Do you have goals? Of course you do, doesn’t everybody? But are they written down, with a written plan of action to accomplish them, and do you look at that plan at least weekly? If you didn’t answer yes to all of those questions, then you need to listen to this powerful, [...]

I once heard Stephen Covey say, “There are only two ways to get work done. Do it yourself or get someone else to do it. Masterful delegation is a major leverager of time.” Now we may not be as good as Huck Finn when he got those others to do his fence painting for him, but there are some specific strategies that you can employ when it comes to delegating appropriately. And by the way, technically Huck did not delegate, which the dictionary defines as “…to assign responsibility or authority.” He actually influenced, persuaded and convinced (one might even say tricked and manipulated) rather than delegated. So let’s see what would be useful and powerful if we were truly to delegate to others.

In my workshops on time management, the first thing I ask my audiences to do is to list the barriers and benefits to delegating. The barriers go something like this:

Deciding where to start: Why do we do what we do when we do it? What criteria do we use for allocating our time? We have many different ways of deciding what we are going to do at any given point during the day. Following are twenty-one of the most common criteria we use to govern our time:

Italian economist Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto observed in 1906 that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. Later, he observed this noteworthy ratio seemed to apply to other parts of life, such as gardening: 80 percent of his peas were produced by 20 percent of the peapods. Over time, this concept has come to be known as the “Pareto Principle,” “The 80/20 Rule,” and even “The Vital Few and Trivial Many Rule.” Interestingly, another of Pareto’s most noteworthy and controversial theories is that human beings are not, for the most part, motivated by logic and reason but rather by sentiment.

How many times have you heard someone say that before? In fact, how many times were you the one saying it, either out loud or to yourself? As someone who teaches time management principles for a living, and who coaches my clients on it as well, getting organized is one of the most frustrating, perplexing, and confusing subjects I can think of. In fact, I would estimate that 80% of my clients spend 80% of their coaching time on this subject alone. So what I will attempt to do in this article is give you some tips, tools, and techniques to help you become a master planner…well, at least a better one, how’s that? And as a result of being better at planning and using a planning system, you can increase your productivity and effectiveness and become more efficient at utilizing your time.

That’s right, you can’t manage time. Despite all the workshops, software programs, PDAs and personal planners available today, you can’t really manage time. I say that what you do manage are people’s promises and commitments (your own as well) made in time. A co-worker promises to have a report to you by three o’clock on Tuesday, you make a commitment to attend your daughter’s soccer game on Saturday, and so on. We make promises and commitments to do something within a certain time frame, and that’s what we manage, not time itself. So if that’s true, how do we manage our promises? How do we organize ourselves to get more done in less time, and with less stress as well? Here are five general principles that I have found extremely useful in my life to help me be really productive and effective:

“After all is said and done, more is usually said than done.”
Old proverb

Why do we procrastinate? Over the years, here are some of the things I’ve heard people say in my workshop on time management: