How Review time affects your mood!

Do you feel like some days you're in a great mood and others you frustrated, or you feel like nothing is getting done?

Well, I have a suggestion for you, and ask that you make sure that you are doing reviews. In my time management work sessions, I always state that part of your time scheduling should include review time. It is very important. Having review times accomplishes a couple of things for you.

1. It shows you that you can accomplish tasks even though you may not enjoy doing them. However, they move you toward your goals and that in and of itself gives you a great amount of pleasure from the knowledge that you're moving toward your goals.  So in turn, you will be in a good mood.  Moving forward is always a positive thing. It certainly beats moving sideways, not at all, or worse yet, backwards.
2. The second thing that reviews do are they keep you on track. They make sure that the tasks that are still open match the direction that you're trying to move in.  You will also shed some light on tasks that might not apply to your current goals. Therefore, you should delete them and remove them from your vision and goal sets as it is just wasting your time.

So in closing, make sure that you review every day just five minutes of your time in its can help you be in a great mood.

Have a great day and until next time...

Review from the OCPMI NewsLetter

Here is a link to the review of the time management presentation given last month at OC PMI.

Click Here

Thanks

Time Budgeting Spreadsheet available

For those that have seen me speak at events, I have mentioned a way for you to get the budgeting spreadsheet that I use to demo the importance of time budgeting. Here's how you can get it:

Become a fan of the PlanNet Facebook page here:
PlanNet FaceBook Fan Page

And I will send you the link via the Facebook fan page.

Secondly, Become a follower of this time management blog.

That's it.

Thanks and I'll be in touch soon.

The art of managing distractions or Time Wasters...

It's amazing how much time we WASTE during the day. You would think that we are constantly moving towards our goals with sharp razor focus. The reality is that we waste time without even knowing we are doing so. The other thing is that we do some things that we might normally consider time wasters, but they have a place in our schedule.

In my earlier posts, I suggest that you budget your time and compare actuals to budget. I also suggest that you add a time grouping of Distractions .... So as you are tracking your actuals, you keep an eye out for times that you are not focused on your task at hand but are working on things that you should not be, atleast not at this time. In order to do this successfully you have to be very honest with yourself. Otherwise you will be doing the same thing as creating tasks and just moving the task to the next day. It never get's done but it is on your list. Be honest with what you are doing.

The second area is budget review. After you have entered your actuals, look at how much time you were distracted by other tasks and or activities that were not even on your budget. Re-assess if this time group or duration of your time groupiong is adequate, and adjust your budget accordingly.

As always, review , Review, review!

That's it for today... Happy time Management.

I will be speaking at the Orange County PMI users group meeting in Feb.

Expect between 1 and 2 hundred folks. The topic will be Time Management for the project manager. I will post location and time details as I find that out...
Here is the link to the PMI Site : http://www.pmi-oc.org/
February Dinner Meeting
Tue., February 9, 2010
5:15 pm - 6:00 pm Resume Reviews (Board Room), courtesy of Technisource
5:30 pm - 9:00 pm Dinner Meeting
Wyndham Orange County
3350 Avenue of the Arts
Costa Mesa, CA 92626


Hope to see you there!

SMS posting for a Blog is really too limited...

I published my first post (below) and found that it is treated more like a tweet than content that will be meaningful. I'm sure there is a place for this.. But I will have to find it. Currently the sms post got split up to two blog posts. Yuck! Plus, if you have more than one Blog, it appears that I can only post to one Blog with the phone, so I will have to be selective which Blog I assign to the phone. I could see using this as a step by step or some sort of follow me process that is going to represent the blog title, but then why have the blog. That's what Twitter is for right? I had imagined that I would be able to do process documentation while the process was going on.. and I didn't have internet or computer access. Breaking up the SMS really hinders the flow. I'm a little disappointed in the SMS performance, if you can't tell.... I won't write it off.. My creative side just doesn't see a use ... Yet! If you know of some settings that I am not using properly, Please respond to this post and correct me!

Till Next Time...

Time Budgeting (as important as financial budgeting)

Have you ever wondered how a successful company that seems to operate off the cuff stays successfull. More than likely it won't. In order for a company (or individual for that matter) to be successfull you must budget. So I won't get into financial matter, but keep the theme around budgeting of your time.

Many time management guru's will have you think that wasting time is the killer of productivity .. hmmmm wait a minute ... it is!!! However, sometimes you have to plan to waste some time.. that way you are within you expected time expenditures. Yes I said time expenditures. You should treat your time like money, hence the age old term "time is money".

Well, if you budget your money (and I hope you do), then why not budget your time, down to the last 15 minute increment. And if you have a budget you can then compare your actuals to budget to see what your time mangement performance is like. Do you get an A, B, C, D or F??? Thet great thing about budgeting is you can budget for fun time or down time so you don't feel like you are being unproductive. If you do feel unproductive without knowing it is ok, you can tend to slip from your productive mindset and get back into old time wasting habits. Similar to feeling like you cheating on a diet and and eventually fall off the diet all together. People tend to beat themselves up over this behavior. If you have it budgeted and you stay within your budget then you are less likely to give up on your process (diet, time, goals ect..)

Here is a sample of my time budget:

I realize this is small (click on the image to see an enlarged view), but I hope you get the point. Budget your time in "types" of activities and then you can summarize your actuals to compare to later. I'll get into that detail in a different post.
Here is a sample of the actuals vs. budget summary:

This shows in week one of tracking time that I have two areas that are in the Red. If you have gone through the effort of budgeting and tracking your time, make sure you spend the time to review your actuals to budget. I suggest doing this process twice a year. It will help keep you on track and remind you of your goals and what steps you are taking (or not) to achieve them.

I'll cover the details of what to budget and how in another post.

Until Next time...