Need more time for innovation (or whatever)?

How to get three hours back every day

by Matt Heinz

I need more hours in the day, and I assume you do as well. Between our personal and professional lives, there's always too much to do and not enough time to do it.

But despite these challenges, I'm constantly looking for ways to do two things:

1. Eliminate distractions
   
2. Make better use of "down time"

If you're trying to do the same, here are eight things I'd recommend trying. Collectively, I think they effectively give me back about three hours every day.

Don't drive

• We waste a lot of time in the car, driving. Except for returning a few phone calls, this isn't very productive time typically. If you can take the bus, other public transportation, or even carpool with coworkers, you can use part of that time to get caught up on other work. Catch up on email offline, brainstorm something without other distractions, and work through other things on your to-do list. Worst case, catch up on some of your reading. Any of that is better than stop-and-go traffic.

Always have something to read with you

• Everywhere you go, carry something you want to read. It can be printed materials (newspapers, magazines, printed-out articles), or it can be saved content on your SmartPhone. For example, on my iPhone I have access to my RSS feeds via Google Reader, a mobile version of ReadItLater that syncs Web articles I want to read, and also an iPhone version of Kindle software to catch up on a book I'm reading. There are so many times during the day when I'm waiting, or in a line, that can be used for a few minutes to catch up on some of this.

Avoid and cancel meetings

• Do you really need to attend every meeting on your schedule? Have you yourself scheduled meetings that can be more effectively handled with a 5-10 minute conversation in the hallway? I'd be willing to bet that 25% of your meetings this week aren't worth your time. Figure out which ones they are, and get your time back.

Keep your email offline, all the time

• If you use Outlook in particular, right-click on the icon in the lower right-hand corner of your screen and select "Work Offline". This will essentially "freeze" the email in your inbox currently, and queue up anything in your Outbox to sync when you want to. This helps you focus on what's at hand, without getting distracted in real-time by new incoming messages. Click the send/receive button when you want to, but otherwise stay more focused and more productive without the constant distractions.

Forward your phone to voicemail when you need/want to focus

• Most phones and phone systems give you the ability to point inbound calls directly to voicemail. If you need to focus on something, shouldn't you turn off this distraction as well? You don't have to do this all day. But if the project in front of you will take 30 minutes to get done, don't let things like new emails and phone calls distract you. That 30-minute project could take 60-90 minutes easy if you check email, take a call, and have to get re-engaged and focused again.

Get up earlier

• Would it really be that hard to get up 30 minutes earlier? This may not be your most productive, awake time. But an extra 30 minutes (when the rest of the house is still sleeping) could be used for reading, exercise, whatever you want. This alone gives you an extra 3.5 hours a week, and that's a lot of time.

Do your most important 1-2 tasks/projects FIRST every day (before email and voicemail)

• At the beginning of each day, you already know what 1-2 things are most important to accomplish. But most of us, before tackling those projects, check email and voicemail and quickly get distracted by the day's interruptions and fire-drills. Nine times out of ten, those distractions can wait until your most important tasks are finished. Get them done first, and I guarantee you'll feel (and be!) far more productive every day.

Delegate

• You probably aren't delegating to others actively enough. You're probably doing too much yourself, including things might be more efficient to be done by others (and sometimes with better results). You could be using a service like TimeSvr to get small tasks done by someone else. You could use eLance to outsource a variety of administrative projects. You could use ActiveWords to shortcut frequently-used activities on your computer. Long story short, you're working too hard and doing too much. Do less yourself, but get the same and more done.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Top 10 Corporate Time-Wasters

Do you need time to innovate?

by Mike Myatt

Time is the only thing we all have in common, yet it's how we choose to spend it that defines and differentiates us as individuals. Even though time is a key success metric, I am always amazed at how many executives don't manage it as such. Time is indeed a precious and finite commodity, and those professionals that manage it wisely are those that achieve the greatest results. Show me an executive that doesn't leverage time to its highest and best use and I'll show you an executive likely to be replaced by one that can. In today's blog post I'll examine the value of time.

The proper understanding of how to use time directly impacts income. You see, time doesn't slow, nor can it be accelerated or recovered; it can only be wasted, invested, or leveraged. I often hear people espouse the axiom "don't work hard, work smart."

I have a bit of a different take on the subject as I work very hard at working intelligently. It was coming to an understanding of these fundamental principles at an early age that have made a tremendous difference in my life as contrasted with many others I've encountered along the way.

Whether you are a sales person, professional advisor, entrepreneur, or executive, you only have 24 hours in a day, which consists of 1440 minutes, and when reduced to the ridiculous amounts to 86,400 seconds. If you want to do more, earn more, serve more, influence more, or significantly change the level of your impact in any area, you simply must make more out of the time you have at your disposal. So, my question is this - How well do you leverage your 86,400 seconds?

Have you ever heard someone say they wish there was more time in a day?

While I've already pointed out that you cannot increase the amount of time in a day, I've also said that time can in fact be leveraged if you know how. Some people use only a portion of a full day, while others leverage the entire day, and those who are most productive leverage multiples of a day.

Multiples of a day you ask?

In my world there are far more than 24 hours in a day. Through making good use of personal time, leveraging staff and technology, outsourcing across different time zones, associating with quality people and organizations, managing risk, and having a laser like focus on highest and best use principles, I estimate that I'm able to average nearly a full week's work into a single 24 hour period while rarely working more than an average work week on a personal basis. Leveraging time is all about making good choices.

Are you making good choices?

The first step in making the most out of your time begins with the understanding that time itself is a key success metric. You can either leverage your time, or waste your time. Once you learn how to invest your time wisely, you can then get to a point where you can start to leverage your time into multiples. The first step in making this transition is to maximize personal time by avoiding the most common workplace time-wasters. According to most of the research I've read, the following items represent the Top 10 Corporate Time-Wasters:

1. A lack of focus and shifting priorities


2. Technology (phone, email, IM, social media, etc.) interruptions


3. Lack of planning


4. Biting-off more than you can chew (initiative overload)


5. Drop-in visitors


6. Ineffective delegation


7. Lack of organizational skills


8. Procrastination


9. Inability to say "No"


10. Unproductive meetings

Time can either be your best friend or your worst nightmare. Executives that understand how to use time to their advantage accomplish great things, and those who allow time to slip through their fingers don't. The lesson to learn is to accomplish more through leverage while decreasing personal time commitments. Remember that time is a finite commodity, and once a moment in time has passed it is gone forever.

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.

Stop Procrastinating - 2 Minutes or Less

by Matt Heinz

When I think about procrastination, I think first of bigger projects. I have a column to write, a proposal to finish, a report to publish.

The real time-suckers are the much smaller projects. If you read an email and don't take action right away, you're procrastinating. If you see an interesting article or blog post and don't do something with it right away, you're delaying action - and you're procrastinating.

I fight this type of mini-procrastination all the time. It doesn't mean I have to actually do everything right then and there. It just means I need to decide what to do, and move on.

But if the task takes two minutes or less (respond to an email, set up a meeting, quickly scan an article), I try to do it right away. With such a short time period required for action, delaying that activity (and reviewing the request or task again later) is pure wasted time. Add that time up across a day of emails, blog posts, phone calls, etc. and it's a ton of wasted time.

Simply acting on those two-minutes-or-less tasks right away will work wonders to clear your inbox, get things done, and keep you moving more productively throughout the day.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Innovating Up and Down

by Drew Boyd

What is the first thing you do when you step into an elevator? For most people: push the button of the floor you are going to. Not so with a new breed of elevators manufactured by Schindler North America. These elevators have the buttons on the outside, not inside. The buttons for selecting your floor are on each floor. Instead of just pushing a single up or down button to hail an elevator, you push the button for the floor you want as though you were inside.

The Division Template is the culprit here. In this innovation sighting, the elevator floor button panel was divided out and placed back into the system...outside the elevator cab. Very novel, useful, and surprising. To use Division, make a list of the components, then divide out a component. Divide functionally or physically and place it back somewhere in the system. Use Function Follows Form to identify potential benefits, feasibility, challenges, and adaptations.

The benefit is better elevator customer service. Elevator cars operate more efficiently which means you get to the right floor faster. How? By selecting your floor sooner (while waiting for the elevator to arrive) the elevator's computer has more timely input about peoples' destinations. It can calculate the optimal pattern of pickups and dropoffs, then execute it faster than traditional elevators. Here is how this new elevator, called the Miconic 10, operates:


"Miconic 10 advanced software drives a powerful logic program that systematically rationalizes elevator traffic flow in a building. It employs a sophisticated algorithm to manage the complexities of traffic patterns as they change throughout the day and to group passengers together with the same departure and/or destination floors.

With any conventional control, passengers can only tell the elevator system that they want to travel either 'Up' or 'Down'. Likewise, everyone tries to get into the first car that arrives, often causing overcrowding, then scrambling to push the buttons once inside the car. As a result, the car will probably stop at every floor on the way up.

With Miconic 10, you can register you destination even before you reach the elevator lobby. The system tells you immediately which car to go to. It groups passengers together by destination to minimize the number of stops. It makes sure that cars can't become overcrowded. Once inside the elevator, your destination floor is confirmed to you. You don't need to press any more buttons (special service buttons are, of course, provided). You receive confirmation of your destination floor upon arrival."


The first elevator was built by Archimedes probably in 236 B.C. It has come a long way since then.

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd