Through the Podcast, you'll bring the meaningful back into your calendar. 5 TimeShifting tips will have you rethinking your day as you produce more in less time. The reality is, how you manage your priorities determines whether you enjoy a satisfying, fulfilling career and life—or not.
Women's Rules of Engagement Podcast addresses the tough points of contention you face daily..... Nancy Fredericks shares all the secrets acquired as an experienced thought-leader. She's Strategically Partnered with women executives for over 30+ years, sharing practical, workable solutions you can tap into immediately on your way to achieving all of your career hopes and dreams.
If you're interested in gaining more insights, check out the Thrive @ Work MasterMind Program for women executives.
Through the Podcast, you'll bring the meaningful back into your calendar. 5 TimeShifting tips will have you rethinking your day as you produce more in less time. The reality is, how you manage your priorities determines whether you enjoy a satisfying, fulfilling career and life—or not.
Women's Rules of Engagement Podcast addresses the tough points of contention you face daily..... Nancy Fredericks shares all the secrets acquired as an experienced thought-leader. She's Strategically Partnered with women executives for over 30+ years, sharing practical, workable solutions you can tap into immediately on your way to achieving all of your career hopes and dreams.
If you're interested in gaining more insights, check out the Thrive @ Work MasterMind Program for women executives.
Hey, do you find it challenging to fit everything into your calendar? Get excited, tighten your earbuds because we're focusing on time shifting, which has you producing more in less time. Welcome to Women's Rules of Engagement, a podcast for corporate women. Are you ready to secure the TikTok of leadership for yourself and to shape time to your advantage? Well, if you are, keep on listening because there's never been a point in history in business ever before or on your career journey when attaining a handle on the TikTok of your leadership clock has been more critical to you than it is today. Rarely is anyone working a nine to five day, let alone a five day work week . More hours are being spent at work today than any previous workforce in our history. Yet Stanford University says that working longer hours won't actually do you any good. They noticed a decline in workers' productivity once employees spend 50 hours on the job. In fact, productivity takes a cliff dive after 55 hours and on top of that many executive women, you know this for yourself, face a full-time job at home. Research confirms what we all know already. Women spend 60% more time doing unpaid labor at home than men with one exception. When it comes to planning family activities, it's a fairly shared equality basis. Oh, and the other thing is when men check off their box for activities for childcare , play with their children is top of the list. So on top of that, what I've mentioned before, 'cause you've heard me say this before, we women permit our time to drain through our fingers where we're doing and working harder on activities that aren't central to our company's measurements and requirements. There's little doubt that time is a precious commodity, yet I don't see it treated with its due respect. Do you and I don't see it, particularly if you're on the journey to demonstrate leadership right where you are. Everybody is always overloaded, always rushed, and always focused on what's next, what's next rather than each present moment, not a very healthy way of living, nor one that is very productive. Let's get to it though. Our first time shifting practices, block thinking, planning, strategizing, and contemplating your navel time. You know, where you're just staring into your lap contemplating the future. I know that doesn't sound as though I'm giving you back any time at all, but I promise you I am. Let's pause for a moment and just try out an exercise. Close your eyes and take a mental survey. In your mind's eye of your company, do you see the busyness? Can you see your peers frantically managing their never ending to-Do list? Can you sense the urgency in the air? That's the essence of a mid-level manager and belows business day. Shake that off, get out of that mentality right away. And now look at leadership, which is very different. They intentionally open white space on their calendars to reduce more results. Forward thinking and planning. They know shortens the time it takes to complete projects and focusing on strategizing leads to profitability. So when you're in the leadership space, they're busy doing important work, but not rushing around like busy little beavers with no objective in their minds. You know, actually focusing on strategy, which is a big thing that leaders do, leads to profitability. The project of Management Institute estimates and get this, it's shocking to me, I guess it shouldn't be that organizations are wasting an average of $96 million every 1 billion invested due to poor project management and performance. Is that shocking? So for every billion dollars they invest, they're wasting 97 million. Anyway, that gets my goat. Think of all the salary increases we could have. Our most successful business leaders understand this. You know, look at Warren Buffett. He spends 80% of his time thinking by his own assessment, and then there's Mary Callahan, Erdos , CEO of JPM Morgan Asset Management, and she encourages quote , I've got some quotes going on here. You have to be manically focused on owning your calendar. She advises, again, quote , look at the short term and the long term . Mary believes calendar management is the single most important thing you can do, especially as you get busy and have more responsibility. What great advice Mary, then there's Tim Armstrong. You know, if you don't know the creative force of who this man is , look him up. He makes his executive spend 10% of the day or four hours per week just thinking. Jeff Wiener, CEO of LinkedIn schedules two hours of uninterrupted thinking time per day. Now I can hear the chatter going on in your head. I bet you are arguing, but I have no control at my level. My entire day is orchestrated by others. There is great truth in this and that's why this advice is so important. You may think of this as being counterintuitive, and yet the reality is, think about this. If you solely focus on filling your schedule with busy to do activities and going, going, going and filling your schedule all day long, you'll never grow and develop your business craft. And it is a craft with such an attitude, you're set yourself up for mid-level management positions and no higher . You see, your business muscle is all about performing production, but you haven't built your muscles in preparation for the bigger role you envision for yourself, and you'll live to regret it. If you don't start having white space for your thinking, depending on where you are in the organization, you may be able to craft out just a teeny little seed of time, or perhaps you have more control and you can craft out a little bigger spot on your calendar. But as you move up the corporate ladder, it's important to continually create white space on your calendar so that you can get the big work done. Our second time shifting practice is taming your meetings. I know you hear this all the time, but let's look at it. I want you to think about another mental exercise. So imagine you are scanning your office. Do you see your coworkers scurrying from one meeting after another, whether in person or charging up their laptop computer for a zoom call? Can you spot the tension? Most likely you've felt this pressure yourself. That's because as a mid-level manager, you spend about 35% of your time in meetings or perhaps you're in upper management, where you spend a whopping 50% of your time in meetings and get this. 71% of all executives find the meetings they're attending unproductive as well as inefficient. Do you often find meetings a total waste of time? If you relate, ask yourself and seriously dig deep in which meetings that I've attended. Has my presence contributed to the discussion or made a difference to the outcome? Why do this? Unfortunately, many women, despite not liking to attend meetings, simply show up to be the good girl in the office. And I don't mean to diminish you, it's just our thinking. We think that we need to be there in order to be seen rather than looking at leveraging our time. Women actually believe attending will give them a promotion leg up, not so much. Simply being present while sitting on the sideline doesn't win you any points. However, the meeting where your leaders see the breadth of your decision making , your leadership strategic thinking and where your acumen is revealed, those are the meetings. Those are the ones that highlight your force, the force you bring to your company. One, your company wants to groom for the future. So begin by examining the ones you didn't put in your winning category. You know those meetings where you couldn't answer a positive to that question? Challenge yourself. Could you have added value if you came to the meeting with ideas or spoke up more where you silent out of insecurity than commit to becoming a key player at every meeting you attend? It isn't a matter of how often you speak, it is about the quality and the content of your ideas. Is there someone you can delegate meanings to that will improve their knowledge of the company or add needed skill sets for their future? Career development? Mentoring staff to high levels of achievement is a much vaunted leadership quality. How do you measure up? Perhaps you should go to less meetings and develop your staff more. Begin introducing meeting efficiencies. Start on time. That's the basic, when I say this out loud, I can't help but chuckle. You know, in one company they had a culture that permitted everyone to drag into the meaning Late as the new leader on the block, I announced starting on time was now the rule of the day when struggling in by some was still occurring even after the announcement and the second announcement, I let them know that the doors would be locked in the future. So either you show up at 10 o'clock or nine o'clock or 12 o'clock and you get in or you didn't and it was your choice. So employees were either there at the beginning or they missed out. That was the rule. It was amazing how fast a grudging, and I say that literally a grudging cultural shift occurred. Even now when we are doing a lot of Zoom meetings in our offices, I start my meetings on time and I'm quite proud of that, to tell you the truth. But one mastermind attendee explained she would appreciate being given a minute or two to sign on because she was scheduled back to back , you know, and that makes a lot of sense to me because our world has shifted and so I agreed. But I can tell you the habit of beginning on time is so deeply ingrained in me. I get antsy waiting those one or two minutes. Next, an additional tightening up tip is to make sure you have an agenda with clearly defined objectives. You know, we're going to do exploration or discussion or decision, et cetera. Set predetermined time limits for each item. Verify every attendee adds value because their time is as much value to them as your time is to you. If you're invited to attend a meeting without an agenda, think twice. Check with the initiator of the meeting. Why me? Why this meeting? If no one can give you an answer, I would question attending. Another tip is to proactively send off purpose topics or discussions to the air quote parking lot. You know, if it's worthy of a group discussion, schedule it for future meeting. Most I found are a waste of everyone's time when they go off topic . Next, begin broaching the elimination of unproductive meetings. I know, I know it is sensitive, especially when you're a mere attendee. Ensure that everyone understands your objective is to gain much needed time for you and everyone to work on larger, impactful projects for your organization. You see, well run meetings are a precursor of leadership meetings. Provide an opportunity to build your muscle, starting small and building for your future. Next, our third time shifting practices. Master Pareto's 80 20 Rule of thumb, the truth of the matter is that many of you are spending a lot of time working on activities that produce very little results. Pareto judged everyone spends 80% of their time working on producing only 20% of their work results. If you shift your focus and start looking to lean more into work that produces 80% of your results and touch that area as often and as frequently as you can, you'll be seen as the future of your company because no one's grading you big. If you're working on tiny unimportant projects, contrast thinking big to mired in detail, ability of your job, you'll never have the opportunity to reveal. You know, your strategic abilities will never be built up, which are what companies are looking for from their top people. Is it a time to examine your projects from this 80 20 lens, not simply as a check to do project off your list without much thought. Instead, focus on projects that will produce the highest value results for your future and that of your company. Isn't that a different way of appraising the piles on your desk? Now, priority and leverage becomes the deciding factor for you. Our fourth time shifting practice is a disruption landslide . One of the biggest time wasters is all the interruptions occurring around you. Some are aspects of your job, you simply need to handle them while others suck the life out of your day with a modest return on your investment. Instead of looking at one interruption as an individual event , start recognizing them as system breakdowns. That means addressing and resolving interruptions as any other process failure, you would handle This has you examining the issue from a big picture point of view, not focused on the minutiae. You know, and I gotta tell you, this is no small matter of saving you time. When on average employees are interrupted seven times per hour lasting about five minutes per incident. Wow. You know, the research shows we're losing approximately four hours a day and yet 80% assess the interruption as having little value to no value. So getting a handle on these is interruptions is gonna change your calendar big time. How do we manage these suckers of our time? Start scheduling time for interruptions because you know they're coming. You're less frustrated when you proactively wrap your arms around the out of control a bit. You know where you take control of it. This means leaving empty space on your calendar so you have time to conquer the unexpected. Keep in mind the stress of continually whirling dervish kinds of schedules prolongs your progress. So slowing down opening space on your calendar actually speeds up your outcomes , yet another counterintuitive thought process. Next, develop a talk file for each person you deal with regularly. Advise your employees to hold questions for scheduled meetings unless it's an emergency and role. Model this behavior yourself, that's a big thing. Role model this yourself. Don't interrupt your people all day long unless it's urgent to interrupt. You'll soon learn by asking them to only talk to you about the urgent who has a handle on what's critical and what isn't . This allows you an opportunity to mentor self-sufficiency in your staff. You have now expanded the abilities of you and your people. And by the way, make sure you have a talk file for your boss. Also, your encounters will be a lot better when you have that talk file in front of you. Interruptions are often nothing more than a process failure. As I mentioned, you'll soon recognize consistent patterns and responses to them as you would any other system breakdown. Interruptions are often nothing more than a process failure. You'll soon recognize consistent patterns where something happens over and over and over again, and it's in the same kind of category, and you'll respond to them as you would any other system breakdown? Huh ? What could I do to mitigate this system breakdown? You know, I remember a new supervisory group. I was training one of the participants, Sherry was complaining about all the stuff and the interruptions and her staff coming in, interrupting her, and she was experiencing this day in and day out, and she was rather dramatic about it, I might say. Together. We generated a specific action plan. We opened the idea creating for room discussion where the group pitched in on their best secrets and shared them with Sherry , and she was ready to snip all these interruptions in the bud. But unfortunately, at the next month's meeting and the next, it was still top of conversation for her. Check your pulse on this one just to make sure you don't own a smidgen of this concept yourself, because it's a career killer. Seriously. You see, sometimes interruptions are no more than unconscious contracts you've created with your staff. What is the contract? Well, it says, don't worry. You don't have to know or do anything for yourself. I'm here for you. I can do it. Is that developing staff? Not to mention, if you're always stuck doing grunt work, what chance do you have of expanding your own career in any meaningful way? Very little. I would say our fifth time shifting practices procrastinating is not your friend. In fact, it has been the downfall of more future leaders than you could imagine. I laugh about it, but it's such a sad tale. You know, the big Lear syndrome, judging something as bigger and uglier than anyone can ever imagine is the root issue of procrastination. Fear habitually lurks beneath the surface. You scramble to find legitimate reasons to work on something else. Anything else? Even organizing paper clips. Procrastination has you sitting on a time bomb waiting to blow you and your career up when you least expect it. It's a battle that must be fought and won. Create the mindset of action, action, action. It will free your calendar. Action is the only pathway out of procrastination. You see, time shifting is a powerful concept, so take it on. Come back again for women's rules of engagement when we can talk about more areas that will shift your career. But before I leave, I wanna challenge you to dig deep into your attitude and your actions regarding time gaining mastery in these areas. Bring the meaningful back into your schedule. How you employ it determines whether you enjoy a satisfying, fulfilling career and life or not. Please, please don't be one of the 59 percenters who say they're planning on doing something and yet never do. Really start managing the TikTok of your leadership time. I'd really appreciate your thoughts and feedback about this and all of my podcasts. You can reach out to me on Twitter at Nancy Fredericks. Much success always.