Agency Minder^® Episode 007 Time Management

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Manny Bartolini: Hey everybody, Manny Bartolini here, CEO and founder of Agency Minder. So in this podcast, I want to talk a little bit about what you're doing with your time. So it's been a lot of change in the past couple of months, and a lot of us are probably trying to figure out what to do with our time, not only professionally, but also personally. And so, you know, I don't normally do book reviews, but I did want to share my thoughts on time management, and I actually am taking a lot of the inspiration from the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.

In his book, he actually does a really good job of describing a time management matrix. In this matrix, what he tries to do is to get people to focus on looking at their activities in two axes. On the first axis, it's importance. Importance being things that are ordered based on how significant an impact they're going to have on what you're doing. The second axis is on urgency. And so he says that there are some things that are going to be urgent and that are non-urgent. And so I'm going to read just a couple of the parts of this here for you just now, so you can self-assess and reflect on where you are.

And then I'm going to tell you where his point of view would take you to focus your efforts. So the first quadrant is on urgent, important activities. My guess is that a lot of you, like me, are focusing a lot of your attention there. In this quadrant, the types of activities that you have are things like crises, pressing problems and deadline-driven projects. I think you'd be really hard-pressed to find someone who's not experiencing a heavy burden, either personally or professionally as a result of all of the change that's occurred recently and because of the pandemic with which we're all dealing.

The second quadrant that he has is the non-urgent important areas. I'm going to hit on this very briefly because this is where I'm going to come back to it in a little bit. But in this quadrant are things like preventive actions, relationship building, recognizing new opportunities, planning and recreation. The third quadrant and the fourth quadrant are both in this area that he describes as being not important. In the third, there are interruptions, some calls, some reports, some meetings, pressing some popular activities that might be time-consuming.

And then there are other not important, non-urgent activities in quadrant four, which are things like busy work, some mail, phone calls, time-wasting things, like perhaps spending a lot of time on social media, and some other things that might be just pleasantries, that might be fun. If, like so many other people, you're spending a lot of your effort in the urgent crisis mode, or in the quadrant, which is quadrant one, or in quadrant four, where there's a lot of what I would describe as just time wasting, you may not be as effective as you could be.

In order to become more effective, his counsel would be that you focus on activities that are in that quadrant two. And as a reminder, those are things like prevention, relationship building, recognizing new opportunities, planning and recreation. So when you think about where your time is going, where are you? You know, I would describe a lot of my effort as having been recently shifted to try to focus on family. It's really hard to do because they've got a full day of work, but the full day of work is filled with a bunch of different priorities, some of which are urgent important because of where they might emanate.

I've tried my best to clear out all of the activities that are just time waste. Wasting time is not a helpful activity. In fact, it becomes a burden when it comes to spending time on the things that are more important. And I look at the relationship building aspect in two ways. There's the family relationship, taking the time to actually have lunch with my family, have dinner with the family, and making time to meet with friends with whom I'm either currently trying to build a relationship or having a long-standing relationship.

So why is this important to helping you mind your business? Well, I think, as you think about your business partners, the people with whom you work, if you want to grow that trust and build those relationships, those things that are so critical to building a long-term business and having fantastic long-term results, you have to get to that place where you're making those priority calls, as we just described. If your team is always, always on this urgent, important life cycle, that's when you're going to start to see people getting burned out.

You're going to see people starting to get uninspired. In some instances you'll start seeing people starting to look for alternatives, places to flee. Now, I can imagine that that's a little bit more difficult at times like now where total national unemployment is so high, but be that as it may, there's still a lot of opportunities for people who are eager. So my advice, and I try to do it myself, it's hard: focus your efforts on those things that are really important, but non-urgent, strategic, long-term business and relationship building opportunities.

Because by doing that, I think you'll end up setting yourself up for a long-term success. You'll get a lot more clarity from the business partners that you have, and you'll be able to build that trust. So hope you find that helpful. Until next time, bye for now. That'll do it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in. Please subscribe and share with a friend. And in the meantime, you can follow Agency Minder on LinkedIn or check us out at www.agencyminder.com. We're here to help you mind your business.