Time Management Strategies From The Busiest CEOs
Bradley W. Smith, CEO & Co-founder,Rescue One Financial
In our fast-paced digital economy, time goes by at the speed of your bandwidth. Balancing competing priorities at home and at work can make it easy to fall behind on crucial job responsibilities and leave you with almost no time to devote to your family and friends. Sometimes everyone needs to reorder priorities and take advantage of tried and true time saving strategies to help stay afloat while meeting multiple deadlines.
It turns out we're not as good at multitasking as one might imagine. In fact, a University of Utah study found most people's conception of their ability to successfully multitask is seriously inflated; 70 percent of people felt they were "above average" multitaskers.
So what are the secret time saving strategies that successful CEOs use to run major corporations without falling behind? Read on to discover six winning strategies for managing time efficiently without ending up in crunch-time chaos.
1. Rethink "Priority Items"
In a digital world where your inbox is always open whether you're in the office or not, by the time action items make it to your desk they suddenly all feel like top priorities. Take a step back, consider each item's relative importance with reference to the others, and start to create a list of priorities.
2. First Come, Not Necessarily First Served
When arranging your list, remember that just because an action item arrives first, it doesn't necessarily receive top priority. When looking through your to-do list, remember that the most important or most time sensitive items go to the top, rather than ranking your priorities in order of arrival. Hopefully, your boss sets a good example for productivity and prioritization; a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research discovered that the boss' example for efficiency skills sets the standard for worker productivity.
3. Make Peace With Incompletion
To be productive, you must first make peace with the idea that sometimes everything won't get done. Acceptance of this fact is the key to successfully prioritizing your time and will also mitigate the stress often created when task remain open.
4. Delegate Your Calendar
Hiring someone else to manage your calendar is one of the best time saving strategies because time management is much more complex than one might think.
5. Merge Work and Personal Calendars
Use technology such as a smartphone or tablet to merge your work and personal calendars so you get the full picture. Working from separate calendars may cause confusion and make you miss important meetings or life events.
6. Screen Your Calls
Not wasting time dealing with unimportant phone calls is one of the most trusted time saving strategies among CEOs. Whether you hire additional staff to answer your calls or use virtual reception technology, this technique will save you time and free you up to work on more important matters.
Take a cue from successful CEOs and apply these techniques to maximize your work time so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labor in free time with friends and family. If you want more information on how to apply effective time saving strategies to your own work and life, ask how _______ can help you maximize your at work efficiency so you can reap the rewards of your labor with more free time in off-work hours.
About the Author
Bradley W. Smith is the CEO and co-founder of Rescue One Financial, headquartered in Irvine, California. Rescue One Financial helps individuals resolve unsecured debt during troubling times. His 18-year financial services career includes Wall Street with Merrill Lynch, where he helped pioneer the restricted stock diversification business at Morgan Stanley.