by Kevin Kruse
Demonstrating that coaches’ obsession with time isn’t limited to the sport of basketball, former NFL coach of the New York Giants Tom Coughlin also dedicates a chapter to scheduling in his book Earn the Right to Win. Like other great leaders I’ve studied, Coughlin is obsessed literally with minutes. Of his typical schedule:
For me the day usually begins at 5:20 A.M. with a workout, I’ll be at my desk at 6:15 and will go until after 10:00 P.M. meetings. Every minute during the week is scheduled (Coughlin 2014).
Did I say he was obsessed with minutes? Actually, its seconds:
Since it’s impossible to create any more hours, I’ll try to get more done in the time available by squeezing waste out of my schedule. I don’t like to waste a second. Literally, a second.
In the more mundane competitive area of business, apparently a focus on minutes has been lost. A research project conducted by McKinsey revealed that about half of executives are not spending their time in a way that aligns with strategic priorities and one-third was “actively dissatisfied” with how they spend their time (Bevins and De Smet 2013).
What can they do about it?
THROW OUT YOUR TO-DO LIST
Could everything you know about time management be wrong? As research for my book 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, I interviewed 7 billionaires, 13 Olympic athletes, 29 straight-A students, and 239 entrepreneurs. One of the findings shocked me: almost none of them used a to-do list.
How could this be? We’ve all been taught from the “Getting Things Done (GTD)” system and others that we put all our tasks onto a big list and then we prioritize that list. A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, C1…Start working on A1, and when we’re done, move on to A2.
It turns out to-do lists have many flaws. Research indicates that 41 percent of what we put on to-do lists are never done at all! And of the items that are done, many are jotted down and then crossed off the very same day (Adams 2014). Ahh, that felt good. How long have you had that unpleasant doctor visit on your list? Or maybe it’s Christmas shopping, or cleaning out the garage. How many items have been sitting on your list for a month or longer?
To-do lists can also contribute to stress triggered by the Zeigarnik effect. This is the psychological term describing how, consciously or unconsciously, undone items flood our minds with uncontrolled thoughts. We just worked a ten-hour day but when we go home, rather than feeling productive and satisfied, our brain ruminates on all the things that are still on our list. Physically exhausted, we may toss and turn from insomnia, our brains still racing with the tasks we must tackle in the days ahead.
If you’re not supposed to use a to-do list, what are you supposed to use?
Your calendar.
See, we’ve been lied to. GTD and most other time-management systems teach that while a to-do list is the place to manage your tasks, the calendar is used only for phone calls, meetings, and events (i.e., things that have specific start times).
Great leaders actually schedule everything. Instead of placing tasks on a to-do list, they pick a date, time, and duration and schedule it on their calendar. This is the only guaranteed way to know that you are investing your minutes in alignment with your values and goals. Known as time-blocking, when applied to everything, it can dramatically improve your—and your team’s—results.
By way of example, my own calendar reflects many of my values:
I value coaching my team members, so I time-block one-on-one meetings with each direct report on Mondays as a way to kick off the week.
I value team alignment and breaking down silos, so I time-block a Weekly Action Review (WAR) meeting each week.
I value writing so I have two to three blocks of time scheduled each week to write uninterrupted.
I value health, so I time-block sixty minutes each day for exercise.
I value my children’s education, so I time-block evenings after dinner to help them with their homework.
I value recharging and new experiences, so I block off long weekends or entire weeks—sometimes a year in advance—for vacations, even if I don’t know yet where I’m going.
But what about free time? What about time to manage by walking around, or to just read, or to think strategically? Yes, you should schedule that, too. The CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, in an article titled “The Importance of Scheduling Nothing,” wrote:
If you were to see my calendar, you’d probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect “buffers,” or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings.
In aggregate, I schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day (broken down into 30- to 90-minute blocks). It’s a system I developed over the last several years in response to a schedule that was becoming so jammed with back-to-back meetings that I had little time left to process what was going on around me or just think (Weiner 2013).
If this is sounding crazy, remember that Hall of Fame sports coaches schedule their days by the minute, often planning an entire year in advance!
MATCH YOUR SCHEDULE TO YOUR ENERGY STATES
Military professionals use the term “force multiplier” to refer to the variables in battle that increase the effectiveness of a given number of troops. One hundred soldiers dug into defensive positions may be three times more effective than one hundred soldiers who are charging them offensively through an open field. Night-vision goggles are a force multiplier for those who have them. Reflecting on attitude and morale, General Colin Powell once said that perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
Once you stop using a to-do list and begin to live each day from your calendar, not only will you begin to get more of the right things done and experience less stress, but you can leverage productivity multipliers by how you schedule your day. The real secret to time management is that it has nothing to do with time. What it’s really about is energy and focused attention. We all have the same 1,440 minutes in a day.
Think about it. Let’s say you have one hour to write a report. If you are totally alert, focused, and in the zone, how many words would you write in that hour? A thousand? Two thousand? But now imagine the same amount of time, sixty minutes, but this time you have flulike symptoms, or maybe you’re hungover. Now how many words do you think you’ll crank out? A few hundred? It’s the same block of time, but your output, your productivity, will be vastly different.
For most people, we are cognitively at our best in the morning, generally about an hour or two after we first wake up. But the window stays open only for a brief time; we have about two hours until our creativity, focus, and decision making begin to decline. As behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely once answered in an online Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything):
One of the saddest mistakes in time management is the propensity of people to spend the two most productive hours of their day on things that don’t require high cognitive capacity (like social media). If we could salvage those precious hours, most of us would be much more successful in accomplishing what we truly want (Ariely 2014).
If you reflect on your personal peak state times, you can factor this in as you schedule your week. Most of the high achievers I’ve interviewed over the years are fanatical about having a daily most important task, or MIT. The key is that they schedule time to work on it every single day, and it’s usually in the morning (uninterrupted) before the rest of the day’s events push it off.
My personal system for force multiplying my day is called the 3Cs: Create, Collaborate, Connect. On most days I:
Create in the morning—do my writing, brainstorming, analysis, from about 7:00 a.m. to noon when I’m cognitively at my best
Collaborate in the afternoon—hold all work-related meeti
ngs and phone calls from about 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.; interacting with others is less brain taxing and a bit energizing
Connect in the evening—socially bond with family and friends from 7:00 p.m. to later in the evening, strengthening relationships while relaxing and recharging
Others talk about having just two categories: maker time and management time. But even this simple distinction helps you to pause and think through what a task is related to, and whether you should try to slot it into your peak energy time.
Last, when you move everything onto your calendar and are forced to assign a time duration, you will be less likely to default everything into half-hour or hour time slots. How often do you automatically just block off an entire hour when someone asks to “grab a coffee and catchup” or “pick your brain”? Remember the coaches’ obsession: it’s with minutes. What I heard repeatedly in my interviews was the more successful someone is, the smaller the amount of time their default is.
Jordan Harbinger, the host of The Jordan Harbinger Show, told me once, “Use a calendar and schedule your entire day into 15-minute blocks. It sounds like a pain, but this will set you up in the 95th percentile as far as organization goes. Use this not just for appointments, but workouts, calls, email blocks, etc.” (Kruse 2015).
And bestselling author and cofounder of Likeable Media, Dave Kerpen, said, “If it’s not in my calendar, it won’t get done. But if it is in my calendar, it will get done. I schedule out every 15 minutes of every day to conduct meetings, review materials, write, and do any activities I need to get done” (Kruse 2015).
THE #1 THREAT TO YOUR TIME (OR MARK CUBAN’S ADVICE)
I asked Mark Cuban a simple open-ended question: What is your number one piece of advice for productivity and time management?
What would the self-made billionaire who owns an NBA basketball team, stars on the hit TV show Shark Tank, owns dozens of other businesses, comments regularly on politics, and appears to be happily married with three kids tell me? Would he describe a unique way to prioritize a to-do list? Would he urge delegation? Perhaps he’d tell me to plan my day the night before? He answered with typical brevity and wit:
Never take a meeting unless someone is writing you a check (Kruse 2015).
OF COURSE not all of us are in the position to refuse all meetings. But don’t let Cuban’s billionaire position blind you to the larger point. Of all the things he could have said, he focused on the dangers of meetings. In fact, I asked seven self-made billionaires the same question and most of them had some kind of advice about the dangers of meetings.
I’m sure this doesn’t surprise you. In my survey research of over four thousand working professionals, meetings and emails tied as the number one productivity killer at work. Atlassian, a productivity software company, recently published data drawn from a series of studies conducted at Microsoft, the University of California, and other research centers (Atlassian n.d.). Here are a few of the biggest eye-openers:
Most employees conduct at least sixty-two meetings a month.
Half those meetings were considered a waste of time.
An average of thirty-one hours per month were spent in unproductive meetings.
Great leaders know to minimize meetings at all costs not just for their own productivity, but for the productivity of their team, and to save the very real compensation costs to the organization. If you do an internet search for “meeting cost calculators,” you’ll find many online tools that will estimate the true cost of meetings by factoring in number of people, meeting duration, and salaries, and some will even mark up the salaries to cover benefits. Playing around with these calculators is interesting and horrifying at the same time.
For example, I use to run a weekly staff meeting of all my project managers to review project status and financial metrics. I had ten people in the meeting, it lasted for an hour, and the average salary of my project managers was about $80,000 plus 40 percent for benefits. This means that one meeting cost me $538.46. Was it worth it? Maybe, as it was a pretty important meeting that kept us all on track. Annualized I was spending $25,846 on these meetings. Really?! Hmm, now it makes me wonder if there was a way to share that information in a shared spreadsheet, or to do the meeting in thirty minutes instead.
THE SOLUTION TO THE MEETING PROBLEM
Great leaders know that every minute counts, and they know that meetings can potentially be a time killer. Meetings tend to start late, run long, they have the wrong people in them, they’re dominated by the extroverts and showboaters, they stray off topic, and worst of all they break up your day in illogical ways. So what do you do about it?
First, if you’re running the meeting, design it and facilitate it well. Make sure you have a well-planned agenda that clearly states the purpose of the meeting, desired outcomes, and initial topics. Circulate the agenda ahead of time so attendees arrive prepared. Think carefully about who to invite. The smaller the meeting, the more efficient it will be. Meetings must be actively facilitated: call on the introverts to weigh in with their opinions, silence side conversations, keep the conversation on topic, and manage the clock.
Second, even if you can’t say no as often as Mark Cuban, perhaps you can say no to more meetings. Instead of automatically agreeing to every meeting invite that comes your way, ask for an agenda or for the desired outcome before accepting. At least this will train others to plan for a productive session. Or say no without saying no in these clever ways:
“My schedule is really tight right now; how about I send Walter to represent me and he’ll brief me afterward?”
“Not sure I can make that; any chance you can send me the meeting minutes instead?”
“That day is impossible; is it okay for me to only stay for the first twenty minutes?”
Or perhaps you can say no to meetings on certain days of the week. Sound crazy? Many organizations are beginning to implement “maker days.” As Facebook cofounder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz told me, “Pick one day a week that you and your team can focus on individual work without any interruptions like meetings…we have ‘No Meeting Wednesdays’ established to encourage flow and productivity across the company” (Kruse 2015). When my friend and hospital executive Kate Kinslow became CEO of Aria Healthcare, one of her first acts was to declare “No Meeting Fridays.”
I mentioned this meeting-free-day idea to Rory Vaden, cofounder of Southwestern Consulting, and he laughed out loud. “We only have meetings one day a week,” he exclaimed. “We call it Mad Meeting Mondays!” As the author of Take the Stairs and Procrastinate on Purpose, Vaden knows a thing or two about productivity. So I invited him onto The LEADx Leadership Show as my guest and he explained further.
We’ve decided that the next generation business is one where people will work flexible hours, from multiple locations, on a variety of projects. Mondays are the one day we ask everyone to come in. We meet. We talk. We discuss. We make decisions. Then the rest of the week we scatter all across the world, we deploy those decisions, and we execute the strategies (Vaden 2017).
Southwestern Consulting’s “four days off from meetings” culture may be extreme for most organizations, but it suddenly makes taking one day off from meetings each week seem much more realistic.
WHEN YOU JUST CAN’T SAY NO
For all those meetings that you just can’t say no to, how can you keep their duration to a minimum? How can you maximize your time?
One idea is to hold “stand up” meetings, literally meetings where everyone stands up. This has become popular among leaders who practice Scrum, which is a project management framework for software development. A “daily scrum” is a stand-up meeting, usually about fifteen minutes in length, in which people go around and answer three questions:
What did you accomplish since the last meeting?
>
What do you plan to complete by the next meeting?
What is getting in your way?
Even though this format is most popular in software development, there is no reason why you can’t adopt it for any kind of recurring status meeting.
Richard Branson has spoken extensively about his aversion to meetings. In one blog post, he shared that he uses the same trick for drastically shortening meeting time:
One of my favourite tricks is to conduct most of my meetings standing up. I find it to be a much quicker way of getting down to business, making a decision and sealing the deal…it’s very rare that a meeting on a single topic should need to last more than 5–10 minutes. If you stand up, you’ll find that decisions get made pretty quickly, and no one nods off! (Branson 2015).
A variation of the stand-up meeting is the walking meeting, sometimes called the “walk and talk” with notable practitioners like Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Western Union CEO Hikmet Ersek, and Darren Huston, former president and CEO of Priceline (Talev and Hymowitz 2014). At LinkedIn, their outdoor bike path takes about twenty to twenty-five minutes to circle once and is routinely used by employees who are doing one-on-one meetings (Peck 2015). Meeting on the move removes the normal distractions from phones, email, and “got a minute” interruptions. Research from Johnson & Johnson shows that people who do walking meetings report higher levels of energy, focus, and engagement. And if you need more convincing, researchers at Stanford conducted experiments that revealed that walking boosts creative ideation (Oppezzo and Schwartz 2014).
