1000 Business Lessons Every Businessman Must Know

Chapter 78 Time Management: Being an Efficient Leader (2)
Some leaders have good advantages from the beginning, such as genetic characteristics, happy childhood, good family background and education.These initial advantages possessed by them usually enable them to rapidly develop strong personalities.All else being equal, they do far less than others to grow and develop themselves.

Someone with a drift-and-go or "it's over" attitude to life may have some degree of success in business, but they're just opportunists who take advantage of a moment.

The real winners are not gifted by God or by chance, but they have the determination to do what needs to be done.They know that there is a lot to do when they get their hands on it, but they are smart enough to break tasks down into parts, one at a time, with energy. "Divide and conquer" was Caesar's method of conquering the Gauls, and it is still a brilliant strategy today.

636. Conserving energy, time and space
Concentration, planning, thinking, or remembering are all thought processes, and if these processes are not perfect, they can consume a lot of time and energy.Physically speaking, labor tools and routines are disorganized and waste valuable time and energy.A messy desk itself will reduce the efficiency of leadership.Unconditional, repetitive activity work routines are a waste of time for employees across the enterprise.

Efficiency is a form of economy because its essence is saving energy, time and space.If we imagine a person as a certain amount of energy, and the consumption of energy obeys the laws of time and space, then, to obtain the maximum efficiency, we must use the given amount of energy wisely: in the least reasonable time, in the smallest Complete tasks within a reasonable space.

Proper organization is essential to a company and to every department in a company.If the assignment and scope of work are well organized, each employee will know which responsibilities belong to him and which belong to his department, how his department is related to other departments, and how the company's managers exercise their powers.

Organization and efficiency, however, must begin with leadership itself.An ambitious leader must often check himself to see if he has planned and arranged his work with [-]% efficiency.If not, it's time to readjust your activities until you're satisfied with the results.

637. Waste of Time Is the Enemy of Improving Efficiency
There are some working methods that waste a person's time and energy, and the following are the phenomena of these time wasters.

1. The work did not solve the priority, always start to solve the extremely minor work first.Some leaders mistakenly believe that they might liven up their work by tackling the least important projects first, which is an uneconomical drain on energy.In doing so, they are effectively avoiding innovative work.They also put off important work until the busiest part of the day, when it is difficult to have enough energy to think about it, and they feel exhausted.Therefore, secondary tasks should be placed in the second place, and can be dealt with when the spirit is the most lax or when the work is the busiest.

2. Frequent shifts from one job to another.The organs of the human body, like other devices, lose power when they stop functioning.When you start after a rest period, it takes time to regain lost momentum.Based on this reason, managers should avoid unnecessary job switching in their work.With proper planning, the major tasks of a day or week can be grouped together to avoid back-and-forth and unnecessary repetition.

3. Keep your schedule full for the day.Another mistake of personal planning is to fill up the day's schedule with various activities, so that there is no flexible time to deal with possible emergencies.In this way, in case of an unexpected situation, the leader has to be forced to give up the planned work; and the unfinished work today must be put into tomorrow's schedule.If it goes on like this, he will have a pile of unfinished work on his desk, making him feel restless.Then he felt that a surprise attack was necessary to complete the accumulated work.This makes it difficult for him to critically evaluate his work and productivity.

638. Make a work schedule to avoid useless work
The work schedule can be cautious and orderly when doing things, avoiding useless work or disregarding priorities.A leader should leave some spare time in his work schedule.In this way, he will have time not only to deal with emergencies, but also to deal with lesser problems.

After a leader has worked out a reliable work schedule, he must first analyze his own work.You should keep a record of everything you do during the week, preferably a few weeks, and you should also include the work you want to do but often can't find the time to do.He should then study this record to find out which jobs are repeating regularly and which jobs can be clustered together.The degree to which there is regularity in the records depends in part on his position and the nature of his work.For some people the work naturally develops a routine, while for others the only characteristic of their work is irregularity.However, with a little research it is easy to see that the daily or weekly activities of any manager reveal more or less a pattern.

639. Need to have a sense of crisis and urgency

In today's climate of accelerated pace of change and increasingly complex relationships, competition intensifies.Just as a diving competition is a fierce competition, and the result of the competition is either a win or a loss, and a war is a more intense competition about life and death. The two can easily arouse people's sense of urgency and crisis.

All enterprises are invariably struggling and competing in this sense of crisis in order to open up the development path of enterprises.

The leader responsible for the overall operation of the department will face challenges from many aspects during the operation of the department. On the one hand, there are internal crises, and on the other hand, there are changes in the general environment and situation.As for the emergence of an internal crisis, the leader may be confident enough to overcome it, because after all, he has the decision-making power and can solve it according to his own understanding.However, changes in the general environment are far beyond the leadership's ability to control, and its impact not only involves the leader himself, but also involves the survival and development of the entire company.The challenges from these two aspects do not have a comfortable opportunity for leaders, but must always have a sense of urgency and crisis.

640. Time Is Money, Efficiency Is Life

The wave of the new technological revolution has violently impacted the world, and new concepts, practices, and scientific and technological discoveries are emerging more rapidly, and are quickly transformed into productive forces.This revolution breaks through national boundaries with a new view of time and space, and is unprecedentedly global.

The characteristic of this view of time and space is that space is constantly depreciating and time is constantly increasing in value.The depreciation of space means that due to the development of space by people, the restriction of space on people is getting smaller and smaller.For example, the same land can produce more food or build more houses, and can communicate with friends thousands of miles away at any time.The appreciation of time refers to the one-dimensionality and continuity of time.It can neither be stored nor interrupted, it is always limited.In order to solve the contradiction between the infinity of space and the finiteness of time, people increase the speed, but the speed increase is limited.

With the development of modern science and technology, the time constraints of constantly exploring new fields are more prominent.The more advanced the technology, the greater the work results per unit time, and the more precious the time. Therefore, the slogan "time is money, efficiency is life" has been accepted by more and more people.

In short, one of the most important principles of time management is to understand what things should be put first, which is also the most difficult for people to grasp and understand.

[-]. The Art of Time Management

641. Try to avoid being disturbed by the outside world

It is impossible to completely avoid interference from all sides at work. However, frequent interruptions will disrupt your work schedule, prevent you from completing tasks as planned, and make your schedule a dead letter.When you are concentrating on a certain job, interference will distract your energy, and you will pick up the job you stopped halfway. Most people need some time to concentrate, review the process and content of the previous work, and then return to the original train of thought. Work.This may be a big reason for your low productivity.

In order to improve work efficiency, we must find ways to reduce interference, at least to reduce or even avoid interference during the time of doing an important and critical work, and minimize its adverse effects.

Sometimes, part of the cause of too much interference may come from yourself; if you are immersed in an important report and a subordinate knocks on the door asking for an interview, although you are not willing to interrupt the work in hand, considering your body As a leader, you have the responsibility to solve problems for your subordinates, and you are concerned about the image of a leader who is peaceful and in harmony with employees, or you like to participate in everything, so you let him in and discuss for half an hour.

Many leaders like to say: "My door is always open to you." But this practice will cause them to waste a lot of precious time, often fail to complete the scheduled work goals, and cause more serious consequences over the years.

642. Don’t Be Controlled by Inertia
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