Do you enjoy working with people?
Do you enjoy working with people? In these three articles, you will go through the steps
always to be in your mind to shorten your working day by simple tips. Lazy
people who really wants to be rich without hard work can refer these articles.
Actually hard work really does not matter until it is for a specific outcome.
Read these articles also,
The first objective of applied laziness is to shorten
your working day not to achieve less, but to achieve more in a shorter time.
Long hours are a
bad habit. Many executives work extended hours because, seduced by all that stuff about hard work, they feel it is
expected of them. But if you measure your performance carefully you'll find
that long hours are counter-productive; the longer you work, the more woolly
your thinking becomes and the less you actually
achieve. (Some people have a longer peak period than others, but the
principle still applies: tiredness dulls the brain.)
The best way to lighten the load is by
effective delegation, which we shall come to later. But there is also a range
of time-saving shortcuts. Get into the habit of using them now, while you are
an executive in someone else's company, and
they'll make an enormous difference when you need them most: the day you
start your own concern.
Start early
Batty though it seems, the quickest way to shorten
your working day is to start an hour early. This lets you get the tricky stuff
done that report written, tender document set out, contract examined before the
others arrive. Or, because you're fresh, you can use that time for strategic thinking: how can I improve my team's
long-term performance?
You'll get more done in that
hour, you'll find, than in two hours at day's
end when you are tired. You may even get more done than in three hours of normal office bustle: phone calls,
appointments, and the assorted crap that keeps landing on your desk,
destroying your concentration.
You
can recoup that hour, and more, by working less overtime at day's end. And think of the example you're setting!
Cut your appointments
The prime job of management is not to
keep appointments or attend meetings. It is to make things happen. If
your diary is full of internal appointments, it is a short-odds bet that you
have too many people reporting to you. Are you trying to do the
supervisors jobs for them? Are you simply too accessible to people "down
the line"?
Either way, you can save time by bunching
your appointment times together and keeping them brief ten minutes if you must,
five minutes if you can. One chief executive gets each departing staff member
to summon not the next person on the list, but the next but one. So people
arrive in a continuous stream, and none of his time is wasted.
Use the time you save
to create deliberate gaps in your schedule. This is your thinking, plotting or
planning time, and is absolutely essential. Hear what Donald Trump says on the
subject:
"I work from
morning until night, but I try to make sure there is plenty of white space on my
appointment calendar... Not being booked
solid allows me to come up with ideas rather than simply react to other
people's problems... Making sure that I run my day instead of allowing my day
to run me is a key way I avoid being overwhelmed by work."
from
Trump: Surviving at the Top
If your diary is full of external appointments, on the
other hand, the question is much simpler: are you trying to do the salesmen's
jobs for them? (On this subject, I cannot help recalling Lord Stokes, then
chairman of British Leyland, making headlines in the 1960s by dashing off to Cuba to sell buses to Fidel Castro.
You could just about date this major company's final decline from this
misuse of its chairman's time,)
Try a job sheet
This is a plain white sheet of A4 paper
on which you list the tasks ahead of you sort out this, chase up that, resolve
the other, adding new jobs as they crop up and crossing out completed ones.
Tony O'Reilly uses file cards with a blue border and "A.J.F.
O'Reilly" embossed on them, but this sort of swank is not strictly
necessary.
The job sheet is
essential to the executive whose specific tasks can take anything from two days
upwards. Organising a new branch was one
example I've encountered; launching a new magazine was another. In such jobs it
is more efficient than a diary. You don't have to pause, even for a moment, to think what comes next, because you have
it constantly in front of you. And, at day's end, you do not have to waste time
transferring a dozen or more partially completed jobs from one diary page to
the next.
If you
have only a few appointments, you can note these at the foot of the sheet, e.g., "Broker
10 a.m. Tues." or "Sarah's b'day Fri. p.m.". This leaves your secretary free
to do something useful, like chasing up outside
suppliers and internal laggards, responding to job seekers or filling in one of
those damnable questionnaires with which governments plague businesses.
Personally,
I used a job sheet in a range of businesses for over forty years,
and found it so useful that for most of that time I didn't need a diary at all.
Cut down on correspondence
If the billionaire oilman Jean
Paul Getty could run his global empire from any old hotel room anywhere, with just one secretary
and an overworked telephone, you can cut
down on the paperwork you generate and the time it takes to do it.
Getty had strong views about
office efficiency:
"One of the
serious wrongs in American business is the penchant for wallowing in welters of paperwork and administrative detail. Some
companies have literally hundreds of
people keeping records on each other and passing interoffice memoranda back and forth... The cost of this
over-administration is staggering, not only in salaries paid to paper
shufflers, but in the general slowdown it has on all operations."
quoted in The House of Getty
What to do about it? The first rule, practised by
Getty and others, is: never write a letter when a phone call (or fax, or
e-mail) will do. Stockbrokers already-work this way, accepting buy and sell
orders worth thousands or even millions of pounds on the strength of just a phone call. True, some brokers do have expensive
systems which tape record every incoming call, just in case of arguments
later. But for many businesses a much simpler tape system or none at all is all
you need.
The second rule is: never
write a letter if a footnote will do. For example, you get from a regular
supplier a letter setting out price, delivery
time and terms on a new item. If these are OK (and you may well have had a
haggle session with him already) just scrawl "Agreed" in the
margin, initial it and fax it back. A normal margin will even allow,
"Agreed, except we reserve the right to vary the quantity by ±10% and
vary your price pro rata", as I have this minute proved by practical
experiment.
That still leaves the letters which
demand a fuller reply. A few people are
expert at dictating. Most are not; their letters are rambling, repetitive
and imprecise.
At least 50 per cent of letters
arriving in the average office are on purely
routine matters. Most stock replies will be on computer. For the others, work
up a system with your secretary: you attach a brief note to the incoming letter, he or she writes the reply. To begin with,
you write reasonably full notes; as time goes by these become shorter
and shorter: "Try
again September", "See ad. agency", "Not poetry, thanks".
Gradually, this turns your
secretary into a PA, able to read your mind
and stand in for you on a range of subjects. Good: stretching people's talents,
not their hours, is the basis of good delegation and indeed of good
management generally. Do you enjoy working with people?
Categories: do you enjoy working with people, hard work
