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Sticky Learning Lunches #42: Think You Don’t Need to Attend This Webinar?
This 7-part model will help you to find out what is wrong with your time management.
You will learn:
– Each of the 7 parts of the time management system.
– How each part is essential to creating an effective time management system.
– The holes that are exposed in your time management system by not having any one of the 7 pieces.
– Practical tips to incorporate any one of the 7 parts of the time management system.
– The strengths and weaknesses of your time management system.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Oh God, there we are. Congratulations we made it. Welcome to Monday. Excited to be here. Excited to be sharing. Excited to see so many wonderful, beautiful people already. We’re just as always gonna wait for the last few people just to arrive in the room, get themselves ready. Abby, thank you for being here. Colin, as always appreciated. Fabian, wonderful to see you again. Tim, Victoria, thank you so very much. I’m just looking down at the list of people coming into the room.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s Monday, it’s beautiful weather outside. I hope you have sunshine where you are, so you give it 30 seconds. Good afternoon, Darren. On a scale of one to 10, for all your wonderful people that are here, how are we feeling about this week? One terrible, 10, fully, you know, primed. Ready to go? How are we feeling about this week? Got some tens. Got some eight. Strong nine. Nice, strong nine. What, what’s stopping it from being a 10? Victoria? If it’s a strong nine, what would make it a 10?
Darren Smith:
Good.
Nathan Simmonds:
To see you, Rihanna. Thank you for joining. I hope I pronounced that right, not having so many back to backs. Agreed. We’ve talked a little bit about that inside the time management side of things. Let’s just make, you know, one thing we can be making sure is know, giving ourselves a little bit of breather to decompress from one meeting and declutter. And then get those things off, you know, captured on the right lists, uh, and and stored in the right way. And then give us those a few minutes to get to the next session. So actually we’ve got a clear mind.
Nathan Simmonds:
Next week is better. Nice. Good. Let’s dive in. Gotta make sure I’ve got all the right pens in the right places. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM Making Business Matter, the home of sticky learning and the provider of leadership development and soft skills to the grocery and manufacturing industry. Idea of these lunches is to give you 20 to 30 minutes of micro learning is gonna help you be the best version of you in the work that you do from wherever you are right now, whether that’s at home or whether that is that you’ve returned to the office or that you are, you know, in the middle of those two spaces.
Nathan Simmonds:
Just some core content that’s is gonna help you raise your awareness, raise your thinking, and raise your impact. So first things first, let’s get you set up for success. As always, mobile phones, let’s make sure they are on flight mode. Little airplane is lit. Zero out the distraction, a hundred percent attention. Also, as always, fresh page, fresh thinking. Let’s make sure you’ve got a nice clean sheet there so that you can document your thinking. Top of that page, you’re gonna write keepers and these are the things that you wanna remember, that you want to be reminded of so you can reignite that new thinking when you go back and reread it.
Nathan Simmonds:
Drinks, I’ve got my herbal tea here. Make sure you’re hydrated and you’re keeping the brain lubricated. Before we even dive into this, I’m gonna make sure that I do this now with you right now. If you have not signed up for tomorrow’s session, the link for tomorrow’s sticky learning lunch is gonna be in the chat box. Now, if you haven’t registered, now is the time to go and make sure you are registered for tomorrow to make sure you are in the room live for hurdle number seven, as we bring time management to a close tomorrow.
Nathan Simmonds:
So that link’s gonna be available in the box for you. I just wanna make sure you’ve got that link. You’re primed ready for tomorrow, so you’re gonna be receiving that information. Where are we going? I think that’s everything. I think that’s everything. I think we’re prepped for today’s session.
Nathan Simmonds:
What are we covering today? This is hurdle number six of the time management training session, which is all about scheduling and it’s all about making sure that you are getting the right things in the right places so that you can take the action at the right time. Or we’d be reminded to take the action at the right time. Quick flow through what we’ve already covered. I’m gonna do this quite small because I’ve got quite a bit to cover up here. We’ve got capturing, these are the points where the information comes in, whether that’s our email or text message, whatever that’s coming in.
Nathan Simmonds:
The next thing here he says is emptying. Making sure we’re clearing our capture points. We have deleting is making sure that we’re stopping things from coming into that flow if we don’t need it, ’cause it’s wasting our time or making sure we’re removing things that don’t need to be there. Emptying then comes down to listing, making sure that we’re taking things off of here and putting them into the relevant lists so we know where they are to take the action in here. We then have storing and then we also have over here. What we’re gonna be covering today is our scheduling,
Nathan Simmonds:
And then we also have our action. So as the saying goes, all, all roads lead to Rome, but when it comes to time management, all roads lead to action. Okay, so these are the flow of the, of the seven hurdles we often experience and where they come in. And we’ve already covered a lot of of these and we’re now getting into the scheduling side of things. The key part, and this is a lesson, a vital lesson that I’ve learned, uh, repeatedly in previous jobs and previous experience, is the first thing that we need to be looking at is making sure that we’ve got a centralized point.
Nathan Simmonds:
How many people here are managing more than one diary? Yes or no? If you’re managing more than one diary, yes. Home and work good. Yes, yes. Good. Lots of yeses. Who here is manage them? Managing them on separate systems? So both of those diaries, those calendars are completely separate of each other, yes or no? Yes. Yes. Who here then has experienced a challenge in those where you’ve forgotten to put one thing on the other and you’ve caused yourself a double booking? Yes or no? Yes. Yes. .
Nathan Simmonds:
And it is frustrating. Um, a because you know, it’s your own actions that of caused this to happen. It was an oversight, um, caused by yourself in this. There is no one else to blame there, you know, it is because you then feel you maybe let the other person down because of that, that, that lack of foresight or you know, the ability to, to sync those two elements, who hears experience, these emotions come that are coming up when they’ve been in this experience. Yes or no, it’s painful and it’s a painful lesson to keep learning.
Nathan Simmonds:
So what we talk about is, or the ideal is that we have our capture points, we empty them, and when we want to get ’em into a schedule that we have a centralized point where we can see everything that’s going on. We want to give ourselves as much support as possible in making sure that we can take the, all the actions we need to get done. The moment that we start to separate things and we start to pull them apart, it becomes just that little bit more difficult because we’re having to constantly look at two things and try and calibrate what’s going on to make sure we take the right action.
Nathan Simmonds:
This make sense so far? And I’m just gonna just check on my slides in a minute because I’m gonna share my screen in a second. I’ll give you a prime example. Previous job that I was working in, um, and I’ve been working in, in multiple, um, there’s multiple elements of the work that I do. I was working full-time, pretty much over here. Um, I’m also working as a trainer. This was some time ago. Um, with MBM, I’m also running my own business over here, but I’m trying to manage two different diaries because I’ve got the work diary over here for the day job.
Nathan Simmonds:
And then I’ve also got my extra, um, responsibilities over here as I’ve started to transition. And I’m trying to keep certain things separate because this is my diary, this is my work, this is what, you know, and this is the, this is the day job. And then what would happen is I would have something coming over here, but because it wasn’t in front of me on my, um, where I was on my nine to five, reminded me at lunchtime that I would be doing this.
Nathan Simmonds:
I would then fall down over here and a prospective client. I be then late for that conversation or the conversation wouldn’t happen. And then I’d be frustrated at myself because I actually haven’t, you know, delivered on the promise that I said to them, you know, I haven’t set an expectation clearly with them or I’ve got something over here, you know, in my personal diary that’s outside of, you know, the nine to five. It might be a webinar or some training that I’m doing within that clashes with something that’s going on over here on the home diary.
Nathan Simmonds:
We know with what’s going on with my daughter. So maybe I was meant to be taking my daughter to dance class, but actually there’s a live training that I need to be in. Okay, there’s a problem here. So we start to see by having these three structures in place, or these three points that I had, where we start to get conflict in those elements and then we start having to juggle and then start to cancel out.
Nathan Simmonds:
And then what happens is doing this at the moment. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Study personal. Absolutely. So need to get this sorted. It. The, the one thing that has made it work for me is getting it into one place. And categorically, if you are on your day job, I mean, people don’t need to know what your bookings are. Now if you are using a color coding system and say, you know, you wanna take your, you’re taking your daughter or your children to a dance class or, or sports or whatever it is, you know, have a color for that.
Nathan Simmonds:
Get it into your central, your one calendar so you can see it. So you know what that color is. People don’t need to know what it is. If you are moving from a nine to five and you’re going into consultancy or, or, or contract work or whatever it is, and you’ve got some additional work and actually there’s that transition, they don’t need to know what that is.
Nathan Simmonds:
That as long as you’ve got that color in your diary that at lunchtime you’re gonna be doing this and on no Thursday evening at seven o’clock you’re gonna be doing this. As long as that’s color coded to what you’ve got in your main diary, there might be a reference check, personal diary. So you’re starting to centralize all that information rather than keeping them completely separate.
Nathan Simmonds:
So it’s got to, you know, even if it’s study, work, whatever, you’ve gotta bring ’em together so you can see it all in one place. ’cause your brain is like multitasking. You can’t scientifically proven that multitasking doesn’t work. What you are doing is you’re flicking between different elements. So the first action to do here .
Nathan Simmonds:
To make this happen to centralize your diary. So you’ve got one point of reference. This is gonna take out so much pain from your diary and from your, your scheduling problems. Number two is blocking out time. What is your diary mostly full of open question for all of you right now, what is your diary mostly full of right now? Meetings, meetings, meetings. That’s just from one person. Meetings, meetings, empty and nice. Got tasks, meetings and webinars. Good.
Nathan Simmonds:
So I’ve written a list of things we’re gonna work on here. The key part, it should not be empty, okay? As is, I’m hoping that’s an it glitch. ’cause you just said your diary’s empty and you’re saying it should not be empty. You may wanna phone it when you finish this meeting, what I’m referring to here is putting everything into your diary, okay? Get really clear on this. If you need to be studying, if you need to have a meeting with someone, if you need to, uh, make a phone call. Now, if you need to put a reference point here to enter your capturing points, you need to put these things in your diary because if they’re not in there and you have space in your diary, what happens to your diary?
Nathan Simmonds:
If you’ve got a gap in your diary, what happens to that gap? Someone feels it filled by others, it is wasted as a good shout. The task expands to fill the space. Absolutely. Someone fills it more often than not. 99% of the time it’ll be someone else putting that on there. As the saying goes, if you don’t start, you know, if you don’t have an agenda at the start of your day, the first person you meet will give you one.
Nathan Simmonds:
So it’s categoric that when you are blocking out time, you factor in time for all the things that you need to be doing as well. So it, like I say, it might be study, it might be preparing for that meeting, it might be preparing for that project. It might be making sure you’ve got enough time to get to the next meeting,
Nathan Simmonds:
But when you start to block out the time, you can then start to reprioritize what’s going on. Or you’ll make some decisions based on how you are controlling your schedule, not how you are leaving it open so someone else can control it for you. Hope this is making sense and we, we’ve got some, we’re starting to see how we can shift things a little bit just to get a bit more control on what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis. So the questions I’ve got written down here gonna share my screen with you. So let me know if you can see it.
Nathan Simmonds:
So what we’ve got here is these are the, the checkpoints for your storage from the last conversation. So you can go through, make sure you know this is, I’m, I’m putting this up to remind you, listening back to last, the last session that we did Thursday last week. Check to make sure that you’re checking your, uh, or double checking your storage points, what’s right, what’s working frequency of checking them. If not remove them, amalgamate them. Then we’re gonna move on. So which diaries have you removed?
Nathan Simmonds:
So this, the idea is if you’ve got more than one diary, and I’ll give you a way this does work in a second, is remove those multiple diaries or make sure that they’re synced and they are centralized. So if there’s stuff on your Google making sure that it is, you know, they, they they do, um, transfer across. The next question I’m gonna ask you comes out of the the white paper.
Nathan Simmonds:
So we’re gonna drop a link in there for the time management, the seven hurdles of time management, white paper, you’ve got it. We’re gonna give you the link for that you can download. It’s got all these tables in these charts in here. So you can go through all of these questions and really build your time management skills is why are you on the payroll?
Nathan Simmonds:
You know, what is it you actually get paid for doing? What are the KPIs now? What is it your, what are your key performance indicators that you are actually getting paid to deliver on? What are they more often than not, when we’re looking at KPIs, there’ll be, there’ll be three fairly high level ones, which will be your prime responsibility and everything else will kind of cascade from that and then feed into it. So have a think about this. You need to get clear on this.
Nathan Simmonds:
And if you’re not certain, then you need to go back and look at your, your job description or and your responsibilities and if there’s still vagueness in there and start to have a look at the projects you are managing, you are leading. Have a conversation potentially with your manager or leader to really get into the nuts and bolts of that to get, you know, that depth of understanding, you know, what are those key things that I need to be delivering on and make sure it ticks the smart box as is it’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, or results focused and time-bound.
Nathan Simmonds:
How, how are you supposed to measure this? The, the reason I ask this is ’cause when you know the questions to this, you can start to then block out the time to work on the right stuff and then you can start to factor in, well actually is this stuff relevant? Is this stuff making the boat boat go faster? Is this the stuff, you know, if I get to the end of the year, if I’ve done this, all of this thing here, actually when I get to the end of the year, is someone gonna say, good job? Or why were you doing that? So go back and start to split those things down. And then from here you can start to understand what are your, what are your top three projects?
Nathan Simmonds:
And I’m gonna give you a, a model in a minute, which some of you may know about looking at what’s urgent and what’s important. ’cause when you know why you’re on the payroll and what those KPIs are relevant to and what your top three projects are that are feeding those responsibilities and those, um, obligations, uh, contractual agreements, you can then start to prioritize what it is you are working on and what’s gonna take up that time and what it is. You’re gonna be blocking out your diary.
Nathan Simmonds:
So you’ve got those, you know, some of those key questions. Why are you on the payroll top three projects? What are they? And start blocking out that time, okay? Start getting really clear on where you are gonna focus your energy so that you can get the best results for the job. And then you can start to work around all the other elements. Actually, how am I, what am I, what am I gonna be doing here?
Nathan Simmonds:
Where do I need to be there in, you’re still on the bottom of that side, you know, stealth mode. I think in military terms, you know that you’ve got, you’ve got stealth mode and you’ve got going dark. You know when special operations are going in and they’re gonna infiltrate the, the enemy base and they’re gonna take out, uh, a target. They often talk about going dark. So they, they kill radio silence, they, they kill visual, they everything. And now everything gets blacked out.
Nathan Simmonds:
When we start to understand what it is we are doing, you know what the projects that we’re working on, the things that are most important, we can then start to create pockets of time where we’re gonna go and do that. And as I said, know what gets scheduled gets done and the moment that you start your day with that agenda, you’ve got control over what’s going on because you can start to prioritize your actions and also prioritize the demands of other people.
Nathan Simmonds:
Because if that project you are working on has a deadline or it’s hyper important no, or is critical to another, to the, the, the business mission and someone else comes in and says, can you make me a cup of tea? You can start to weigh out far more easily because you’ve got it in your calendar, what you are working on to the demands of the other individual. And then you can marry those two up and start to ask some more questions.
Nathan Simmonds:
When we talk about going dark or going into stealth mode, it’s about putting the time in your calendar so that you can go and get stuff done on your own terms. So right now, open question, conscious of time, but we’re gonna go anyway. Question for you now is what’s one thing that you are working on that you need to allocate some time to, to get done this week in the question box? One thing that you need to allocate consciously and block out some time for to make sure you get done this week.
Nathan Simmonds:
What is it you are working on that needs your attention to it? Interview prep, revising trading program during covid. Absolutely future growth and survival tender cost in a market report. Nice. These things that are coming in, how much time have you already factored into your diary to actually take action on CV review? Gotta ask, you know, CV review, is it your own CV or is it other people’s cv because they’re applying for jobs.
Nathan Simmonds:
So it’s about making sure that you’ve got time in your calendar to actually put this in. You know, if you need half an hour to look at 10 cvs with the highlighter pen, now is the time to book that half an hour in. ’cause the closer you get to that, now that moment and actually something else comes in or someone else’s priority overrides what you’re doing, da dah dah dah, dah, dah. Now you lose track on it. As your email goes pinging a new action comes in and you forget what you were doing over here ’cause you’re now working on this because you haven’t prioritized it and blocked that time out in your calendar.
Nathan Simmonds:
So these projects that you are now working on, how much time do you need to allocate to them to get them done? And when do you need to allocate that time? So these are two questions for you to answer right now. How much time do you need and when do you need to make it happen? So number three, while you’re answering those questions, no, that’s your dart mode, that’s your stealth mode. When is no, what is your stealth mode?
Nathan Simmonds:
So I’ve been told called, you know, the the urgent important matrix, the Eisenhower matrix. So we’re gonna go with Eisenhower, make sure I spell it right ’cause that would be the travesty. Couple of hours this week sometime. Absolutely. So sometime somebody is no time, nobody, okay? The moment that we say some to something, it becomes nothing. So what we need to be doing is when we’re looking at smart goals, when we’re taking action, be super specific about it and we say, you know, I need one hour, 47 minutes. ’cause in your thought about how long this is gonna take, you know.
Nathan Simmonds:
One CV as an example, when I’m doing recruitment, one CV might take me seven and a half minutes to review. Okay, great, I’ve got 10 of those. Okay, X, Y, and Z. When am I gonna do it? Wednesday afternoon, two o’clock, bam. Move. Because the in the moment you say, oh I need, I need somebody to do this. Walking into a team meeting and you, you wouldn’t delegate a task and you say, right, I need somebody to do this. And everyone looks down basic be typing ’cause they don’t want any extra work.
Nathan Simmonds:
But at the moment you’re saying, Nathan, I need some help. Absolutely I’d love to help. What can I, what can I do for you? I’ve got this situation and I can make a decision whether I I’m the best person or maybe we can help delegate it to somebody else. Let’s get clear on that. Who here know understands the hope that’s helpful. Who here knows the Eisenhower matrix or the urgent important matrix? Yes or no?
Nathan Simmonds:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Good. Lots of yeses. Yes. How many people are actually using it in their decision making when someone comes and gives ’em something else to do? Oh, we’ve got some more people saying yes or tell. I’ve got one person saying yes, mostly yes, no, sometimes good, but those that maybe don’t know it, let’s just give that super fast. Urgent, not urgent. Handwriting’s getting worse. Important. We’ll abbreviate that, not imp. So whenever we get the task coming in or whether something’s happening when we’ve got our time blocked out based on what it is we need to do.
Nathan Simmonds:
Understanding the priority we’ve got and the urgency of that thing against something that’s mission critical, business critical person, critical, whatever it is. When the other thing comes in, we’ve already reconciled our single diary and we can start to balance out because we can see it in the central place. I haven’t got to think about multiple locations that made it easier for me to understand this because I understand how much time I need to get a certain job done.
Nathan Simmonds:
When the other thing comes in I can more, you know, I can more quickly balance it and reconcile what it is that needs to happen here. This is the useful tool, but without this clarity up here, this starts to become redundant because we haven’t got a clear train of thought on the first stuff that we’re offsetting and remember, you know, what is it you are saying no when you say yes to something, what is it you are saying no to? And vice versa. Then the, the, the opposite is true of this, but when someone else gives you something to work, you’ll do your boss, your manager, and they say, you say yes, what are you actually saying no to?
Nathan Simmonds:
So we need to go in and balance. So headline, he says, if it’s urgent and important, you do it. If it’s important and it’s not urgent, you plan it. If it’s urgent, not important, delegate. And if it’s neither eliminate. So you can balance up the, the, the, the weight of something as it comes in and put it into either each of these boxes. Let’s change this language a little bit so it matches up with what’s going on with our time management flow. If it’s urgent and important, it goes straight into the action pot, which we’re covering tomorrow.
Nathan Simmonds:
If it’s not urgent and it’s important, we can schedule it. If it’s not important, uh, and it is urgent, we can delegate it. So we can either get it onto someone else’s list or get it into storage so we know that someone else is looking after it, we can have a look at it and if it’s neither we can delete it and get it off our workload. Stop it from coming to us because it wasn’t important.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s not urgent, let’s deal with this in a certain way. It might be we do some leadership development, we might do some coaching to stop that request coming into us again from that individual. So we eliminate it, we delete it. So clear actions quite, that’s quite a lot. What has been useful? Well I’m conscious of time. What’s been useful from today’s session? What have you taken away from today that is gonna help you improve your time management?
Nathan Simmonds:
What am I actually on the payroll for? Yes, line the seven time management rules to the Eisenhower model. Nice ab a big prod to think about the future and to task it. Absolutely. I was listening to something this morning, Frank Kern, huge internet marketing guy. Um, you know, he did a test on himself. Now a variation between hustle and methodical planning and he worked really, really hard. Hustle, hustle, hustle and the machine gun approach in comparison to strategic planning and taking um, you know, sniper and uh, an analogy type shots. And actually the sniper thought about plan shots seemed to pay off for him.
Nathan Simmonds:
Uh, much better in a business sense blocking time. Good. Look at my top three priorities and block out time for those first. Absolutely get ’em in the calendar prep before using the matrix. Clarify, mission critical, great coaching or feedback to stop unimportant requests coming in. Coaching and feedback is the most powerful weapon of any leader to make sure that their teams are going above and beyond them. That their teams will supersede them. That the people in their gift will go on to do greater things than we ever did.
Nathan Simmonds:
That’s the sole responsibility of a leader is to create more leaders. We want self-sufficient individuals doing great work in their own spaces. That’s why we’re here. Victoria, thank you for being here. Appreciate it. So useful. I’m conscious of time now. I’ve thrown a lot of content at you. Hope this is useful. What questions have you got for me right now? If you haven’t got any, please say no, that’s absolutely fine. You can say no, no questions. Let’s me know. While those responses are coming in, we’re gonna share the link for the time management coaching cards as well.
Nathan Simmonds:
Now we’ve got some phenomenal coaching cards there around the grow coaching model. We’re gonna be looking at leadership in a couple of weeks time. We have the time management coaching cards in the chat box coming up in just a second. You can get your copy of them there and you can get all the coaching cards that we do there as well. Whether it’s mental health conversations, leadership development, category management, which we’re gonna be covering and start covering this week as well.
Nathan Simmonds:
They are all there. Huge value in those packs. They’re five pound phenomenal questions in there, which gonna get help you to get phenomenal results. Hope this has been useful for you. I hope this has been useful tomorrow. It’s all about taking action and I’m looking forward to seeing you there tomorrow. Now, I know some of you have been incredibly engaged and you’re picking up some, you know, some core content from these sessions.
Nathan Simmonds:
We would love to work with you if you know, you know, if, if your business would benefit from a conversation around grow coaching, if your business would be benefit from, you know, mental health conversations. If your leadership team would benefit from leadership development, um, one to you know, one to many or one-to-one, now is the time to have some conversations with us. ’cause we are here to support you. Make that shift.
Nathan Simmonds:
We’re here to help you grow your business and we’re here to help you develop your teams with specialist expert skills that get results. So if you’ve enjoyed this lunchtime learning, this sticky learning with me and, and the rest of the team, reach out. Now is the time. Send us a message so we can support you and help you get that best result while we transition back to the office, uh, and go back into the brave new world that we were experiencing looking forward. So if that’s good for you, please connect. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Nathan Simmonds:
Really appreciate, thank you very much for the feedback. Thank you Colin, everybody. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Have a lovely rest of your day. I’m gonna pick up number seven of the hurdles and I’ll see you then. Thanks a lot.
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