Improve Time Management – Is it the Best Strategy?

The key to success in Business isn’t to improve time management. In fact, it’s flat out impossible to manage time. Trying to manage it is a recipe for running faster and faster without really getting anywhere.

No matter how you slice it there’s 24 hours in a day, 7 days in every week and 52 weeks in a year. Time isn’t manageable. You can’t save a Monday afternoon and magically add it to Saturday. Time rolls along at a steady pace. It’s the nature of the beast.

More and more is being written about how to improve time management while people feel like they have less and less time. Attempting to manage time is proving to be a mug’s game. Dictionary.com defines a mug’s game as: a foolish, useless, or ill-advised venture.

Entrepreneurs need to look elsewhere for workable solutions. Growing your business and building a company does require a fair amount of work. The strategy you choose has to be effective or you’ll wind up driving yourself a lot harder than you need to.

Most company owners have been told that putting in long hours is what it takes to succeed and while that may be true in the early days it’s best not to buy into this myth for the long term. If you do, the solutions you really want will be hidden behind a giant to do list with your name on it.

One thing we know for sure is if you keep working harder and harder while trying to ‘push rocks uphill’ you won’t be able to see the answers you really want. Take the opportunity to look around for what’s hiding just out of sight, but be careful. The funny thing about the best solution is that at first it doesn’t appear to be a solution at all, especially if you start out looking to improve time management.

A metaphor from nature might be able us to recognize solutions that will work more effectively.

The Venturi Effect or Improve Time Management?

Let’s look at the challenge from a different perspective. In nature there is something called the Venturi Effect. It’s described as the reduction of pressure and the increase of velocity. That’s right: less pressure AND the workload being processed at a faster speed. This is the type of solution that’s needed in business.

An example of where you’ll see the Venturi Effect in nature is a lake being drained by a river. The water in the river is moving at a faster rate than the water in the lake so it has more velocity and it’s also under less pressure because it’s flowing.

To transition the analogy to your company: imagine the ‘lake’ contains all the things your company needs to do in the upcoming year. The objective is to drain the volume of the ‘lake’ – knowing that rain will be filling it back up again with the business for the following year. We know this because the rainmaker functions of sales, customer service and marketing are part of this year’s ‘lake of activities.’ Notice the venturi isn’t about how to improve time management, it’s about processing the workload.

To extend the metaphor: if you were working on an actual lake the first things you’d want to know about are

1. How much water was in the lake
2. When the rainy seasons are
3. What rivers and creeks were available and what condition they’re in

The Lake

The first challenge is to estimate what’s in the lake. This is an inventory of all the functions that your company needs to perform in the upcoming year. Some of them will happen hundreds of times and others could even be thousands of times. Answering the phone is a good example of a high frequency function. Other functions like preparing monthly financial statements happen less often.

How many times functions are expected to happen during the course of the year is known as the frequency. The monthly financial statement preparation will have a frequency of twelve.

Some owners tell me they don’t have time to take inventory of what their company needs to do. That’s like saying they need to go to the bathroom, but they don’t have time to walk down the hall. There aren’t many options left and none of them are pleasant.

Sorry for the vulgarity, but without taking ‘a walk down the hall’ and doing your inventory of functions you are putting yourself at a serious disadvantage. You’ll likely continue on your valiant attempt to empty the lake with fire hoses or worse yet run around with one of them putting out fires all day. It just makes common sense to start by taking an inventory.

 “Common SENSE is instinct. Enough of it is genius.”
George Bernard Shaw

Enough of it means getting the inventory of functions completed and keeping it updated. When you and your team discuss it regularly, with the aim of creating venturis, there will be serious potential for genius solutions. It’s about putting yourself in position to get the results you really want.

Murky Waters in the Lake

There are often areas of their companies that owners don’t know well. There are other areas that they know very well. These are the parts of the lake that are crystal clear and you can easily see right down to the bottom. You know the details. It’s easy to wrap your mind around them.

Accounting, bookkeeping, sales, and marketing are fairly common areas where the waters get murky. They are also key drivers for profitability. This is often surprising to many owners. Have your employees in these areas create the inventory of functions and use it as a guide to build your own understanding. You don’t have to know everything, but you do need to know these key functions well enough to manage them effectively.

They probably aren’t as complex as the areas of your company you already know well. Like anything else you’re learning you’ll have more questions than answers at the start, but soon you’ll be asking better questions and getting better answers. Clarity will emerge as you stick with it.

Creating Venturis

Often the best place to start is with high frequency functions that aren’t being performed very well. Write down the steps that are currently being used to process the work with enough detail so a new person can easily step in and do the work. You can do this yourself or better yet have the current person write it out and see if the steps are detailed enough. Your people can draft the systems, but the shouldn’t become official until you or a key manager signs off on them.

Now that you have the current system documented you’ll be better able to analyze it for potential improvements in flow. A little thought and some common sense go a long way here.

It’s also a good idea to consult with someone from outside the company who has solid business experience. This might be a coach, a consultant, a contact from your industry association or a mentor. Most initial consultations are free.

Ask yourself: if I don’t know how to get this function performing at a high level, who do I know that does? Then go ask them. For best results you want and keep the discussion focused on performance and away from how to improve time management.

Turbulence

Turbulence happens when there is resistance in the venturi. In business this means your systems either breakdown, don’t exist yet or haven’t been well thought out.  Wikipedia says turbulence is characterized by chaotic property changes.

In a river this can be seen as white water rapids. In the business world turbulence is often accompanied by ‘lake flooding’ with other important business functions not getting done meaning the chaos spreads. Time management improvements can’t help you out here. It’s important to make sure your company’s systems work, the people are trained and they have the needed resources. It’s more about flow than how to improve time management.

Turbulence needs to be eliminated because customers should be expected to pay fair prices that cover the cost of doing their business, your cost to run the company, a fair wage for you plus enough for a decent profit, but they can and should resist paying more to cover your chaos and inefficiency. This will come right out of the profits you should be making and perhaps even your wages too.

If turbulence is your company’s natural state and you’re still making good money then you’re sitting on a wonderful business opportunity. You also currently have the resources you need to mine it for all it’s worth.

As size of your staff grows you should be able to decrease the amount of hours you put in if you choose to.  If you’ve added employees and are working harder than ever then something is out of balance somewhere. If your take home pay is less than you would earn working this hard at another company then you’re in danger of having the business consume a big chunk of your life.

If your company is efficient then the solution could be your pricing strategy. It might be a good idea to read this article.

How High Performance is Born

This is a huge subject. K. Anders Erickson is a respected expert on developing high performance. He’s written several world renowned books on the subject. How to improve time management is never mentioned. His central concept is known as deliberate practice, and it’s incredibly powerful.

Basically it’s a series of 90 minute sessions designed to improve performance. Often the activity is not inherently enjoyable. Think about a football player running sprints, lifting weights or studying the playbook. Teams that don’t do it don’t win. It’s interesting to note that it’s not playing the game. Just like building the strength of your company isn’t doing business. Most entrepreneurs turn the dial way too much towards doing business and this gets in the way of building a strong profitable company.

Deliberate practice is different from work, play and simple repetition of a task. It involves preparation, concentration, focused effort, and there is no immediate monetary reward, which is another reason why it’s often avoided by most business-people. Improving performance is the primary motivation and the central goal. Owning a high performing company leads to a lifestyle enjoyed by few.

That’s not to say that deliberate practice can’t be designed to be interesting and involve some fun along the way.

The road to high performance in athletics involves a series of deliberate practice sessions that literally lasts years. Depending on the level of performance desired they could have an annual frequency of up to one thousand and in some instances even more.

The good news is that it doesn’t take anywhere near as many for companies to see significant improvements in their performance.

The deliberate practice approach is approach is still the same. Focused sessions, maximum 90 minutes, designed to improve performance. They could be on any of the functions in your inventory. The depth of discussion involved depends on the circumstances. It also ranges from the first draft of the system to drilling down on a critical step that’s been causing turbulence.

Comments from the Business World

As I was writing this article I thought it would be a good idea to drop by and visit a couple of the companies that I helped implement this process a few years ago. There are many more examples, but they were on my route for the day.

First Company

At my first stop the owner of the company is now only putting in a couple of hours per week. His son runs the company now. Prior to taking over the company with sales in the millions he had limited business experience. The father gave me the following quote.

“My son is doing an excellent job managing the family company.  It makes me a proud Dad to see the next generation take over the family business and continue our traditions.”

The son was working on the financial forecasting for the next fiscal year. Even though the business had grown their labour costs were down because of better flow. We also discussed his business expansion plans which are well underway.

Can you walk out the door tomorrow and have your company become more efficient and continue to grow? It’s possible, but it takes a plan and some work to get there.

Second Company

At the second company their market had been tough for the past few years. The owner just heard from a couple of his competitors who were currently being forced out of business by their banks. His experience is a little different. He was able to buy the land and facilities a couple of years back. It’s not the good old glory days, but he’s managed to keep his business model operating fairly well in a difficult market.

When it came to how to explain the process he said the turning point for his company was when they realized that it all didn’t have to happen at once. They had the inventory of functions and frequencies down and then they moved through the systemization at a pace that worked for them. A series of deliberate practice sessions spaced over two years dramatically improved their performance and put an almost complete stop to things falling through the cracks.

He said that it was really helpful when bringing new staff on and it significantly reduced his training costs. New hires came up to speed faster and performed better.

Closing Thoughts – Improve Time Management, Really?

Here’s another way to think about this. When you want to do a project effectively and efficiently, it’s a big advantage to have the best tools for the job. Sometimes you have to assemble the tools and learn how to use them before you turn your attention towards working on the project.  This means you have to ‘walk down the hall’ and create your inventory of functions complete with frequencies. Then you’ll essentially be putting yourself in position to do the job well and succeed. The road ahead will be paved and straight.

Next you need to engage in deliberate practice sessions. They are the proven core building blocks of high performance. This will put you on the road to the strong profitable company you’ve always wanted.

It helps to have an experienced coach when you tackle this. There’s enough information here in this article for many companies to do it themselves, but a professional coach brings a lot to the process. At Rock Solid Business Coaching we developed this process and we’ve lead literally hundreds of companies through it. We deliver the initial training, provide templates, set deliberate practice schedules that work, chair some sessions, and have examples that clearly outline the level of detail needed. We also bring big value by pointing out worthwhile functions that you aren’t currently doing. Surprise, surprise how to improve time management is not one of them.

We’re not expensive, particularly compared to other options. Our objective is to build critical mass and have companies carry through to completion. We’re not there to bill you as much as we can for as long as we can. Our role is to help build the tools and to train the people in the company to use them.

This process described in this article will allow you to build an efficient company you’re proud of and delegate with confidence to ‘clear some room’ for living the good life. Isn’t that what we all want?

Free Consultation click here

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