Cameron Herold walks through four steps to double your productivity: use tight time containers like Parkinson's Law, separate your critical few tasks on an A/B list, estimate every task in 15-minute blocks to see where you're overcommitted, then delegate roughly 80% of those hours to others.
Chapters
You've heard the saying that time is money, but what if I told you that your approach to actually managing time management is not working for you and is actually holding back on your company's growth? I'm going to give you a few key strategies on what the top COOs do to stay ahead of the competition and to manage time properly. Because the reality is we all have the same amount of time. It's what you get done during the time that you've got that is actually going to drive your company forward and it's going to grow you as a leader and inside of the organization you're in. Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time that we give it. So the longer amount of time that you give a project to take, that's how long it's going to take. So the number one thing that you can do to actually get more done in less time and to manage this whole time is money scenario is when you delegate a project to someone. And I actually talk about this in my invest in your leaders course in the delegation module, which is really important for you and all of your management team to watch that module delegation. The idea here is that when you delegate a project to someone, you tell them how little time you want them to spend on that project and how little money you want them to spend on that project. Now, the difference is often people will delegate a project and they say it'll only take you an hour. And that point, your kind of subordinates keep arguing with me about how much time it's going to really take, or telling them how little time it's going to take them. Tell them how little time you want them to spend. Here's an example. Let's say I was delegating an email or a memo that needed to get written and sent out to all of my COO alliance members. I could ask Meredith on my team to write the memo and I could say, it'll only take you an hour. And she'd probably give me all the reasons why that memo would take longer than an hour. But if I switched that and said, please don't spend any more than 15 minutes on this memo, write it and spend maybe 10 minutes or 15 minutes max, she would get it done in the maximum of 15 minutes. She wouldn't argue with me because I'm not telling her how little time I think it'll take. I'm telling her how much time I want her to allocate to actually doing it. Very similar to buying something. If I was asking Meredith to Organize a dinner for me and three CEOs. I could say, organize a great dinner for me with three CEOs and she might get the best steak restaurant and open some wine and have everything perfectly set up. And that might cost me 500 bucks. What I really meant was, hey, I'm having dinner with three other CEOs. We're having it at my home. Can you just bring some food in that's really healthy and don't spend any more than 120 bucks? She could find a way to make it happen for $120 because I gave her a smaller container. So that's the number one thing to think about when you're actually managing time is this Parkinson's Law idea of time management. Number two is think about the priorities that you have. It's all about working on the critical few things versus the important many things. So here's a great system that you can use to manage your time and to manage your projects. Let's say it's over the course of an entire week or over the course of an entire day. First off, make a list of all the stuff that needs to get done. This is the to do list, and it's not your to do list, it's the to do list. Because you can delegate a lot of what's on the to do list to other people, or you can outsource it, or you can look at the to do list and say no or not now to some of those ideas. So here's how you work the to do list to manage time properly. Make a list for your week of all the projects that you want to get done, all the big high impact things, and all the miscellaneous stuff that you can come up with. Maybe you've got 18 different things on your to do list. Then I want you to go through every item on your to do list and put either an A priority or a B priority beside them. So it might be a B, A, A, B, B all the way through the 18 items until each of them have an A or a B beside them. Then go back and look at the A's. Maybe you've got six A's and number them A1, A2, A3. In terms of the order of impact, which are the most impactful, most important projects that you get done. Number them off that way, one through six. Then look at all of your B's and number them again. This exercise should take you no more than four or five minutes to do to set up your entire week. The third step is take a look at each task on your plate for the week or each project that's on your plate for the week and think about how many minutes or how many hours do you want to spend on each of those projects. Do it in 15 minute increments. And again, it doesn't have to be perfect, but maybe it's 15 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour and a half, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it's going to be for each of those 18 projects or 18 tasks that are on your list, then total up the amount of hours in your week and you're going to realize pretty quickly you don't have enough time in your calendar to get all of that done. Which is why I call it the to do list and not your to do list. Step number four is to take a look at all the hours on your list and delegate 80% of that work, 80% of those hours to other people. Either outsource it, freelancers or people that are on your team that you can delegate it to and maybe spend a few minutes helping them with their skills or confidence so they can take that work off your plate. But the key is to get the work done by others, not to do it yourself so that you're left working on the critical few items. That's how you actually manage time. That's how you actually control the time. Is money part of your business? And again, one of the other modules in my invest in your leaders course I spoke to the delegation module. Another key one to look at is the time management module and the third is the project management module. Those are three of the 12 modules in my invest in your leaders course that you should actually go through and make sure that all of the managers on your team go through those modules as well. If you like this content, check out more before. Make sure you like and subscribe to the channel.
