Have you ever wished you could add more hours to your day just so you could cross more tasks off your to-do list? Do you spend most of your days going from meeting to meeting only to feel like you haven’t accomplished what you need to accomplish? Do spend countless hours going through your email and still feel like you’ve barely made a dent in it? If so, you’re probably making the kinds of mistakes productivity expert Neen James says most people make when thinking about time.
“We’ve got to look at time differently and think: Is this the best use of my time right now?” she says.
In today’s podcast episode, Neen talks about the biggest mistakes people make when thinking about time and productivity, ways they can organize their day so they can get more done with less effort, and why it’s important.
As the author of Folding Time: How to Achieve Twice As Much in Half the Time, Neen talks about how the notion of “time management” is no longer useful or effective, and how people should look at time if they want to accomplish more.
She speaks with audiences and top executives around the world, sharing field-tested strategies that not only improve leaders’ productivity but increase their influence and effectiveness.
“We all get the same 1,440 minutes in a day,” she says. “So when people think they can manage their time, that’s not true. What they can do is manage their attention.”
Listen to this episode and discover:
· The biggest mistakes people make when thinking about time, and what things to consider instead.
· Why making a to-do list is actually a waste of time.
· How to make business meetings shorter and more effective.
· The single most important question you can ask yourself when tackling a task.
· How to create an environment that is conducive to focus and productivity.
· The “super-fancy” (Neen’s words) system she uses to make sure she accomplishes what she needs to each day.
· And so much more!
Episode Overview
As an expert on time and productivity, Neen despises the term “time management.” It’s an old paradigm that keep people on a never-ending hamster wheel of to-dos.
“The old way of managing time used to work before we had email, before we had the internet, and before we had social media. While it’s important to have a really good relationship with time and to understand how you work best, I think the new conversation is about attention.”
Instead of using outdated and ineffective language to describe time – “I’m going to kill time” or “I don’t have time” – people should use more empowering words to describe their behavior around time.
“We have to reframe it,” she says. “It’s really easy to say, ‘I don’t have time,’ but that’s not true. You do. A better choice of words is: ‘I didn’t choose to spend time on that.’”
Considering time in this way allows people to step off the hamster wheel of needless activities. Because the truth is: people sabotage their productivity when they choose to spend time on small, seemingly important things that produce little to no results – things like unnecessary, in-person team meetings, or email.
“What we have to be more disciplined at, as leaders with our time, is understanding what activities are going to give us the highest return on our time invested,” she says.
In addition, Neen shared some tips on how people can organize their day to ensure they prioritize what’s important (the “not-negotiables,” as she calls them) and let go of what’s not. Using a “super-fancy” single Post-It note system, Neen shares her secret to getting more done in less time.
Listen in for all of that and more on this edition of Grow My Revenue, and then let me know what your key takeaways were. I look forward to seeing how you’ve implemented Neen’s tips and strategies.
For full show notes and other resources, please visit: http://www.ianaltman.com/podcast/neen-james/
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