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Managing Work/Life Balance To get ahead, leave the right things behind
Everywhere you turn, there it is. Pressure. Pressure to meet objectives and deadlines. Pressure to do more with less. Pressure to update your skills. Pressure to balance life and work. Under all this pressure, how does a good manager keep it all under control? The answer is quite simple, really. Do for yourself what you do for your clients every single day: manage tasks, workflow, work volume and time lines. The result is improved quality in your work and your life. Easy? Why should it not be? Historically, managers have dominated the field of expertise we call project management. How is it, then, that they seem to be chronically pressured, stressed and short of time when managing the "project" that is their own life?
Managers worldwide face excessive workloads, constant overtime and making do with dwindling resources. Managers in Canada are no exception. In the private sector, they often work for, or are, employers struggling to compete in the global economy. That economy has spawned staff cutbacks and even closures for many companies. Managers who are "lucky" enough to survive downsizing end up with a larger and more diverse workload - and less support to get it done. On top of all this, we expect our managers to constantly upgrade their professional skills - another demand on their time. No wonder Canadian managers want straightforward solutions to make every minute count.
No one - managers included - is taught in school how to work. In theory, it should be easy for an analytical, linearthinking manager to make hard choices about what to do and what to leave undone. Whether a manager works in manufacturing or services, he or she makes decisions daily about products, people and processes. Think back on what you worked on today. Did you look at work station layouts, shift change analyses, staffing up to workload, production bottlenecks, process improvement, scrap and reject levels, rework and double handling? Congratulations! You are already using, have already tried and tested techniques that can make an enormous difference in your own work. You can apply these principles to your own human machine. The objective is to stop running that machine at over capacity, and shut it down for routine maintenance before it blows a gasket.
Do the following scenarios sound familiar?
Poor workstation layout: Look inside your own office and computer. There is a direct connection between your organization and your productivity. If your workspace looks like chaos, clean it up and organize it. Use four simple principles to sift through the mountains of paper and cyber files that clutter your environment: Dump it Now, Delegate it Now, Designate Time for it Now or Do it Now! If you invest one full day organizing your office and computer, three hours per week can crawl out from under that pile of junk. That is 12 weeks a year. Get it back.
Ineffective start up at the beginning of the day or shift:
Do not touch your e-mail first thing in the morning. Email is a time bandit. Instead, spend the first hour of the day focusing on the One Big Thing that must get done. Schedule an appointment with yourself, for your work, first thing every morning. If you dare open your e-mail first thing, you will sink in a storm of triviality. Leave it alone until you have killed the first dragon of the day. Decide to improve the quality of your leadership focus - turn off the "beep" that signals the arrival of new e-mail. When you are focused on a strategic priority, your intelligence is too precious to be distracted by random messages. Instead, schedule specific times, two or three times a day, to check your inbox. Be ruthless with the "delete" button. Do not use the e-mail inbox as a virtual junk pile. Instead, file e-mails in your personal folders as soon as you have dealt with them. And no fair opening an e-mail, peeking at it and then clicking "mark as unread." That leads to double and triple handling. The surest way to triple your workload is to touch everything three times. "If you touch it, you marry it!
Staff up to work on what counts:
Organize your time around your strategic priorities, and make some hard decisions: do it well, risk doing it poorly, delegate it or do not do it. You cannot execute two items at once with the same priority. You have to choose. There are no exceptions. The approach is simple: Set your priorities, write them down and post them. The more your work improves, the more credible you are when you negotiate with your boss about dropping nonvalue- added jobs. Sometimes you have to mentor your superiors. Your boss is under pressure, too, and might welcome intelligent suggestions on how to work smarter.
Unnecessary rework and double handling:
Standardize some of the routine things you do. Make computer templates for routine documents or processes. If you are wasting time re-inventing the wheel each time you make a purchase requisition, standardize the process. Planning and organizing take time the first time, but once you are set up, it liberates you. If, after the initial set up time, it takes you more time to keep yourself organized than to eliminate items from your list, change your method.
Bottlenecks to work flow:
We are talking about meetings. Managers spend up to 24,000 hours in meetings in the course of their career. The single most critical step to controlling time spent in meetings is to create an agenda for every meeting and stick to it. People will click "accept" for three meetings at same time, then decide at the last minute which one to reject. It is rude, and it is a classic case of bottlenecking. Put a price on your "yes". Say "yes" only to meeting organizers that provide a relevant agenda.
Maintenance, scrap and rework:
If you work a 60-hour week for more than three weeks running, you will be fine for the first two weeks. Watch it on the third 60-hour week: your productivity will drop like a stone. Sure, there are times when we have to work a 60- hour week. But schedule one "normal" 35-hour week every time you have put in two at 60. The real challenge is to "learn to say 'no'".
Mismatched capacity:
Do the math. Most managers are awake for some 5,000 hours per year and spend over 2,000 of those hours at work. Increased absenteeism, substance abuse, divorce rates, long-term disability claims and costs to employee assistance programs are bottom-line cost-control issues, and managers know how to address those. Take time to go on your vacations, eat properly and get exercise. If you are sleepdeprived, you lose the battle. Teach your people that sleep is a weapon.
Losing your assets:
The greatest cost to companies comes when good managers quit because they are overloaded. Burnout is responsible for more attrition than we think. At some point, the body takes over and makes the decision for us. If companies want to attract and retain good people, we need to pay more than lip service to helping them achieve work life balance. It all starts with good managers who can walk the talk. Good managers model work life balance first, then mentor their people on how it is done.
Ann Searles
Ann Searles is the President of The Institute for Business Technology (IBT), Canada/Caribbean. IBT delivers Personal Efficiency Program courses in English and French, offers solutions designed to enable clients across Canada to reclaim and re-invest time, and is the publisher of the book The Personal Efficiency Program: How to Get Organized to Do More Work in Less Time.
