Use Outcome-Based Scheduling

The most precious resource you have as a manager is time.

Use it wisely or wastefully, but either way it's gone when you go to sleep. Your job is to improve a few key results. Take our your schedule of activities for the upcoming week. As you look at it, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you know what the most important result is that you are trying to improve for your organization?
• Are these the activities that will have the greatest positive impact on improving your most important result?
• Have you saved time on your calender for emergencies?
• Are you realistically going to get to the few activities that can make the biggest difference in improving your most important desired result?

I suggest you use an Outcome-Based Scheduling Approach. Here are the steps:

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper. (Get used to this. Most of my advice starts with "take out a blank sheet of paper.")
2. Write down the single most important outcome you want to improve in your organization in the next three months.
3. Carefully select and write down the three activities that you can do that you believe will have the greatest positive impact on improving that outcome.
4. Take out your calendar and write in specifically when you will do each of these three activities. Lock those in place.
5. Add any other activities that need to be added, but never remove or overlap the three critical activities for improving the desired result.
6. Remove as many non-essential activities from your calendar as possible. Force yourself to give up some of your activities. Create lots of free space in your calendar. This will allow you to both deal with emergencies and still accomplish the three critically important activities you selected above.