• The Management Models Pocketbook
• The Handling Resistance Pocketbook
• Brilliant Influence
• Brilliant Time Management
• Brilliant Stress Management

This is proving too complex, so I have decided to consolidate these into one blog, on my principal website at mikeclayton.co.uk.

To read blogs linked to the Brilliant Time Management, please go here.

Action, please

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Here’s an article I posted on smarta.com

We have all had one of those days. Sometimes a little too often. We have plenty of time, but nothing gets done. Yes, we find plenty to do, but it seems to be anything but the things we were supposed to be doing.

Some of us even lose most of our time, because we fritter it away, doing nothing very much. This is easier than doing something important, which takes concentration and, significantly, involves the possibility of failure.

So, rather like a hedgehog, it is easier to curl up into a little ball of inaction: it feels safe. Of course, most of us feel uncomfortable with total inaction, so we replace meaningful activity with meaningless “displacement” activities. This is procrastination: putting off what we know we need to do.

The first step to conquering procrastination is to own up to it. Once you do that, you may find you can get on with the job at hand. If not, here is a sample of seven ways to conquer procrastination and get things done.

… read the rest here.

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For all of us, there are special times of the day when we can be especially productive, innovative or enjoy our work best.  Here are five.

1. Prime Time

Schedule your weeks and your days to suit the work and recreation patterns that suit you and the things you need to achieve.  Ensure that the most demanding and important things are scheduled into your “Prime Time” – those times of the day and week when you are at your best and really able to concentrate on delivering true value.  Leave the little tasks to the times of day when your energy dips.

2. Golden Hour

For many of us, there is a particular time of the day – maybe not every day – when we are at absolute best.  Your mind is sharp and you have a lot of energy.  Just as photographers will get up early for that special dawn light to get the perfect shot, or wait for the magical light of dusk, so you will create, achieve, enjoy more in your “Golden Hour”.

3. Creative Time

Set aside a time in your week when you can go somewhere special to really stimulate your creativity and foster your most innovative thinking.  Make sure you are equipped with a notepad and pen to capture your ideas, and arrange some time shortly after so you can harness your ideas and create some action.
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4. Next Bend

Take time out regularly to sit and think.  Use your “Thinking Time” to review what is happening and what is new, so you can start to anticipate what is coming around the next bend.  For some people, a quiet half hour on your own is not work.  But really, it is the most valuable work you can do.  “Important but not Urgent” in its purest form.

5. Focus Time

Fifteen minutes to kill before your meeting?  Go into a cafe and clear some paperwork.  A half hour train journey?  Think through a structure and key points for your forthcoming presentation.  Fill the gaps when you have nothing to do with truly valuable work or creative thinking, and you will be amazed what you can achieve in these “Magic Minutes”.

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These tips first appeared in my regular Thoughtscape newsletter.
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bytestart.co.uk is a website full of resources for anyone who wants to start up a small business.

I was asked to write them a short article on practical time management and decided to go to the heart of the issue: the OATS method.  The short article I wrote summarises a very important process, at the core of Brilliant Time Management.  You can read the article by clicking on “How to successfully manage your time via the OATS method”.

1. Past Negative
2. Past Positive
3. Present Hedonistic
4. Present Fatalistic
5. Future
6. Transcendental Future

For a fabulous introduction to Zimbardo’s thinking, you can do no better than this wonderful ten-minute video made by the RSA.  If you haven’t seen their videos before, beware! You may get hooked and want to bookmark the RSAnimate YouTube Channel.

Here is Zimbardo talking about time orientations, cultural differences, and the future of society.  Enjoy!

You can see it here.

So much to do but so little time

The show was called “So much to do but so little time” and it is on the Photo Night Live website, run by presenter Ross Dean.  Photo Night Live is the UK’s first web TV show about photography, but this edition will certainly appeal to non-photographers.  Ross, and his other guest, Claudia Carter of Carter Imaging, quizzed me on using time effectively – especially for someone who is setting up a new business in their spare time, as Claudia is.

During the show, it felt like we covered the whole gamut of time management tips.  You will hear about:

• The OATS method for scheduling your day
• How do deal with To Do lists
• How to prioritise
• The impact of hand-held technology
• Overcoming procrastination
• And why photographers might like coloured filing systems

Generous with their praise

I was knocked back by how generous Ross and Claudia were with their praise for Brilliant Time Management; it seems it really hit the mark with them both.

I was also tickled by this picture on Claudia’s new website, under the heading “These are a few of my favourite things”.  Click on the thumbnail to see this and all the other pictures on Claudia’s blog.

Don’t worry; you won’t notice the difference.

Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in California has calculated that the change in the distribution of the Earth’s mass should have caused Earth to rotate a bit faster, shortening the length of our days by about 1.8 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).  This is a preliminary calculation, so the figure may change as more data becomes available for scientists to analyse.

Yes, tomorrow is 1 April

… but this is not a spoof: it’s a genuine observation with a real message.

If all you are worried about is how to get everything done today, then take a moment to think about other people who have something rally serious to worry about.

Getting your troubles into perspective is also an essential part of time management.

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The first response I usually give is to ask what is the first application they start up when their computer has booted up.  Guess what… it’s their email client.  Unless, that is, they have it set to start up automatically.

Gain control over your email

For most of us, the best starting point is to plan your day and to do your first tasks before activating email on your computer.

Unless your job is to scan and deal with emails, let them wait.  And unless your job is to scan and deal with emails, you don’t need an alert function activated so that emails disturb you while working on something else.  Better still, check your emails when you choose to then turn off your email client.

Outlook is a sinner here

MS Outlook is probably the most widely used email client.  Except that it isn’t just that, is it?  It is a contact database.  It is a calendar/diary system.  It is a to do tool.  It is a document tracking system…

If its name is anything to go by, it should be an “outlook” tool, helping you to get a better forward view of your workload.  The huge value of integrating loads of tools is balanced by the problem that, if you want your schedule on your desktop, then you get the email by default – and you can’t readily drop that default – although it is possible to supress easy access to your email and then open it in another window.

By the way: a fascinating fact

Outlook’s predecessor was an application called Schedule+

Reduce the volume of email coming into your inbox

Here are seven ways:

1. Make use of the voting buttons in outgoing mail, when you want to get a simple response to a question.  You can opt for simple yes/no type options, or set up your own custom responses
2. For complex surveys, use one of the free survey tools available on-line – like Survey Monkey, Kwik Surveys, Free Online Surveys, or even Google Docs.  A quick search will reveal loads of free services
3. Send short, well considered emails out
4. Be careful who you cc an email to and you will get fewer responses
5. Set up rules to divert regular newsletters into folders and you will be able to allocate time to reading them
6. Unsubscribe from lists you no longer have the time or inclination to read
7. Formally close projects that have ended (look at my Shift Happens! blog for tips)

Ross is a professional photographer, who wants to offer the photography community special guests from the photo world, discussing a chosen hot topic, each week.  The format is one new or aspiring professional and one seasoned pro discussing, over 30 minutes, how to get to the top of your game.  Viewers can Twitter questions for Ross to put to his guests, in advance.

On 11 April, I will be talking about Time Management with emerging photographer Claudia Carter from Carter Imaging in Edinburgh, UK.  But I suspect that this show will not just appeal to photographers.  Ross has briefed me that Claudia wants to talk about how to make time for a new venture, while continuing to stay on top of existing commitments.  Could that be useful to you.

If you cannot tune in at 7pm on 11 April, the show will be available on the Photo Night Live blog, after that.

So what did we do?

For boulder, read email inbox.  No matter how hard we work, it will always refill.  And, like magical purses of fairy tails, it will not bring ultimate wealth – a slavish devotion can only bring misery.

But let’s stick to one metaphor: for boulder read inbox.  We forever roll it up hill to find that tomorrow, it is once again full.  Did I defy the gods somewhere along the line?  I don’t recall.

The solution

If you can’t keep on top of your inbox minute by minute; hour by hour, what is the solution?  And, by the way; you shouldn’t chase every email, as that will leave you no time or head space to do creative, productive, deliberate things that make a real difference.  The answer is to stop focusing on the number of emails in you inbox for a while, and recognise only four levels of fullness:

Empty

Shangri-la:  even a new installation will immediately place a welcome email in your inbox.  This is a mythical status – theoretically possible, but probably in reality more scary than we can imagine.

“Empty”

Okay, not really empty, but you can see white space on your screen – tip: get a bigger screen

Full

Your inbox has escaped your control.  But unlike Sisyphus, don’t feel that immediately you have to start pushing it back up hill.  That would be enslavement to your inbox.  Instead, wait until you are ready to empty it (advice on how to do that in Brilliant Time Management)

“Really Full”

Okay, now you really do have to do something, because you have let it go too long, and now your system (email or organisation) is starting to mis-function.  Some employers even limit the inbox capacity of staff – which then means people don’t ever get emails once their inbox is full.  This isn’t a customer care blog, but if it were; I’d have to say: “how stupid is that?”  Creating poorer customer service as a by-product of poor time management is like giving a student an E for maths, because they missed their French homework.

The upshot

Stop your inbox angst.  Forever chasing an empty email inbox is the very definition of the absurd.

Now, why hasn’t Godot rung me yet?  He’s late.