Right Attitudes » Ideas for Impact
» by Nagesh Belludi

The ‘SMART’ technique (see this excellent introduction) is a popular framework for effective goal setting. Generally, the acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound requisites for goals. Some people use different denotations and variations; others use the expanded ‘SMARTER’ form or focus only on the measurable and time-bound (’MT’) characterization of goals.

Quite often, goals — even the SMART ones — fail to stimulate action beyond the initial burst of motivation. The simple reason for this slip is that goals tend to lack visibility for the “true ends.”

Make Your Goals Stick

A goal that lacks an underpinning of meaning and personal significance is likely to run out of steam. Therefore, a goal or resolution can be inspiring only when you can connect it to a larger purpose.

When you define any goal, identify its “true ends” — what benefits you expect to gain by successfully pursuing an idea or goal. For example,

• Instead of “Join a fitness center and workout every day,” try “Lose fifteen pounds by 6-June to drop a clothes-size and look and feel better at my best friend’s wedding.”
• Instead of “Reduce credit card debt,” try “Reduce expenses and pay off $12,000 in credit card debt in three months so that I can save $135 per month in interest fees.”
• Instead of “Attend fewer meetings,” try “Attend fewer meetings or delegate participation to reduce time at work and enjoy more quality time with family.”

Recognizing the true ends of your goals will sustain you through internal and external resistance to pursue your goals.

Recommended Reading

• Use the ‘10-Minute Dash’ to overcome procrastination
• Don’t Let ‘Perfect’ Be the Enemy of ‘Done’
• How hard you should work
• Think and perform like a CEO

***See other articles related to goals, aspirations, resolutions, ambition, dieting success, perspective

1. Divide and conquer. Break up large projects into smaller tasks. If you think a task will take less than five minutes, get it done right away. If you can reply to an email in less than two minutes, reply immediately and file or delete the incoming email.
2. Fight procrastination. One of the easiest ways to fight procrastination is to focus on starting your task. Commit to your task for just ten minutes. Avoid distractions and interruptions and continue to work for just ten minutes. By the end of the ten minutes, you probably get absorbed in the tasks, build momentum and can choose to continue working towards completion.
3. Put things in their place. Designate a place at your home and office for everything — your keys, wallet, watch, clothes, electronic gadgets and all personal effects. Always put each item in its proper place. Being orderly prevents you from anxiously searching for these belongings the next time you want to use them.
4. Create checklists for all tasks. Consider preparing checklists for everything from cleaning the home to packing for travel. Checklists help you remember everything critical and thus reduce the persistent worry of forgetting something important.
5. Start planning your day on the prior day. Before you leave office or before you go to bed, plan the next day and prepare a ‘To Do’ list. Check your calendar for meetings, deadlines and commitments. In addition, put out everything you need the night before. Planning ahead not only helps you start the next day with purpose, but also gets things off your mind. You can thus enjoy your time away or sleep better.
6. Pick up after yourself and clean your home and workspace. From time to time, glance through all areas of your home and office for things that are out of place. Tidy up before the clutter gets out of hand. Use the wastebasket liberally. Realize that mess leads to stress.
7. Maintain a ‘On-The-Go’ folder. When you receive your copy of a subscription magazine, tear out all the articles that interest you and dispose of the rest of the magazine. Maintain an “on-the-go” folder and file such articles. Take this folder wherever you go and read these articles during transition times — when you wait for a doctor’s appointment or when your flight is delayed at an airport. Review this folder frequently and toss out everything that is older than six months.

Recommended Reading

• Self-assessment Quiz: how stressed are you?
• The “10-minute Dash” technique to overcoming procrastination
• You have a pile of reading material at your desk?
• Everyday reflections for effective time management
• Seven habits to beat Monday morning blues

***See other articles related to time management, personal organization, productivity, stress management, getting things done, work-life balance

A.G. Lafley on the Unique Work of CEOs

In this article (PDF of full article) in the May 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Proctor & Gamble’s Chairman and outgoing CEO, A.G. Lafley reflects on the unique responsibilities of CEOs. What makes this article engaging is that A.G. Lafley uses the context of his commendable achievements at the helm of Proctor & Gamble to elaborate on the teachings of management guru Peter Drucker.

“The CEO is the link between the inside and outside. He alone experiences the meaningful outside at an enterprise level and is responsible for understanding it, interpreting it, advocating for it, and presenting it so that the company can respond in a way that enables sustainable sales, profit and total shareholder return (TSR) growth.”

Drawing from Peter Drucker’s teachings, A.G. Lafley identifies the four fundamental tasks of a CEO. Here is a summary:

1. Defining and interpreting the meaningful ‘outside.’ Identifying which external stakeholders matter the most. Recognizing where results are most meaningful. Clarifying and communicating the priority of external stakeholders.
2. Identifying and focusing on the competitive spaces where the organization can win. Inquiring, “What is our business? What should it be? What is not our business? And what should it not be?”
3. Balancing the present and the future. Determining the optimum balance between yield from present activities and investment in a highly uncertain future. This involves, (1) defining realistic growth goals, (2) creating a flexible budgeting process, and (3) allocating human resources in a way that identifies and develops good people for today and tomorrow.
4. Shaping the values and standards of the organization. Winning with those who matter most and against the very best.

Think like a CEO, Focus on Organizational Performance

I believe that everybody is a CEO. Whatever your span of responsibilities — supervisory, managerial or leadership — you are accountable to the external stakeholders. These stakeholders measure you purely by your ability to identify opportunities and get things done through the resources you have. Here are five essential initiatives to help you think and act like a CEO.

1. Understand the context of your organization or project. Change your perception away from the minutiae of your organization and seek to understand what your organization means in the broader context and how it fits into the external world. Draw from this external perspective to establish the right directions and align the work of your entire organization with these organizational goals. Differentiate between short-term and long-term opportunities.
2. Identify the primary external customers — these could be higher-level managers, other groups within your company or a consumer who uses your products. Use this customer standpoint to make every strategic decision and choose the right actions. Connect each initiative to its beneficial results to your customers.
3. Communicate your direction and priorities to your organization. Help your employees determine where to focus their own efforts and how they eventually fit in the broader context of the external world.
4. Focus on execution and achieving results. Introduce a culture of accountability. Ensure that each employee actually does live up to the values and goals of the organization.
5. Coach your employees and develop them. Understand and align their personal values and aspirations to those of the organization, to the extent possible. Per Peter Drucker, “make sure that the performing people are allocated to opportunities rather than only to ‘problems.’ … Make sure that people are placed where their strengths can become effective.” Plan for succession.

Recommended Reading

• Procter and Gamble: One of the world’s best breeding grounds for managers
• How to broaden your thinking and grow on your job
• Jack Welch’s four types of managers
• Jack Welch on acting quickly

***See other articles related to Peter Drucker, Proctor & Gamble, organizational leadership, executives, CEO, leadership skills

Brad Feld on Work-Life Balance

Here is an excellent podcast (summary here) where Venture Capitalist Brad Feld discusses his thoughts on the concept of work-life balance. He also shares the changes he implemented to achieve more balance in his life. Also, see a previous article by Brad on this very topic. Here are key takeaways:

• The sense of busyness is not the same as the sense of achievement.
• Balance is an important issue to consider at all ages, as many make the mistake in believing they will “get the balance on the back half of life” and find it shorter than they hoped (”you don’t know when the lights are going to go out (when you are going to die.)”)
• Work-life balance is an important issue to everyone, yet each person’s approach will be different. There is no one-size fits all approach.

Work-Life Balance is an Individual Choice

Balancing the various demands on our time is by no means easy. It is unrealistic to establish a ratio between ‘work’ and ‘play’ time to pursue the sense of balance.

Balance is an individual choice you have to make based on your personal and professional values and associate relative priorities between these values. Here are five essential guidelines to make such choices.

• Don’t become a slave to your work. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Work is a means of living, it is not life itself.”
• Slow down your life and develop mindfulness. Simplify your life and inculcate discipline. Focus on the simple things. Control your wants and meet your core needs.
• Talk to your family and friends and explore ways to introduce more fun into your daily routine.
• Sleep more. Help around the home. Go on more vacations. Cultivate a hobby or two. Volunteer for a good cause. Do something meaningful with your spare time.
• Learn to control how you react to other people and their demands on your time, money, or both. Consider the cost on your own resources and become skilled at how to refuse unimportant demands.

Realizing the balance in your life is your prerogative.

Recommended Reading

• My three-step process for better time management: time logging, time analysis and time budgeting.
• Fighting Procrastination: ‘Ten-Minute Dash’ technique
• Working exercise into a busy day

***See other articles related to happiness, time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, work-life balance

Blogger Carla Kay White reflects on how she “found time” by transforming her mindset about being overwhelmed.

… it occurred to me that I’m feeling overwhelmed because that’s precisely the message I’m putting out in the world. I repeat it all day long in different forms “I have no time…” or “I wish I could, but I’m busy…” or “gotta rush…”

But what would happen if I simply told myself, “I have all the time in the world”?

I repeated this to myself anytime I felt rushed. Someone stopped me to chat, I had time. Working late, no problem. Caught behind a slow driver, I chilled and enjoyed the view. In the end it actually worked. I created time.

By sending out a new message “I have time” I’m relaxing, finding a new rhythm and living in the moment. I’m focusing on one thing at a time instead of ten different things. As a result, I get more accomplished, do a better job, and truly do have more time.

So if you constantly feel overwhelmed, ask yourself — are you really? Or is it just a conditional thought that you repeated so often to yourself, you believe it and live it? Just maybe you too can magically create time through your thoughts.

How to Create More Time

The feeling of being overwhelmed is primarily a lack of sense of priority over what we need to do. Follow my three-step process for better time management.

• Time Logging: Follow this simple exercise to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.
• Time Analysis: Tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities.
• Time Budgeting: Follow this simple process to list your life’s values and priorities. Then, create a time budget to help you center your actions on the truly important aspects of your life and career.

Recommended Reading

• Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘done’
• Overcoming procrastination: the “10-minute dash” technique to get a task going
• Make your weekends feel longer

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, work-life balance

Among the hundred blog posts I wrote in year 2008, here are the ones that received the most visitors, largely by means of Google Search and referrals.

1. The ‘STAR’ technique to answer behavioral interview questions. The best way to impress an interviewer is to discuss your credentials and accomplishments in terms of personal success stories using the ‘STAR’ technique. By following this simple technique, you can narrate direct, meaningful, personalized experiences that best identify your qualifications.
2. Jack Welch’s four types of managers. Organizations face the challenge of developing and sustaining a culture that is both values-centered and performance-driven. Nothing hurts morale more than when leaders tolerate employees who deliver results, but exhibit behaviors that are incongruent to values of the company.
3. Why the sandwich feedback technique is ineffective. The sandwich feedback method consists of praise followed by corrective feedback followed by more praise. However, the sandwich technique amounts to undercutting praise with criticism. A praise followed by criticism undermines the positive impact of praise and weakens the significance of the corrective feedback.
4. Time management: Log where time actually goes. Before you begin managing your time effectively, you need to develop an idea of how you spend time currently. Track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. The immediate benefit of time logging is that it induces a sense of significance of your time.
5. Keeping good eye contact. Our eyes play a major role in our interpersonal communication. The eyes express our moods and reactions more overtly than does other body language. People who keep good eye contact are usually seen as personable, self-assured and confident.

6. Overcoming procrastination: The ‘10-Minute Dash’ technique to get a task going. One of the easiest techniques to overcoming procrastination is to begin. Quite often, seemingly difficult tasks get easier once we get working on them. In short time, we get into the ‘flow’ and work towards completion.
7. Effective delegation: Delegate outcomes, not just tasks. The key to effective delegation is to approach delegation as an offer to present to a team member, not a demand to be made. Delegating outcomes–not just tasks–helps managers skillfully present assignments to their team members and empowers them to get the job done.
8. Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘done’. We need to accept the prospect of compromises to our goals and aspirations. We need to acknowledge that our expectations are often excessive and uncalled for. When we develop a ‘good enough’ or ‘perfect enough’ mindset, we realize that imperfection is, after all, a negotiable outcome.
9. Never surprise your boss. Success in building a relationship with your boss begins with recognizing that this relationship hinges on open communication, cooperation, and credibility. Bosses dislike surprises–positive or negative. Keep your boss in line and suit her preferred style of communication.
10. Make your weekends feel longer. The key to making your weekend feel longer and having a relaxing time is to reorganize your plans and freeing-up time for your favorite, pleasurable activities during the weekend. By prioritizing, improvising and staying on top of things you can arrive at the end of your weekend contented and full of energy for the fresh week ahead.

Thank you very much for your continued readership and support of my work. I wish you and yours a happy, healthy and prosperous year ahead in 2009.

I am on vacation in Bangalore, India through 12-Jan-2009. During my time in India, I can conduct seminars on personal and organizational effectiveness in your company, college or non-profit organization. See this one-page circular for a list of my seminars and a brief biography of myself.

My seminars come at no charge to you or your organization. I am willing to travel to other cities if my schedule permits. Contact me via the contact form in the sidebar.

• One-page circular on my seminars (PDF File)

Preamble

This article is the second in a series of three articles that describes how to get clarity about your present role in your organization and write an effective job description. Yesterday’s article established that writing a job description for your present position will help you clarify your role and establish a sense of better control and direction over your job. See full article here.

Before you begin writing your job description effectively, you need to thoroughly document your understanding of your role, its scope and context. This is the intention of job analysis.

Step 0: Prepare and Survey

You should have been on your current job for a suitably long-enough period of time, ideally three to four months, to develop a fairly reasonable perspective of your job and its requirements. Collect a job description if one exists for your role, your boss’s and your employees’ job descriptions if they exist, your organization’s objectives and any metrics that you report on a regular basis. Study these documents carefully.

Step 1A: Focus on Contribution to the Whole

Yesterday’s article established that your job exists to fulfill an essential function of your organization. Therefore, at the outset, your job analysis should focus on this specific need of the organization.

Identify the goals and the end-product of your organization. If you work at a larger organization, focus on the product of your business division or department. Ask, “Who is the customer of our organization? What do we produce? What service do we deliver?” Then, examine how your role fits in this larger context. Ask, “What contribution does my role make to this whole? How do I add value? How does my work contribute to the performance and results of my organization?”

Recognizing the broader perspective of your work in the context of your organization helps you understand the objectives of your organization and what is expected of you and why.

Step 1B: Understand the Interrelationships

Reflect on how your role is interrelated to others’ roles in the broader context of your organization. If feasible, make a special effort to ascertain the contributions of your manager, his manager and his peers, your peers and your direct-reports. Ask, “How does your role fit into our organization? What are your goals and objectives? How does my work help you contribute in your role? How do you use my work? What can I do to help you and how? What product or service can I provide you to help you become more effective?”

Step 2: Identify What Your Role Requires of You

Given a thorough understanding of your organization’s objectives, establish what the demands of your role are. Stress on defining your key responsibilities and contributions by asking, “What do I need to do to meaningfully add value and contribute to the results of my organization?”

Step 3: Refine Your Role around Your Strengths

In principle, no job should be structured to suit the incumbent employee — every job should be task-focused and organized by function to ensure continuity and succession. However, to promote ownership and job satisfaction of the incumbent employee, her role should be customized to reflect her strengths and weaknesses to the extent possible, without compromising the core contributions expected of her role. This balance between job satisfaction and productive work is critical.

Once you have established what your role demands of you, understand how your unique strengths and characteristics can help your role be more effective for your organization. Ask, “What unique skills do I bring to this job? How can I channel my strengths to enhance this role?”

Step 4: Include How You Can Grow and Expand Your Role

Every job consists of tasks and activities. Managers and organizations often belatedly discover that, when the component tasks tend to be repetitive, an employee may no longer feel challenged and may therefore lose motivation on the job. Hence, all jobs should provide opportunities for the personal and professional growth of the employee and opportunities for the role to expand in terms of its responsibilities and contributions.

To identify how you can grow and expand on your job, ask, “What factors and trends will influence my organization in the short- and long-terms. How can my organization respond? What will be its next initiatives and goals? How will our roles change? How will these changes influence my role? What initiatives can I take to add more value to my job? What else can I do to contribute more? What skills can I acquire to be more effective?”

Recommended Reading

• Why to write a job description for your present position
• The importance of understanding perspective on your job
• How to examine a process and ask the right questions

***See other articles related to effective executive, contribution, objectives, goals, responsibility, job description, career success, performance assessment, managerial skills

Self-Declarations on Résumés

Consider the following assertions from résumés that I reviewed recently:

• “Ambitious, career oriented, uniquely qualified, results-driven professional with outstanding academic preparation and exceptional industrial experience in applied research and design.”
• “Extremely strong, aggressive, self-sufficient writer with excellent technical skills and ability to learn new technologies quickly.”

The trouble with these statements is that they amount to unoriginal self-declarations. It is as though these candidates put on a crown and proclaimed themselves the kings and queens of the land of have-everything-an-employer-needs-skills. Most candidates do not realize such jargon can, in fact, be a turn-off.

Show than Tell

A résumé is, in essence, a documentation of your achievements and recognitions. Your résumé should not explicitly declare such characteristics as hard-working, entrepreneurial, self-starting, etc. Instead, your résumé should describe your accomplishments in such a way that a reader infers these skills in you.

Admittedly, describing your accomplishments to imply you are a “hard worker,” “self-starter,” or “team player” is difficult.

• To present yourself as “hard-working,” describe your part-time employment, serving as captain of the soccer team, leading a student club. Mention your high GPA and academic projects.
• To present yourself as “results-driven,” show how your projects contributed to your organization’s goals and bottom line: include phrases like, “saved 10% costs,” or “improved capacity by 18%,” etc.

Avoid proclamations, jargon and clichéd superlatives. Write your résumé to include more than a mere assemblage of personal particulars. Help the reader connect to you through your résumé and get a picture of your personality, unique skills and characteristics.

Recommended Reading

• Effective fonts and text sizes for résumés
• The one-page résumé rule
• Judging people: Talent is more than skin-deep

***See other articles related to resume tips, resumes, resume, job search, career, interviewing, curriculum vitae

Preamble

This article is the final article in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you. Here is a synopsis of the preceding three articles.

1. The first article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.
2. The second article outlined a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. See full article here.
3. Yesterday’s article described three steps to tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities. See full article here.

Today’s closing article details a simple process to list your life’s values and priorities and create a time budget to help you center your actions on the truly important aspects of your life and career.

Define Your Values and Priorities

A great deal of anxiety and stress in your life is largely from doing things that are inconsistent with what you believe and what you know you should be doing. Your lack of control over your time stems from doing things that are incoherent with your core values and priorities in life and career.

Matching your actions to the truly important aspects of your life will help you be more focused, more disciplined and more effective. With this objective, spend about 15 minutes to reflect on your life and career, clarify your short- and long-term goals and discover your overriding priorities.

Identify Your Priorities in Life

1. With the help of your spouse or significant other, catalog the core values that you hold dear — the guiding principles of your life. Include personal characteristics, traits and achievements you desire to realize in the short-term and the long-term. Your list many include family, career success, well-being and happiness, prestige, wealth, sense of community or anything else that you feel is important.
2. Rank your values and goals. Sort your list in order of their importance to you. Begin with most important value or goal and end with the least important. Judge between conflicting values to help you commit to ideas and activities that are truly important. Condense your list to 7 to 10 priorities.
3. Rewrite your priorities in terms of actions and achievements that would satisfy each priority or the associated value. Consider the following example.

Example 1: Top Three Priorities of Linda, a Housewife

The previous article on time analysis featured Linda, a housewife who works part-time. Consider this list of her top three priorities in life.

1. Husband and daughter. “Love and care for my husband. Support his career and goals. Nurture our daughter and give her the best upbringing.”
2. Family and friends. “Provide for my aging parents. Support my entrepreneur-brother. Spend more time with dear friends.”
3. Part-time work. “Learn and contribute in my profession as an accountant. Supplement family income.”

Identify Your Priorities at Work

Your desire to be productive at work should begin with understanding your most important tasks in terms of what your role demands of you.

1. Collect your job description, your boss’s and your employees’ job descriptions, your organization’s objectives, any metrics that you report on a regular basis, your recent performance reviews, and your documented career plan. Review these documents.
2. List and rank your priorities. What does your role require of you? What goals have your boss and your organization set for you? What are your key projects and initiatives? How your organizational objectives direct impact your own work? Do not list any more than three major priorities (priorities that require 25% of your time or more) and two minor, comparatively less-significant priorities.

Example 2: Top Priorities of Kumar, a Middle-Level Manager

The previous article on time analysis featured Kumar, a middle-level manager at an aerospace company. Kumar aspires to reorganize his time, adopt productive means to get his work completed by working no more than 45-48 hours per week. Consider the following list of his projects, in order.

1. Project A
2. Project B
3. Coaching and developing team members
4. Initiative M
5. Project C

Realize How Your Current Actions and Priorities are Incoherent

The root of the feeling of being under constant time pressure is the disparity between your actions and priorities. You tend to take advantage of almost every opportunity that comes your way, irrespective of the significance of these opportunities in relation to your core values.

Compare your time log and time analysis report with your list of priorities and decide objectively how much time each of your activities was worth to you in contrast to the time you actually spent on it. You may realize that, perhaps, 80% – 90% of your time is wasted in non-effective activities.

As you review your time analysis report, think about everything that you do that should not be done at all or should not be done by you and recognize all the non-productive, wasteful activities. You will realize that you have been spending time instead of investing time in what really matters.

Resolve to eliminate all activities and commitments that are not aligned to your priorities. For example, Linda — the housewife referred above — spent six hours each week volunteering on the curriculum committee at her daughter’s school “just to be involved.” She realized the lack of value in spending six hours every week on an activity she did not contribute much and decided to withdraw from the committee. Kumar, the middle-level manager, spent way too much time attending meetings. He decided to attend only the most important meetings where his presence was truly required, participated via telephone wherever possible and spared 10 hours on his weekly calendar.

Prepare a Time Budget to Schedule Your Priorities

A time budget helps you decide how your hours should be used given the priorities you have identified for yourself. This is the first step in exercising more control over your time and your life. Preparing a time budget could be as simple as deciding how many hours you would devote to each of your priorities, or could be as complex as setting up your weekly calendar to reflect your priorities.

1. Beginning with your top priority, setup appointments in your calendar and block-off as many hours of the week that are necessary for your priorities. If your most important priority in life is family (it should be,) first allot time for all the activities you desire to do or share your family — set aside time to coach your kids in basketball, set aside time to help your spouse with chores around the home, etc. At work, schedule time to work on your most important projects and initiatives.
2. Locate your most important tasks hours when you tend to be most efficient. For example, if you tend to work best in the mornings, schedule your most important projects for the mornings.
3. Schedule time for your minor projects and lower priorities around your major projects and higher priorities. Decide on the right time to do email, run errands, conduct regular staff meetings, etc.

Your time budget should essentially serve as a guide for how you will spend your time. As with a financial budget, you may not necessarily comply with your time budget. Nevertheless, it is important to prepare a time budget to help you direct how you should spend your time.

Your time budget will help you decide how you can live your priorities. You will realize that by complying with your time budget, your use of your personal time improves dramatically; you are able to focus and reduce anxiety.

Example 1: Time Budget for Linda, the Housewife

Linda prepared the following time budget to help her comply with her stated priorities in life. She eliminated or reduced activities that did not directly contribute to her priorities or were not as productive. For example, she

• ‘found’ six hours by quitting from the curriculum committee at her daughter’s school
• saved four hours by seeking her husband’s help to clean her home and hiring a landscaping service to tend to her yard.
• reduced her time watching TV and on the internet.
• ‘discovered’ more time for her family and friends, exercise and well-being.

Example 2: Time Budget for Kumar, the Middle-Level Manager

Kumar, who previously could not “get it all done” in over 65 hours each week at work, reorganized his calendar around his most important projects and prepared the following budget for 45-48 hours of productive work per week.

Wrap-up: Managing Priorities (and Time) Effectively

This series of articles on the basics of time management described a simple and effective process of logging and analyzing how you use your time, and budgeting your time around your priorities. This process reveals time wastefulness and provides a structure to help you focus on your chosen priorities.

Your personal and professional values and priorities change often based on your progress in life and career. Plan to perform a detailed time analysis regularly — ideally once every six months, — monitor your time, review your priorities and adjust your time budget. Keep your focus on achieving the top priorities.

In sum, time management is, simply, an orderly discipline of controlling how you spend your most valuable resource. The singular purpose of this quest is to regulate the pace of life, reduce unwarranted stress, organize your actions and responsibilities according to the main values and priorities in your life, and realize a meaningful, purpose-driven life.

Recommended Reading

• Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘done’
• Overcoming procrastination: the “10-minute dash” technique to get a task going
• Seven habits to beat Monday morning blues

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, time logging, time survey, work-life balance