Becoming a Human Time Machine

Hi everybody, Alastair here. So I'm going to tell you how to become a time machine. Helping leaders gain control of their time and priorities, one of the areas that people write to me about the most, talk to me about the most. It gives me great satisfaction to provide ideas to help give you time back. The first thing to remember is you cannot manage time, you can only manage yourself. So this session is going to challenge your thinking, and I want you to experiment and try something new. I know you can do it. Of the 22,000 or more leaders I've worked with in 20 different countries across 4 continents, I don't think I've ever met one who didn't find their diary a constant challenge. So in this short session, you'll learn how to reclaim hours of your valuable time time back every week with the secret to effective planning and prioritisation. There isn't a moment to waste, so let's get started in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I'll explain about that later. We're gonna start by thinking about value. So why is it worth analysing and understanding how you use your time? If you do a brutally honest time diary in 15-minute chunks, for 2 days, you'll be amazed at the results and what you learn. If you want to do that, Google 15-minute time planner template to give it a try. Go on, I dare you, you'll be shocked. If you're too scared to try that, just have a look at Settings and Screen Time on your iPhone. If you use Android, it's Digital Wellbeing. So pause this video and do that now. Scary, isn't it? Let's do a quick calculation. So whilst you've got your phone in your hand, or use a calculator if you prefer, I want you to focus on saving 5 minutes every hour you're at work. That's one email you don't have to read, one distribution list you come off, a meeting that's shorter and more focused, an activity that's streamlined to save time. Sounds easy, right? If you multiply that 5 minutes by how many hours you you work per day, then by how many days you work in a year. In the UK, this is 223, excluding weekends, bank holidays, and 28 days annual leave. So this is the total minutes you would save in a year: 8,920. So if we divide that by 60 to turn it into hours, and then again by the hours in a day, this is the total amount of time you would save in a year just by saving 5 minutes every hour you are at work. It's a lot, isn't it? 18.6 days to do more of what you want. What are you going to do with all this extra time? Imagine the possibilities. You know, how's that for return on investment? In purely monetary terms, on an average manager's salary, you would save £4,559.40. There is a warning though, this takes discipline, it takes belief, and it takes practice. But what I'm going to introduce you to now, 7-step planning process, will help get you well on the way to taking control back of your time. So let's get started with that now. So how's your planning at the moment? Is it painless at the moment? Is it really? How do you plan your days, or do you just kind of wing it and plow through and cross your fingers, hope for the best that you'll do all the things that you need to do? In a survey of 5,000 leaders who manage between 5 and 50 people, 94% said pre-planning the week was key to success, but only 1% had been doing it consistently in the past month. Madness. So how do you decide what order to do your tasks in? Is it who it's for? Is it your boss? Maybe. How much you like the task? If it has a deadline? Who shouts the loudest? How much trouble you'll be in if you don't do it? Maybe. How difficult or easy it is, uh, what you feel like, um, on the day, even what time of day it is. All of this creates overwhelm and panic in your brain, specifically the amygdala, your danger sensor, if you like. It switches the brain into survival mode by bypassing the neocortex, the thinking rational part of your brain, which is usually at the front. So this is why we sometimes make rash emotional decisions when we're under stressful conditions. So I want to give you my secret 30-minute, 7-step planning hack to outwit your own brain, make this a whole lot less painful and a whole lot more structured. Just try it for one week and I guarantee you won't look back. All you need is a diary system of some sort, preferably electronic such as Outlook, Trello, Google Calendar, iCal, something something like that. But an Excel spreadsheet, paper diary and pencil works just as well. Pencil because it will change. Let's get started then with step number 1. So the first step in the process is to plan pleasurably early. So what do I mean by that? Most people do their planning for the week on Monday morning. It's too late by then. Your brain's auto-panic mode will kick in when you open up your inbox at 9 o'clock on a Monday. What I'm suggesting, set aside 30 minutes on Friday afternoon before you leave work, or even Sunday afternoon with a nice cup of whatever you fancy and some peace and quiet. The trick here is to make it a pleasurable experience, so lock yourself away at work with a nice cup coffee, you know, sit in a comfortable chair at home on a Sunday afternoon and get it done so you feel calm and organized about your week ahead and you avoid that terrible sleepless Sunday night dread and anxiety. So that's step 1: plan pleasurably early. Friday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, but not Monday morning. So step 2 is be Beyoncé. You're probably thinking, Alastair, what on earth are you talking about? Well, what do you think Beyoncé does after every concert? Presumably after she's had a shower, I imagine she— but she actively demonstrates growth mindset. What she does is she sits down and watches her performance back to identify key areas for improvement. So I want you to do the same. Think about that one thing you're gonna change from the last week that you can improve in your plan for this week. So imagine you had a time machine. What would you do differently? What mistakes did you make with your planning last week? So for example, if I think about my last week, uh, my one change would be to plan some time in for important finance tasks that kept distracting me. I was trying to sort of fit them in, in between other things, but I didn't set aside any time to sit down and really work it through. So I kept starting but not finishing and having to pick it up later on. The whole thing just ended up stressing me out and taking a lot longer than it would have done if I just sat down and dedicated some time to it. Step number 3 is get your goals clear. What are the most important things you need to achieve next week? Most valuable, biggest return. The Pareto principle, 80/20 rule, tells us that 80% of our useful results usually come from 20% of our efforts. So make sure you are clear about your must-do big-ticket priorities and goals for the next week at work. Think goals, not individual tasks at this stage. So there's 4 examples here on screen: get the end-of-year budget completed, make a decision about new IT equipment, plan a team strategy session, get the team appraisals organized. So those are the big things I need to do next week, for example. Step 4: is what we call the fortnight flick ahead. What we're looking for here is unexpected landmines. So look ahead for the next 2 weeks and just look out for those things that you might need to take into account. So that could be deadlines, big projects that are coming up, team absences, holidays, events, things, organisational things that are landing in those weeks. I also look for meetings that I must attend and meetings that perhaps I don't need to attend. So look for meetings that you can get rid of as well as meetings that you need to attend, or maybe you need to attend part of it as well. So for example, in my fortnight flick ahead, I've got an event coming up, it's going to take me out of the business for for a full day, and I'm gonna need to prepare for that too. So I need to put the preparation into my next week's plan, even though the event isn't for 2 weeks. Next step then, task list triage. So look at your goals and brainstorm all the tasks you have to do next week that will take longer than about 15 minutes 30 minutes if you're just starting with this. Write down everything, including preparation for other tasks. Break those large goals down into bite-sized chunks. Then triage them in terms of urgency and importance. Make sure you're diff— you're clear about the difference between urgency and importance. Urgency is time-related, so think deadlines. Importance is different. Importance is how critical the task is to your job, your objectives, your strategy. For example, answering a ringing phone, email, or text message is urgent, but it's often not important. No one's going to die, nothing's going to explode if you don't answer it. So be really strict with yourself here. So Category 1 are your miss— mission criticals. If you don't get these things done immediately on Monday morning, serious consequences could be ahead. What are those things that are your core function, must be done by you straight away, both important and urgent? We need to do it now. Category 2 tasks are important but not urgent. We should be spending most of our time on tasks in this box. These activities need to have a scheduled slot in your calendar. Category 3 tasks are not important but urgent. So interruptions, some calls, mails, reports, repeat or regular activities. These are right for delegation, uh, if you can, or diminishing, um, doing in low priority time Getting distracted by these Category 3 tasks is where most leaders go wrong. Category 4 tasks— and my video's obscuring that, which is perfect— because they're neither important nor urgent. So trivial tasks, idle chitchat, reading industry magazines, some meetings even would fall into this category. So ditch it altogether or do it in low-value time like on your commute if you must. If you're on a train, not while you're driving, obviously. Okay, so we've got our list of tasks, we've triaged them in terms of urgency and importance, we've given them a 1, 2, 3, or 4 rating on there. What's next? Next is time blocking. If you look at many successful leaders of big organizations they all use time blocking. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Benjamin Franklin, Jack Dorsey from Twitter all swear by this method, and I agree. Everything goes into your schedule. If you want a number to aim for, because I know some people like that, aim for a maximum of 10 tasks per day. 1 big, 4 medium, 5 small, something like that. But every meeting, every document you need to do, every preparation activity, anything you don't want to forget about and needs to get done should really have a space in your calendar. Only then do you really know how busy you are and whether you can handle anything else that comes your way. Think in minutes rather than hours. Don't automatically schedule an hour because that's the default. Think about how long it will take. I personally add 20% onto that just in case and to give me some wiggle room. Try and avoid putting things back to back if you can, particularly meetings, because then, you know, you're— the cognitive stress of that means that you're not performing at your best. So here's what my schedule looks like for a week. I know, I know, everything goes in it, including exercise for me, otherwise it doesn't get doesn't get done. My personal appointments in there as well. I color code it so I can see the balance of meetings, paid work, volunteer work, personal stuff. I always schedule time for desk-based tasks and preparation, which I believe is absolutely critical to making this work and not overloading yourself. It's so much easier to make decisions and feel in control. I can look at this and I know straight away if someone comes to me on Monday with an urgent and important piece of work that will take 2 hours, I know that I can find a space for it and then I can move something else. For example, here, those purple, the purple stuff is client-paid workshops. That can't be moved. But I know those blue items can be moved, but I've then got to find a slot for it somewhere else in the week, or perhaps I might need to say no, but at least I can say no with justification of my full schedule clarified and clear in front of me. So that's time blocking. The final stage then, folks, is to make it happen. Accept the fact that it will change. Schedule— schedule Schedule, schedule. It will change, but at least you have a strong starting position, and now you know what needs to be achieved next week. When things come up, you can either say no, you can defer it to later, you can add it in, you can delegate it, and you can move things around with skill and precision. You know how busy you are on each day. You know which days are going to be the difficult, challenging days, but also there's the opportunity to share it with other people as well if you choose to do so. What this does though is put you firmly in the driving seat. Give it a try for a week and luxuriate in the knowledge and calm it gives you. It will change your life.