindedly on the one task, the most important use of your time, is essential for success.

Always allow yourself enough time to complete your most important tasks. Calculate how much time it is going to take to do the job and then add 30 percent as a buffer zone. Deliberately providing a cushion of time will greatly contribute to your ability to get your most important tasks done on schedule and to a satisfactory level of quality.

Overcoming Procrastination

Procrastination is not only the thief of time, it is the thief of life. It is perhaps the greatest destroyer of human success. It is astonishing how many tasks never get completed because the individual was simply not capable of overcoming the natural human tendency to procrastinate. Fortunately, a series of time-tested techniques can help anyone in overcoming procrastination.

Bite-Sized Pieces

Make a list of all of the small tasks that you must complete in order to complete a major task. The action of breaking down a large job into a series of small jobs makes it more manageable and much easier for you to get started. You then resolve to complete one small task before you do anything else. This action often gets you launched into the job, and once you have started, you will often continue through to completion.

Salami Slice

Another variation of bite-sized pieces is for you to salami slice the task. Just as you would not attempt to eat a loaf of salami in one bite, you slice off one small bit of the job and work on that little slice until it’s completed. You then go on to the next slice. This approach will often break the mental logjam of procrastination and give you the momentum to keep on working through the task.

A Sense of Urgency

One of the rarest and most valuable qualities in the world of work is a sense of urgency. Being known for this quality is one of the best reputations that you can have. When you become known for action-orientation, for starting and completing the job fast, you will start to attract to yourself more and more important responsibilities.

Perhaps the most powerful affirmation you can use to overcome procrastination are the words, “Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!” Whenever you feel yourself procrastinating or putting off starting or working on a major task, repeat those words to yourself until they rev you up and launch you into the job.

Creating Blocks of Time

To accomplish important tasks, you require unbroken blocks of time. The more important your work is, the more important it will be for you to set aside blocks of time to work on important projects.

Here is a rule: Do not attempt to mix the accomplishment of creative tasks with the accomplishment of functional or administrative tasks. You cannot do operational tasks and creative tasks simultaneously. They require two totally different ways of thinking and acting, which is why you sometimes hear, “You can’t get any work done at work.” Most of your time at work is taken up with brief meetings, conversations, phone calls, and dealing with email. You are constantly distracted by small tasks that are urgent and immediate. You never get sufficient time to focus and concentrate on major tasks.

You need 60- to 90-minute chunks of time on a regular basis to accomplish anything substantial. If it is a report or a project of some kind, you actually need about 30 minutes to get settled down and get into the task at the beginning. Only then can you really focus and concentrate, and such focus is only possible if you eliminate the distractions around you.

If you can put together three unbroken hours of work without interruption, you can get more done than many people accomplish in a day or two in an office where they are surrounded by interruptions and distractions.

The best chunk of time is that period you create first thing in the morning when you are fresh and most alert. You can get up at five or six in the morning and work for 60 to 90 minutes before you go to the office. Even if you get to the office late, in those 90 minutes of uninterrupted work time, you can accomplish nearly a whole day’s work. Lunchtime at work is also an excellent time for you to clear up your tasks. Turn off your computer and cell phone, close your door, and work single-mindedly while everyone else has gone out for lunch.

Another way to get a chunk of time is to close your office door for certain periods each day for 60 to 90 minutes. Put a “Do not disturb” sign on the door and for one hour refuse to take any interruptions. You will be amazed at how much work you can plow through when you can concentrate single-mindedly. The greatest enemy of success today is “distraction.” We are surrounded by technological “noise” that threatens to undermine our effectiveness and sabotage our careers. For this reason, one of the most important of all time management techniques is simply to “leave things off.”

Check your email only twice a day. Turn off your computer so that it does not continue announcing incoming email while you are working. Turn off your telephone, or put it in silent mode and refuse to react to it every time it lights up. Have your phone calls held when you are in the office, and leave the radio off when driving so that you can use that time to think.

Controlling Interruptions

At work, interruptions are the single biggest time wasters of all. These interruptions usually occur when people walk into your office, or you walk into someone else’s office, just to chat.

The biggest time waster in the world of work is other people. Continually ask, “Who wastes my time at work?” Then, if you have the courage, you should ask, “Whose time do I waste at work?” When you are a manager, you often waste other people’s time by coming late to meetings, forcing everyone to wait for you, or by keeping people waiting when you have arranged to meet with them personally.

One of the best ways to minimize the time wastage of interruptions is for you to say to people who want to chat, “I’d love to talk to you right now, but I have to get back to work.” Keep saying the words, “Back to work! Back to work! Back to work!” whenever you feel like slacking off or taking it easy. You can use these words to get yourself going, and to keep yourself going. You can use these words to break off a conversation by telling the other person that you have to get back to work. No one will ever try to hold you back from your work.

Batching Your Tasks

Batching your tasks simply means doing several similar jobs at the same time. Because everything you do involves a learning curve, when you do a series of identical or similar tasks all in a row, the learning curve reduces the time to do each subsequent task by as much as 80 percent. Batch writing letters, emails, and other correspondence together and do them all at once. Batch your phone calls and return them all at once. If you have to interview a number of people, do them consecutively.

By doing similar tasks all at once, you can dramatically reduce the amount of time that it takes to get through all of those similar tasks. You can add one or two hours of output and increased productivity to your day in this way.

Organize Your Work Space

Organize your work space and clear your desk before you begin. Don’t let paperwork pile up around you. Put all your documents away into the appropriate files and deal only with your current work. Try to have only one item in front of you whenever possible.

Think of your office as that of a dentist, doctor, or lawyer. The top professionals in every field keep a tidy and highly ordered work space at all times. They clean up and reorder their workspace as they go through their day.

Get organized and stay organized. Make sure your office supplies and materials are fully stocked. Once you start work, be sure that you have everything at hand to complete the task.

Delegate everything you possibly can to others who can do the tasks as well or better than you. Become excellent at delegation, outsourcing, and eliminating. These activities expand your capacity and output from what you can do to what you can manage. Learn the skills of correct delegation, beginning with choosing the right person to handle each task. Provide timelines, deadlines, standards of performance, and a regular schedule.

Maintain Balance in Your Life

The most important factors for happiness, health, and high productivity in life are balance and moderation. As Shakespeare said, “There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.” The main purpose of learning and practicing time management is to enhance and improve the overall quality of your life. It is to increase the amount of pleasure and happiness that you experience. Improving your overall quality of life should be your main goal.

Your health is extremely important. No success in business will compensate for ill health. Take time to eat the right foods and get regular exercise and the proper rest and recreation. Sometimes the best use of your time is to go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep.

Finally, and most important of all, you must take time for your relationships. The people you care about and who care about you are the most important parts of your life. Never allow yourself to get so caught up in your work that you ignore the importance of those key relationships—your spouse, children, and close friends.

An excellent life is one that is in balance. If you spend ample time preserving and enhancing the quality of your relationships, you will find that you get more joy, satisfaction, success, and fulfillment out of your life than if you allowed your work to pull your life out of balance. A wise old doctor once observed, “I never spoke to a businessman on his death bed who said that he wished he had spent more time at the office.”

Action Exercises

1. Determine your three most important business goals, those goals or results that make more of a difference to your success than any other.

2. Determine the three most important tasks you do to achieve your most important goals.

3. Determine your three most important values or organizing principles in life. What is most important to you?

4. Make a list each day of everything you have to do, and then organize it by priority using the 80/20 rule and the ABCDE method.

5. Create chunks of time each week when you can work without interruption on your most important projects.

6. Delegate everything possible to free up time to do those things that only you can do. What are they?

7. Keep your life in balance. Organize your time so that you spend ample time with your family and on personal activities.