" Performance Management"

Staying On Post When the Battle Rages

Executive Summary: If we in business are going to live with any kind of real balance and long term success, then we have to start taking a strategic view of the manner in which we work. The technology is there in any basic calendaring system. Use it to stay on your post and bring value to every minute of your day. Now that’s real performance management!

No Task List

Down with the endless task list! Down with the stacks of unread mail! Down with the piles of memos, reports, and sticky notes! Down with the gigabytes of unread email! Down with serving two masters! Down with all that stuff! It’s time to be done with that way of working.

If we in business are going to live with any kind of real balance and long term success, then we have to start taking a strategic view of the manner in which we work. In my work with clients all across America, the number one thing that deters excellence in performance, regardless of position, age, gender, sector, or experience, has to be the phenomenon I call “time debt.” Time debt is the chronic bleeding away of energy and focus due to un-calendared, strategy-less work.

Time Debt

Start with this: Just like a soldier, you have a post…a place to stand guard over, a garden to tend. Your post includes three key areas: time, treasure, and people. Your post is a metaphor for “your business,” and it is your responsibility to not just survive on yesterday’s success, but to take control of your future.

It takes diligent strategy and discipline. And you can do it! Simply put: You are here to do something…and by extension so is your business. Defining exactly what it is cannot be underestimated. Like the Oracle said in the sci-fi movie The Matrix, “we’re all here to do what we’re all here to do.” So, what are you here to do and how is your business helping you do that?

Our “post” is the area of influence we occupy, nurture, and diligently guard. How do you deal with the daily attacks on your post? Some attacks are obvious, some are quite subtle. Like those in the first paragraph…those chronic wear-you-down, boil-the-frog-one-degree-at-a-time, constant-drip type of enemies? They are everywhere! What do we do about them?

In reality, these subtle enemies are far more dangerous than the obvious ones. And the ugly part is that they conspire endlessly to produce one thing: Unending Time Debt.

Time debt is just like financial debt. Money is simply time in foldable form. So the relationship is not as far fetched as it first appears. Debt, time or money, can have the same debilitating, crippling effects. Since we’ve all heard the horror stories about financial debt, we don’t need to rehearse that here. However, let’s look at what time debt does and how we can reverse it so we can be about what we’re really here to do!

Our Man Jack

Jack was a salesman for a large manufacturing company. With increasing pressure to move operations overseas, the atmosphere of work was grim and rumors were on everyone’s lips. Jack and all the others in sales were working their fingers to the bone to make their quotas. Jack rolled into his office on Monday and he saw his unforgiving time debt for the hundredth time.

He simply sat there at his desk and stared at the mountain of unfiled papers, the 325 unread emails, and a monitor covered in sticky notes. He could hear his heart speed up. His sigh was audible within 20 feet. He pitifully looked down at his well worn to-do list and as soon as he could force his eyes away, he’d already seen at least 40 things he was supposed to have done last week.

So Jack tries to do his best. But while he’s gathering his courage to face another day in such unbearable debt, his boss barges in and…well you can guess…the list just got longer. When Jack first came to work, he had energy, focus, and hopes. Now all that had been plucked from him and exchanged for fear and guilt…fear of life without a paycheck and the guilt of knowing that this was not what he was destined for.

So after a long moment of depression, Jack tries again to just start at the top of the list… You can finish this story. Let’s be honest here, we’ve all be Jack at one time or another. Somehow we’ve not see that our life really must be totally integrated. If we persist in thinking it’s OK to trade 5 days of one thing for 2 days of another…it won’t be long before our relationships and our business starts to suffer.

Disintegration?

You may ask, “Why is being disintegrated so bad? After all shouldn’t I have some boundaries?” You’re right boundaries are critical. But boundaries are connected…they are touching things on both sides. What I’m talking about here is those voids…that lead to isolation, depression, and poor performance. This disintegration is perhaps best seen in the analogy of the body.

If I have a cell in my body that won’t integrate, won’t be on the team, won’t contribute…well, isn’t that what we call cancer? If you have working patterns in your day that are disintegrated, then you have cancer in your business and it will affect everything in your life. If your thumb was dislocated because you got it caught in a car door…Ouch!...how good would you be at picking up a heavy bowling ball? You see it wouldn’t be that you weren’t strong enough…it would be that you lost your leverage…your thumb was off it’s “post” no longer able to do it’s job…it would be sort of dis-integrated.

So you can see this type of working just doesn’t work. Many things contribute to this. In fact much more than we can go into here. So for what we can address here, let’s start with something simple: The task list. Yes indeed, the task list is a contributor to disintegration! Why? Because they don’t ever allow us to see the big picture.

And worst of all, because there is always more work to be done, they keep us in perpetual time debt, in that feeling of agony that makes us stay longer than we plan, cost more than we have, and frankly produces nothing but stress. So what is Jack to do? What technology can he use?

How can he get out of time debt, and have a life that’s balanced and successful? How can Jack stay on his post and win? He can start by taking the task list and doing something that borders on insanity: he can go through it item by item and estimate the time each task will take!

Now I’ve had many clients who I’ve walked through this step in the Total Integration™ process and the response is almost always the same. “God help me!!! I have 86 hours of work to do on my task list!” The next painful step that fully crosses the border into insanity, is to actually take a program like Microsoft Outlook’s calendar and put every single task into it. That’s right, if you want to be present to your life, slow down internally enough to see where the real leverage is, and actually get the work done, then you’ve got to get out of time debt.

The problem with the task list is that it is resides in the back of your mind as stuff you need to do, but haven’t done yet...subtly stalking you day and night. You are documenting and reinforcing a sense of constantly being behind in keeping a task list. Stop it! Sometimes technology that is really effective is really simple.

This is certainly the case here. The beauty of this performance management technology is that all you have to do is follow orders all day long. And when you’re done…you’re truly done. Task lists usually tempt us into doing the items that are easiest first.

Result: more and more time debt…feeling behind, overwhelmed, running at the speed of light with our hair on fire.

So here’s how it works: 1) Take all your tasks and estimate the time each will take. 2) Schedule all the tasks…in other words transform the tasks into appointments. Now at the beginning of each day, review your calendar asking “what work is really key today?” If something needs to move, or the order needs to change do so. But warning, discipline is required. Once the tasks become appointments and the appointments become “authorized work” the rush of freedom begins…you start to feel the time debt melting away.

You no longer have 45 things to do…you have just one thing to do. Freedom at last! Just open your calendar and honor the appointments. Why? Because you believe that they are authorized. You’ve abandoned the time debt and red-faced running around the rest of the world suffers from and transformed into someone who can proactively engage their working world with confidence and poise. You may think this is crazy.

Believe me that won’t surprise me. But I’ve seen the freedom first hand and it is real. It let’s you be done with work when work is over. Obviously depending on your job, you have more or less discretion with your time…or do you? If you are an entry level worker, you can still choose how you approach your work. After all who are you really working for? If we in business are going to live with any kind of real balance and long term success, then we have to start taking a strategic view of the manner in which we work. The technology is there in any basic calendaring system. Use it to stay on your post and bring value to every minute of your day. Now that’s real performance management!

Here's to your success!

Eric J. Beck - Founder

Total Integration Executive Program & Productivity Suite