You receive a phone call from the CEO who asks whether you’d be interested in taking on a special assignment. In this assignment you would report directly to the CEO and participate in making some of the important strategic decisions facing the company. This assignment would provide you personally with major growth and career opportunities. The offer has only one catch; because the assignment is only part time requiring about one day per week, you would have to do your present job in the remaining four days. Would you take the assignment?

Before reading any further please answer “”Yes” or “No” - Would you take the assignment?

HBR (October 2002) reports that this question has been posed to hundreds of managers, most of whom believed that they already lacked the time to do their jobs properly. Yet, ninety nine percent of them take the assignment. Why?

Are these managers (and perhaps we could include ourselves):  Admitting that if the motivation were powerful enough, they could eliminate or do in much less time eight to ten hours worth of current activities each week without negative consequences?  Currently spending time performing unproductive, time wasting activities (that they could easily drop) to avoid or escape job related anxiety?

Like the other 99% of managers, did you answer “Yes”?. If so, what activities that you currently do, could you eliminate or do less of to free up some of your time for the more important things you need to do?

As the HBR article points out, almost all managers escape some job-induced anxiety through a variety of unproductive, often unconscious, psychological mechanisms - rationalization, denial, blaming and so forth. One of the most costly is busyness; the escape into time consuming activities that managers find less threatening to perform (though much less productive) than the tough aspects of their jobs. I call these “comfort tasks” - comfort because they are generally mindless and easy to do. However, having done them, have we progressed any of the major tasks we need to achieve? The answer is almost certainly “No”. And like good food, “comfort tasks” make us feel good, but if we have too much, we feel bloated. The trick is to keep the comfort tasks to an enjoyable minimum and thus not become “time management obese”.

So, how do you reduce the amount of time spent on “comfort tasks”?

The first step is to become aware of how much time each of us spends on these comfort tasks. Remember, for most of us, these comfort tasks are done unconsciously, so we need to find out what they are.

For the next week:

Place a very bright post-it note somewhere visible with a large question: “Is this a comfort task?” (You will quickly learn to identify them because they are the things that you start to do when your mind wanders AND you find yourself not working on the required major goals, tasks or activities)

Take a note of the things you do that are comfort tasks (i.e. they are not progressing your major goals or activities)

During the following week:

Make a conscious effort to reduce the amount of time you spend on identified comfort tasks.

Keep in mind, that some time spent is ok (and healthy), but overdoing it is overdosing!

In the future, should you find your mind wandering, remember the “comfort task” trick and get back on track. This simple technique is bound to free up some of your time to focus on the really important things either within your job or private life.

Copyright 2006 The National Learning Institute

Bob Selden, of the National Learning Institute, has previously taught time management techniques to managers with varying degrees of success. Over the years, he has found this one simple technique outperforms all others. If you have another time management idea that you’d like to share with Bob, or pose him a question regarding time management, he can be contacted via http://www.nationallearning.com.au.

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Don’t despise the scraps of time or anything else in your life. Instead, use them to help achieve your goals and transform the way you live.

Five minutes every hour can help you make strides in learning a skill. If the five minutes escalate into ten minutes an hour, the results can be astonishing.

Don’t wait until you have an extra hour or so available. That hour may never come and you may never learn that skill. Even a few minutes a day can help you make progress in playing that banjo or whatever skill you desire.

Don’t despise the scraps of exercise in your day. Get up and walk around during the advertisements in two hours of TV and you will have walked for nearly half an hour.

Alternatively, put an exercise machine in a room with a TV and work out while you watch the program.

Do situps every time the ads come on and you could do fifty sit ups in two hours of TV. If you don’t watch TV or films, just do five sit ups every time you stop reading or writing or whatever you are doing.

Get up every hour or so and do something physical. Try walking around the house and taking a look at those rooms you seldom spend time in. Walk up and down your stairs.

Walking up and down the stairs can stress the heart a little and make it stronger. It is great value for time. I have just walked up the stairs to switch on the central heating and will need to return to switch it off. In any event, you don’t need an excuse to walk up and down your own stairs. You have paid for those stairs after all!

If your central heating or the equivalent is on automatic put it on manual and get yourself moving around the house. If you live in an apartment block or bungalow just getting up and walking to the controls is better than nothing.

You could always put away the remote controls for the DVD player or TV and force yourself to get up and use the push buttons on the actual set. These scraps of exercise all add up.

I have some foam nunchakus in my room and I practise with them for about five minutes whenever I can. I don’t use wooden ones because I might well break something in the room or injure myself when I miss a catch.

One of my taekwondo teachers knocked himself unconscious with his nunchakus when training on his own in his room. There is no point in doing any kind of training or activity which injures you.

So use foam nunchakus, preferably with a chain link, and you will be injury free and can develop a useful skill which is fun and which involves exercise. I had the main electric lights in my room moved away from the middle of the room so I would have space to swing the nunchaku without breaking the lights.

If you don’t know how to work the nunchaku, buy a DVD and learn from it. We are all incredibly fortunate these days to have DVD’s available which will teach us almost anything.

If you don’t want to work out with the nunchaku, just do something like squats or knee raises or pushups when you take a break. These scraps of movement will eventually produce results. Practise your kicks if you study the martial arts. If you don’t, get a DVD and learn a few kicks. Just practise them very slowly. This will build muscle and skill.

Humans were made for exercise as they chased down their mobile food. It is important to recapture part of that life style at least.

Use time scraps to deal with clutter. Put one or two things away in those spare scraps of time and your room can become a model of neatness.

Don’t despise the scraps of paper that tend to appear everywhere. Deal with them one at a time and you may save yourself hassle. I’ve just had a snooty letter from a credit card company because I have exceeded my limit on their card.

If I had shown more respect for the scraps of paper on my desk, I would have found out that I had exceeded the limit sooner. If you plan to keep some paper, put it in a file or home of some kind with a relevant name on it! Important paper deserves preserving and labelling.

So then; start using the scraps of time and motion in your life and they can provide you with powerful skills and a healthy body. Use every chance to get up and move about doing something. There is usually a bed or chair available if you overtire yourself!

Take care of those scraps of paper and they will take care of you. You will stay on top of your finances, relationships and many other things.

Apply the scrap or bit by bit principle to everything. I just walked to my back door and noticed a pigeon walking round searching for scraps of food. It looked quite plump and healthy. Scraps are keeping it alive and well and mobile enough to evade any predatory cat or fox.

We have all been told we should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables every day but how many of us do that? However, we could all eat a slice of apple or two or three grapes or half a tomato every hour or so. As always these scraps will mount up and we may even get a taste for healthy food.

Obviously doing the above should not be a substitute for taking control of our main blocks of time each day and making a plan or schedule of the activities we need to complete or, at least, begin in order to achieve our goals.

An example of a daily plan, which I have mentioned elsewhere, is to spend an hour on learning a skill; an hour on dealing with an overwhelming task like sorting out your paper work and an hour on achieving one of your goals. The acronym SOG can help. S for skill; O for overwhelming task and G for goal.

Priorities are clearly crucial to goal achievement and doing the important things early in the day ensures they get done. I have just finished this article after starting work early this morning and have then gone on to write a second article by the early evening.

Writing articles like this is a key priority for me as I need the advice in them as much as anyone else. They may also bring visitors to my website.

Control your main blocks of time but do not despise the scraps. They are worth their weight in gold.
Make full use of any scraps of exercise or motion. You can keep fit without moving outside your house!

Deal carefully with every scrap of paper that comes your way and, if you don’t like healthy food, at least try to eat some scraps of fruit and veg every day.

Good luck with the above ideas and congratulations if you are already following the principles described. If you are sceptical, give some of the activities suggested a try and see what happens.

John Watson is an award winning teacher and 5th degree blackbelt martial arts instructor. He has written several ebooks on motivation and success topics. One of these can be found at http://www.motivationtoday.com/36_laws.php

You can also find motivational ebooks by authors like Stuart Goldsmith. Check out http://www.motivationtoday.com/the_midas_method.php

Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site but please include the resource box above.

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