Time Is Not on Your Side

What separates the good leaders from the great ones is the ability to master their time, says industry advisor Mark Richardson in his newest Remodeling Mastery podcast. Having the ability to master one’s time helps you to reduces stress, allows you to accomplish more, helps you to keep your promises, and makes you feel more in control of a situation.

Listen to the podcast to hear Richardson discusses the three elements he says are essential to mastering your time.

Three Essential Time Mastery Elements

1. Understanding reactive time vs. proactive time: 4:04
2. How to manage meetings and make them meaningful: 11:56
3. Properly planning your time: 17:01

Partial Transcript

Hi, I'm Mark Richardson, and welcome to remodeling mastery. Remodeling mastery is a podcast series that's really designed to help you reflect and think about your business, not just do your business. What I try to do is I take topics that I'm really hearing out there that are pretty relevant to what you're doing and hopefully meaningful to take your game to the next level. This podcast series is supported by my friends, certainly in the industry, not the least of which is Professional Remodeler magazine.

Today, I want to talk about a topic that I'm seeing pop up quite a bit out there, and it's the whole focus of time, and specifically, the title of today's topic is time is not on your side. You know, one of the things I've realized over the years, not only being a time master, but also having written a book about the art of time mastery, is that one thing that really separates the good from the great individuals, individuals, whether it comes to leaders, individuals, whether it comes to in sales or production, is their mastery of time. So rather than give a whole seminar on the art of time mastery, what I want to do is take three elements that I think are, you know, topics and certainly themes that are especially interesting, and you can kind of couple these together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle piece, and really hopefully see each one stand alone but also see how they fit together.

Before we get into that. I think it's especially important whatever you do, whatever you do, either as a parent or as a leader in your business or as just a day to day kind of functions. Is that you really ask yourself, why is this important? Why is the subject of time? Why is the mastery of time important? Well, several reasons, at least, to put under your pillow and think about. Number one is it reduces stress. You know, if you're feeling any degree of stress, which 95% of people out there today are, then by being more masterful of time, you're going to see that blood pressure of stress certainly go down. Second is you will accomplish more. You know, who doesn't want to accomplish more fit more into their day or their week or certainly their year. Third is it allows you to keep promises. You know, so much of the time, the reason that you're actually falling short on either a project or even a relationship is, in fact, because of time you're not really focused enough on time and allows you to keep the promises. Third is allows you to exceed the expectations. Today more than ever, it's all about creating delighted clients. It's all about creating raving fans, and that's true with your relationships, and you can exceed the expectations if, in fact, you're more masterful at time. And most importantly, I think, it allows you to just feel a little bit more fulfilled, you know, allows you to feel a little bit more in control.

So today, I want to talk about three elements that relate to time that I think are especially important. Number one, I want to talk about the whole theme of reactive time versus proactive time. Number two, I want to talk about meetings and meetings being kind of time suck in your day, in your week, in your life. And then number three, I want to talk about planning time. And planning time not only, not only as as like you would plan a remodeling project, but also planning time as it relates to planning time and make appointments for yourself as well.

So let me start with the first one, and that's this whole theme of reactive versus proactive time. Now, the fundamental difference between reactive time and proactive time is, proactive time is the time that you control. Reactive time is it's controlling you. When I wrote the art of time mastery, that was really a big, big part of my focus was trying to get that in balance the reactive time and the proactive time with with people. So three things I'd strongly recommend, number one is take inventory of your time. Now this may not be quite as easy, but even if you just do it in a rough way, as I've oftentimes done in seminars, you will have a better understanding of second is to look at the sources of reactive time. I'm going to give you three today. And then number three is allowing for the reactive time to come into your space and into your day on a regular basis. So number one, take inventory of your time. So what I'd like you to do is just reflect what percentage, what percentage of your week. Think of it as a week is reactive time, time that others are controlling you, or things control you versus you control it now, as you really think about this subject, and don't take my numbers literally in your case, because you really do need to think about it, and in some cases you need to, actually, you know, be very intentional about jotting down some of those reactive and proactive activities you're doing so that it really helps you To understand it. But what I find with most people, most people that are leaders of companies, most people that are in management leadership roles, and even most people in project management, and maybe project leaders in sales, about 80% ideally about 80% you want to be proactive that you control not 20% now, by looking at it as an 8020 rule, which seems to be a magic kind of formula in so many things in our life, you know, by looking at it from that perspective, I think it really helps you to understand so if, in fact, you take inventory, and there's no you've got to be honest with yourself, if it's 60% proactive and 40% reactive, then what you need to do is you need to think about, how do I inch that? How do I get it to 6535

Speaker 1  6:37 

How do I get it to 7030 you're not going to make it jump from 60 to 80% proactive. But you can inch it forward by doing different things. And by doing that, it really gives you, I think, an opportunity to really have time on your side and not be against you. So there are three sources of reactive time. Number one is your clients. Number two is your team, and number three is your friends and family. Now there are other sources of reactive time, but those probably represent, for most people, about 80% of your reactive time. So starting with your clients, I think if you go into a mindset. I want to control this relationship. I want to control the communication rather than just react to it. Then I can see again that blend starting to shift. I might only get two three points in terms of that percentage blend shifting, but that will be meaningful over time. So what would I recommend. I recommend for those that are involved in sales, project management, leadership, whatever you define as your clients. On Monday morning, I think you what you should do is you should reach out proactively to each one of those clients. If you got clients in the pipeline, if you got clients under construction or in design, whatever, but reach out proactively. Be very friendly about how they did. How did they have a nice weekend before? But you just wanted to reach out to let them know that you were here first and foremost, and that you if they had particular questions, issues that come up, you would be available to meet with them on Wednesday at 12 o'clock, or when you come out to the site on Tuesday morning. You know, by proactively communicating with the client, letting them know you're here, letting know your top on top of everything, you will, in fact, be able to see more of your time be proactive and not reactive. Now, what's going to come of that of 10 different clients you're going to reach out to, you're going to probably, overall perceive positivity and professionalism from all of them. However, three or four of those are going to stand up and salute. They're going to do just what you asked him to do. There's going to be two or three probably that that you know, don't really register one way or the other. And then there's going to be two or three that are just going to communicate whenever they want to with you, just like they always have, because they are control freaks. So what you're doing, though, is you're adjusting the blend. You're seeing some improvement. The second is your team members. Your team members are source of a lot of reactive time. Now, I know everyone is kind, and they're trying to be helpful to your team members whenever they ask and interrupt you, but what you need to do is shift the conversations and move it more towards saying to someone that's interrupt you, Jim, how about if I get back to you on this in an hour where I can really be focused and really to address your your question or your issue by trying to set a time to meet with someone on things? It sounds a little bit inefficient, but it's really not. I go back to of these 10 interruptions that you have, you're going to have two of them that are fires that you have to deal with right away. You're going to have two of them, or three of them that say that's just fine. We'll set it up. And then mysteriously, you're going to have about half of them. They're going to go and solve it in a different way or on their own, but they're not going to put you in a reactive vote and have you be effective. Now, the same technique, I think, holds true when it comes to your friends and family. You know, rather than necessarily drop everything when you in fact, have friends and family interrupting, you try to either set a time or at least communicate in different kind of ways I got your message, maybe you text them back rather than drop everything and return phone calls. But I think the point in all this is you've got to take control of your reactive time if you ever want to see I think a level of success when it comes to time. The last element is allowing reactive time in your day, in your space. We're not machines, we're not mechanical. You've got to allow a certain amount of time in your overall day. Now what I recommend with my planning system is allowing 120 minutes a day at the beginning for reactive time and activities. So that means, if you've got about a window of a 10 hour day, two of those hours are probably going to be reactive, and the other eight you can really plan out in a lot more detail. As you move into a planning process, and you get better and better and better at it, you can start to reduce that down, down, down. So in fact, you can be more productive than ever...