Leadership by Choice: Increasing Influence and Effectiveness through Self-Management

Chapter 8

Prioritize for Productivity

You are the CEO of your life, the chief effectiveness officer. How you spend your time, how you delegate, plan, organize, and deal with interruptions is all up to you. You are responsible for being productive. I identify four corners of productivity to help you achieve the best decisions for your business.

Four Corners of Productivity

Time	Plan
Focus	Delegate

1. Know where your time is going.

2. Plan the day before.

3. Focus on high-payoff items.

4. Delegate for results and not the process.

Let's start with the first corner. How do you spend your time, and what do you actually accomplish in a day? More often than not, the day can get away from you and go something like this:

You go to work, read a newspaper, jump on the computer, and read and respond to some e-mails. Then a colleague walks in and says, “Hey, it's time to go to lunch.” You look at your watch and think, “Where has the time gone, and what did I get done?”

A great way to chart your time is to divide your day into two parts: (1) the time you walk in until lunchtime and (2) lunchtime until you leave.

Let's say your typical workday is 9 to 5. You begin at 9 am and stop for lunch at noon. Just before breaking for lunch, write down what you actually accomplished from 9 am till noon. That is the first part of your day. Then after you return and work from 1 pm to 5 pm, just before leaving for home, write down what you accomplished during the afternoon.

Charting your time allows you to ...