Don’t Squander Time

When Ed Shook, territory manager for BioDynamax, a Boulder, Colorado, company that sells nutritional supplements, plans his day, he does much more than arrange meetings and phone calls: He pursues goals in every area of his life. Shook’s tool in this process is the time management system from renowned personal development guru Stephen R. Covey. First Things First, the third habit from Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a 1989 bestseller, is now available as a separate book that is becoming the new bible of time management. It takes time management in a totally new direction, away from simply organizing time toward using it to create a more fulfilling life.

“I love to sell and everything I do concerns my accounts,” Shook says, “but I need to focus on other roles in my life, like the house and the family. The Covey system helps me prioritize the things I need to do for long-term success. It’s been extremely helpful.”

The first thing Shook did in accordance with the Covey system was record a personal mission statement in which he outlined what he hoped to accomplish in every area of his life. The system suggests writing the statement, but Shook tape-recorded his. “I listen to it every morning on the way to work,” he says.

The statement helps people “get clear what’s important and what makes them unique,” says A. Roger Merrill, a co-author of First Things First. “It’s a key to motivation.”

Once you are motivated by the mission statement, the next task is to establish your various roles in life and set a goal for them on a regular basis. “Each week, you say here are my roles in life and determine the important things to do in each one,” Merrill says. “Then you do the most important things first.”

When your roles and goals have been established, the next step is to plan activities to meet the goals, in the context of all the activities you perform. You can do this by placing the activities into four quadrants, according to how important and urgent they are. The system suggests most people spend too much time on Quadrant I activities (urgent and important) and not enough on Quadrant II (important but not urgent). It is often necessary to rush from one urgent matter to the next, but when you do you may ignore the important activities that satisfy long-term goals, like new business opportunities or personal relationships. “Put Quadrant II goals in place first,” Merrill says, so you can “focus on what’s important in life and consider the big picture.”

Concentrating on long-term goals like new opportunities and relationships may be foreign to most time management systems that are concerned with daily activities, but the Covey system is representative of a new philosophy that stresses personal development in the context of professional success. Traditional time management prescriptions of faster, harder and smarter are wrong, Merrill says, “because more important than how fast you’re going is where you’re headed.”

Covey and Merrill aren’t the only personal development specialists who subscribe to this theory. Dr. Stephan Rechtschaffen, founder of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in New York’s Hudson Valley, offers a similar strategy in Time Shifting, a new book from Doubleday. Like Covey and Merrill, Rechtschaffen says, “In the name of efficiency what we’re losing is quality. Full-speed-ahead is not good in dealing with important matters.” Rechtschaffen goes beyond Covey and Merrill in a way, offering an entirely new outlook on time itself. Covey and Merrill think of time in terms of weeks, but Rechtschaffen says we should “recognize that each moment has a rhythm to it and do things that allow us to become more present in a given moment,” a time-shifting tactic he claims will reduce stress and allow us to be more productive. Rechtschaffen says athletes like Michael Jordan are time shifters who maintain a for-the-moment consciousness that “raises them to another level.”

Rechtschaffen admits that his time awareness system is nothing like traditional time management. Instead of telling us how to manage time, he encourages us to develop a new concept of it that can help us live more fully. “When we can exist fully in the present moment, we’ve achieved time awareness, which lifts us away from clock-time, into time freedom.”

Covey, Merrill and Rechtschaffen may be at the forefront of a new kind of time management theory. But there are more than 100 other new books and time management systems on the market, each offering a unique take on this stimulating topic. In Time Tactics of Very Successful People (McGraw-Hill), B. Eugene Griessman, an Atlanta-based speaker and writer, suggests some innovative ways of saving time, including speed reading (“It’s important to know how to read certain kinds of material quickly and efficiently, and some material not at all”), succinct writing (“If you’re writing business letters, you’d better write only one page if you expect it to be read by somebody who’s busy”) and alert listening (“Recognize that listening is an active process, not a passive one”). Listening, of course, is an essential skill for salespeople, who should listen carefully to their clients to get a better sense of their needs.

Like Covey, Merrill and Rechtschaffen, Griessman believes successful time management demands a kind of heightened consciousness. He encourages readers to “tap into the power of the flow state,” which he describes as a “super-rational kind of behavior like Zen that stems from the right side of the brain.” In the flow state, people experience “a loss of awareness of time [and] produce an enormous amount of high-level work,” Griessman says. If you can attain this state, “don’t stop working, because you’re getting so much more out of your brain. It’s like a gambler’s streak. You should go with it and maximize your time.”

Griessman also says mastering your moods will help you save time. “Depression and bad moods are notorious thieves of time,” he notes, but they can be overcome in a number of creative ways. “Get out and get some sunlight, create a humor file filled with cartoons and clever sayings, do something mechanical like filing to get the motor running. Then you can make the transition to the more mentally difficult stuff.”

Perhaps there are so many new time management techniques because managing time is so much more important today. “We’re in the throes of enormous downsizing. People who used to work in a department now work on their own and have to arrange their time better,” says Roy Alexander, president of the Alexander Co., a New York public relations firm, and author of Commonsense Time Management (Amacom). Increased competition and customer demands for higher quality also increase the need for better time management, he says.

And if time management is more important today, it is particularly important for sales professionals for whom time is especially critical. Because of the information revolution, “the response time to client inquiry has been shortened,” Griessman says. “I can call or hop on the Internet and expect quotations very quickly. Anyone who’s slovenly or sloppy, they’re out of business.”

But Covey and Merrill take a different approach, arguing that while urgency is important in sales, it is less important than “planning ahead, building relationships and providing solutions for clients.” Sales professionals like Shook who follow the Covey system and establish their mission in life “are more balanced, motivated and trustworthy,” Merrill says. “They can build better relationships with people and that’s critical to sales.”