Tag: Skills

6 Time Wasters vs 6 Time Savers

Written by Gillian Reid on August 24, 2017. Posted in Articles.

The idea of time management is not a new concept but the term creates a false perception of what a person is able to do.

Time can’t be ‘managed’, time is uncontrollable and we can only manage ourselves and our use of time. Time management is actually self-management!

It is important to know what aspects of our personal management need to be improved in order for the time management process to work. Identifying your time wasters will ensure you are not wasting time on unnecessary activities. Consider some of the following time wasters:

Mobile phone: how many times a day do you pick up your mobile to react to a message or check social media? Don’t have your phone on the desk, put it away in your drawer or bag and only check on your breaks.
Interruptions by a phone call, messages or personal visitor: assess every interruption, if it is not urgent and important; ask if it can be discussed later. If you use an instant message system, mark yourself as Busy or Do Not Disturb in order to provide users with an indication on your current status. This may not be fool proof as some people could ignore this. Most peoples will respect these status updates if you use them accurately and not constantly marked as Do Not Disturb.
Procrastination and indecision: decision avoidance is one of the most common time wasters. Stop procrastinating and take action. Add additional time to your plan in order to handle indecision and put time in people diary for them to discuss the decisions and provide sign off. Ensure a RAID log is maintained for any project based work and indecision can be raised as a time waster.
Unclear objectives and priorities: This is where we waste most of our time as Business Analysts. This can result in time spent on the minor things and not on the major things that are important. When you are asked to complete a task make sure you have clear guidelines and objectives on what is expected from you and the date due in order to plan your priorities.
Stress and fatigue: a lack of sleep and worrying about personal matters reduces productivity. Most adults need between 6-8 hours’ sleep every night. Ensure you have a good work/personal life balance.
Desk management and personal disorganisation: how much time do you spend looking for something on your desk or computer? The most effective people work with clear desks and organised files.

Fortunately, there are strategies to better self-management in order to feel in control and reduce stress.

Write To-Do Lists: Creating a weekly to-do list with bite size, achievable tasks that you can tick off once completed. Don’t write project titles or a task that is too high level that you can’t actually complete in the working week. Allocate a specific time limit to the task in your diary and do not go over this time. Sometimes we need to learn to stop working on something and move on, if we spend too much time deliberating over activities we can ultimately be wasting time.
Priorities: Most of the urgent items that you work on are other people’s priorities. Ensure that you establish an expected completion date and clarify the difference between important and urgent tasks. Then you can identify priorities with simple lettering:
1. Must Do
2. Should Do
3. Could Do
Planning: Do not allow yourself to be distracted from your plan, work through the priorities first. Think about when you are most active/alert in the day and complete the must do tasks in this time frame. Schedule meetings to avoid wasting time with unplanned visits or quick questions. Then plan for the meeting to get the most of it. This simple daily planner can help you plan your day in order to get the most out of it. Aim to complete the Must Do and if you get to the ‘should do’ and ‘could do’ it’s a bonus.
Simple Daily Planner
Goals: with the help of your weekly to-do list and priorities, set daily goals, so you know what you want to achieve in the morning and be specific. Learn when to say no to a task and delegate to others if you have the authority.
Emails: We spend most of our working day dealing with emails and a majority of emails are low priority or not relevant. Think about sending fewer emails and ask not to be involved in emails that do not concern you. Prioritise incoming emails by sorting emails by Sender then To and reading emails sent directly to you first and then CC second. Remove the new email notification to avoid distraction during another task and handle emails during an allocated time slot in the day.
Meetings: how many meetings do you attend where you leave feeling ‘that was a waste of time!’ Keep meetings brief and provide an agenda and required information prior to meeting. Place time limits on agenda items in order to avoid lengthy discussions and handle important items first. Try a stand-up meeting as they tend to take less time and decisions can be made faster. If you have been invited to a meeting, is it vital you attend? Could you delegate to someone else?

You need to recognise that you can’t do everything! Simply do more of the important things and let the trivial things fall through the cracks. Strive for significance over speed and quality over quantity. Multitasking is not possible! Not only does it decrease efficiency, it also compromises memory.

Don’t be distracted from your plan! The key to effectiveness is getting the things done that we schedule in our planners. This involves commitment and self-discipline.

Driving Out Distraction – Tips for Facilitating Focus during Group Sessions

Written by Victoria Mills on August 22, 2017. Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Driving Out Distraction – Tips for Facilitating Focus during Group Sessions

I recently attended the 2017 PMWorld/BAWorld Conference held in Toronto. The opening keynote speaker, Curt Steinhorst from FocusWise, presented a motivating talk about managing one’s focus and attention.

Of course, having attention deficit disorder myself, and having worked as a high school teacher, I found his discussion interesting and I could easily relate. In his speech, Curt articulated the factors that affect our ability to focus, which are energy, emotions, environment, and experience. He also categorized the things that can distract our attention which are internal and external interruptions that may influence our ability to focus. As a Business Analyst, I started to ask myself how these distraction factors affect group sessions and what could be done to mitigate distractions and facilitate the collective focus-ability so that we could feel more productive.

Meetings, workshops, walkthroughs and large team sessions can be draining on the individual’s ability to focus and on the team’s as well. Since our energy will decline during meetings, and as people begin to lose focus, they can contribute to an environment that distracts others, or emotionally begin to lose sight of the value of the overall output, the value driven from group activities begins to take a downturn as well. We can prepare for these distractions, be aware of the effectiveness of focus throughout the meeting, and evaluate the factors that influence or impede focus afterwards. I have organized some tactics to overcome distraction in three categories; pre-event, during-event, and post-event. The intended applications of these tips are for longer or larger in-person events since they would be exhaustive for smaller update meetings.

Pre-Event

Plan ahead of the meeting. At the beginning of a project, while planning stakeholder engagement approach, consider and plan to communicate not only the meeting roles and responsibilities, but also strategies to maintain team focus.
Lay out the ground rules with the stakeholders. Identify the various meeting types in the engagement plan with the various stakeholder teams and create guidelines that allow for management of distractions.
Distribute agendas ahead of time and identify your expectations of the attendees before and during the meeting. Articulate the intended output of the meeting well enough in advance so that attendees understand their purpose for being present. This allows them to prepare not only the materials they may need to bring to the session but also their minds to that they can feel engaged.
Schedule meetings for the latter part of the day if possible. Allow team members to conduct their individual work in the morning and come to an afternoon session with a feeling of relief and appreciation for the change in pace.
Schedule shorter sessions. The anticipation of long sessions can set the tone by exhausting participants before they even get started. Avoid this by limiting the length of time you expect to maintain their attention.
Plan for distractions. While conducting stakeholder analysis, as a meeting facilitator, assess how you can them remain focused when the going gets tough. If you have a plan on how to handle distractions beforehand, you are more able to guide the group past them with little disruption.
Consider doing some team-building sessions or getting to know what motivates your stakeholders during the early days of the project so that you can identify how to plan for distractions.
Make sure that the environment is suitable for the activity and that it does not contribute to distraction. Seating, ventilation, noise, light, and sight lines can all influence one’s ability to pay attention. It may help to evaluate the location for these impacts in advance.
Prepare to have enough variety in the visual aids to maintain audience attention when necessary, but not so much that it distracts from the conversation.
Come up with a mantra for the team or work ahead – this can be a sentence that defines the goal and anchors commitment. When things get tough, remind the audience, or have it posted on the wall in sight of all participants.

During Event:

Set some meeting SMART goals. Begin the session with a recap of the meeting purpose, expected output, and what is possible to achieve.
Pay attention to the influencers that can motivate or negatively affect the focusing ability of others and the group throughout the session.
Give participants the floor and encourage the sharing of information. Then echo back their message so that they feel heard and valued. As a result, they are more likely to engage in the task. This also allows others to absorb the information twice!
Take planned recap moments throughout the session to re-iterate the purpose, expected output, and any findings or discoveries. The number of recaps depends on the length of the meeting, the audience, and the complexity of discussion.
Take breaks! Allow the attendees to shift gears shortly to tickle their brains, move around, change their sight line, be creative, or to take care of small distractions. When they return, they are more likely to stay on task. Plan these carefully. You do not want the breaks to become deterrents.
Provide participants with the items they will need to satisfy distractions without losing focus. Giving in to distraction in small doses can sometimes maintain focus over long periods. Consider providing tactile items such as a variety of papers, pens, marker, stress balls, and fidget toys at tables so that distractions can be satisfied without entirely losing focus.
Use the parking lot. Allow off-topic questions and comments, but do not allow them to derail the group. Put those on a predetermined easel or whiteboard and call it the “parking lot”. Do not discard these! Go back to review the parking lot at the end of the meeting. Have the team decide if the topics are worth discovering and if so, action them. If not, discard them with consensus.

Post-Event:

Recap the meeting to highlight accomplishments and outputs, and identify if discussions remained on track.
Evaluate how well the team was able to remain attentive at the end of each meeting to recognize what works and the potential need for other strategies.
Monitor the results of post-event evaluations over time throughout the project. There may be a re-occurring issue affecting a team’s ability to focus.
Monitoring results from a larger scale. Analyze what has worked and not worked over long periods and many projects.
Share with others what you discover. Others may benefit from your experience and results.

Survey Says Squ(Wh)at

Written by Robin Goldsmith on August 16, 2017. Posted in Articles.

In my experience working with and training business analysts (BAs), I’ve found a number of things that differentiate more-effective BAs from less-effective ones.

High on the list is that less-effective BAs tend to over-rely on surveys and questionnaires for data gathering. Beyond business analysis, I’ve further found that less effective folks of all persuasions tend to over-rely on surveys for making decisions.

Surveys are popular because they seem like an inexpensive way to get seemingly simple information from a lot of people. It used to be that surveys were printed in bulk and perhaps mailed or just handed out to prospective responders. The responder does the main work of filling out the survey. Totaling scores from returned surveys takes a bit of effort but not much brainwork.

The Internet has made it even easier with online surveys/questionnaires that eliminate printing and postage costs, while simultaneously automating score counting grunt work.

Moreover, the Internet facilitates getting surveys to more people quicker. Many online and offline business transactions trigger immediate online customer satisfaction surveys, with autoresponder software sometimes hounding until the survey is completed. Lots of online transactions embed easy instant surveys, such as one- to five-star ratings, which as with this article usually are voluntary but sometimes must be completed in order to obtain something additional that the customer wants.

The biggest weakness of surveys/questionnaires is that they provide highly questionable data which are not suitable for basing business decisions on. Data are unreliable when answers aren’t real, representative, responsive, or relevant.

Reality

“A wide, though rarely spoken of, position in the tech industry says that customer satisfaction scores are BS” Rob Enderle wrote at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/dell-technologies-vs.-hp-inc-the-interesting-nuances-of-applying-nps-to-effect.html.

The ease of Internet surveys no doubt has exacerbated surveys’ unreliability by creating over-surveying and resulting backlash against surveys in general. People answer anything just to get annoying surveys out of their face.

Increasingly, responses too often are perfunctory or “gamed.” These days so many service providers not only ask customers to please complete a coming customer satisfaction survey but also warn that any response less than “the best” will be very harmful to the typically low-level worker being rated. Consequently, customer satisfaction surveys can make even the most superficial services seem world class. In addition, people are reluctant to report even actual shortcomings of providers they like.

Representativeness

Perhaps you’re aware that in the survey business, a 2% response rate is considered good. Quick math show that a far lower percentage of BA Times/PM Times readers instant-rate articles. A rudimentary understanding of statistics makes it evident that a 2% sample cannot reliably speak for the population. Moreover, there’s a good chance that the specific 2% is very much not representative of the population.

Those who choose to respond tend to be self-selecting from the fringes, often disproportionately on the negative end because they have an axe to grind. Sometimes they’re upset about the survey subject; but they could just as well be cranky about something unrelated, yet take it out on the survey instead of kicking the dog. Then, too, are those who take a certain perverse pleasure in “never giving a perfect score,” which further throws off the sample’s meaning.

Additionally, negative responses often reflect that the respondent didn’t want to attend the event or that it wasn’t the right event for them, which means they actually were rating something other than the event itself; but few surveys provide a means to reveal such hidden measures.

Responsiveness

Moreover, some survey responses are simply erroneous. I’ve seen numerous examples of surveys with very positive comments that obviously mistakenly-marked all “1s,” perhaps thinking number 1 is usually the best when in fact it’s the worst score for the particular survey. Sometimes it’s the opposite, where poor comments nonetheless come along with high scores. One-click responses could easily be typos, but there’s no way to tell whether or how they were intended.

Professional survey companies charge a lot of money because they use very scientific techniques. We mainly become conscious of them during elections, but they are used widely in marketing and elsewhere throughout the year. They go to great lengths to understand demographic details and assure their samples in fact are representative of the populations they intend to measure.

Professional surveys usually are reasonably accurate, except of course when they’re not. For instance, there was a famous photo of victorious 1948 Presidential candidate Harry Truman holding a prominent newspaper with a blaring headline that Truman’s opponent Tom Dewey had won. The paper had over-relied on widely-accepted survey data rather than waiting for the actual vote which contradicted the mis-sampled survey. More recently, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton found election results failed to match what their surveys were saying.

Also, all survey-takers are not created equally. For many topics, only answers from knowledgeable people will have value. Yet, it can be near impossible to attract responses from them or to filter out respondents who are not suitably qualified.

Relevancy

Professional surveys also rigorously test each survey question to give confidence it accurately measures its intended topic. Wording can dramatically affect how questions are interpreted and answered. In contrast, typical analysts’ survey questions almost always are simply whatever wording the analyst happens to think of at the time.

Sometimes the question’s wording is unclear or misleading—to the survey taker. The author always thinks their questions are clear. Thus, it’s essential to have mechanisms, included in the survey and/or through follow-up, that help us understand how the responder interpreted the question and their response. However, such essential additional effort rapidly erases the survey’s supposedly low cost.

I’m constantly annoyed by surveys that force choosing from a set of answers where none conveys what I want to tell them—and what they probably really needed to know but still won’t find out until it’s too late, if then.

Surveys are best for capturing information about simple facts, such as, “how many computers are there in your house?” Consider how differently different members of the same household could answer that seemingly simple question. Moreover, such facts tend to have limited value. Survey authors usually want to find more complex information, often by asking respondents to compose answers rather than selecting from pre-defined choices. Few people are good at coming up with or articulating open-ended responses; and scoring such answers tends to defeat surveys’ presumed economies.

Consequently, it’s very common for the main finding of the survey to be too-late realization of what questions should have been asked instead of the ones that were asked and turned out not to provide relevant information.

Decision Making

It should be apparent from the above typical weaknesses of surveys why effective BAs use them sparingly and why over-relying on them characterizes ineffective analysts. But the issue goes beyond analysts, because the bigger harm comes from those who act based solely on survey ratings. And we all tend to do it to some extent, often with far greater impacts than we may realize.

These days, a one-digit survey rating can disproportionately determine choice of things such as movies, restaurants, and books/articles/courses. I don’t know about you, but I often find the ratings don’t match my tastes. For instance, I continually am disappointed by Academy Award winners; but not always. .

Not only are such measures likely to be unsound, so too are common reactions to them. High or positive survey scores tend to be taken for granted, whereas disproportionate weight often is attached to low or negative survey scores.

Thus, you may or may not read a highly-rated article or book; but you almost certainly won’t read one with a low rating, even though the low rating may be totally specious, mistaken, or even malicious. When you won’t read the maligned piece, you won’t counter the low rating with your own perhaps higher rating, so the stain persists.

When a one-digit rating steers me to a movie, article, or restaurant I don’t like or away from one perhaps I would have liked, the significance and impact on me is fairly small; but it can make all the difference to the provider whose service or product I and others like me do or don’t choose.

Not surprisingly, survey ratings with potentially big financial impacts not only are shaky at best but now increasingly are subject to gaming. Besides obviously-seeded scam ratings placed by bribery or automated tools, high-rating incentives have led to various borderline-ethical techniques to bump up scores. For example, I’m aware of training that teaches how to make essentially any book an Amazon best seller by inducing five-star reviews as soon as Amazon lists the title. Authors can be disadvantaged by working the old-fashioned way and depending on real readers’ actual ratings.

Issues are magnified when such unreliable solely-ratings-based decisions involve matters of materiality, especially in the realm of projects and business analysis.

Presenting for Engagement, getting the most out of your meeting

Written by Jason Kelly on August 15, 2017. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Presenting for Engagement, getting the most out of your meeting

All too often we have attended presentations that upon conclusion of the meeting we asked ourselves:

Why was I in this meeting? What was the point of the meeting? All too often we have attended presentations that upon conclusion of the meeting we asked ourselves: Why was I in this meeting? What was the point of the meeting?

It costs money in salaries and time for staff members to attend meetings. Ineffective meetings can waste significant amounts of resources in terms of dollars and time that could be spent on other activities. Project Managers and Business Analysts schedule a lot of meetings as part of their day to day activities. Let’s discuss how to deliver maximum results from each meeting you are hosting.

Caprice White says, “Meeting facilitation is a soft skill that is a vital part of your business analyst toolkit. It is rare to be a business analyst and not facilitate meetings.” Keeping your facilitation skills sharp can move those meetings along when everyone in the room seems to be talking about a different topic.

“Fortunately, we have a little meeting protocol where I work…you can’t schedule a meeting without identifying the objective of the meeting and the desired outcome,” offers Andrea Brockmeier. Identify why you are meeting and what you expect to get out of the meeting in the invitation to be clear with meeting attendees. If your purpose and outcome are not clear, don’t hold the meeting. Your agenda should support the outcome. Consider stating agenda items as questions to answer as a way of reinforcing the meeting outcome.

Bob Prentiss offers the advice, “With the right preparation, you can confidently walk into any room – including the board room – and knock it out of the park. Know your audience needs and tell a good story.” Even with a clear meeting purpose and outcome, a meeting can be unproductive without understanding your attendee’s needs. Understand WIIIFM: What Is In It For Me? Every attendee will be asking that question at some point in the meeting. Tell the story to get WIIFM across. Data is good, but we remember stories long after the meeting. Data supports the story you are telling.

There are four phases to creating a great meeting and presentation, one that will both inform and create engaging conversation.

Planning Phase

The planning phase can be a quick review of the presentation structure (if recurring content) or a more detailed in which you are thinking about key aspects of the meeting. The first key decision point is outlining the purpose of the meeting. The next is to outline the outcomes of the meeting you want to achieve. Outlining the outcomes sets expectations on the desired outcome of the meeting.

Invite roles or resources that are critical to ensuring a good outcome for your meeting. Stakeholder analysis or a RACI can be used to determine meeting invites. If the meeting outcome is a decision, make sure that attendee can make that decision. If an attendee can’t help you achieve the meeting outcome or make a decision, you might want to consider excluding them from the meeting. Understanding your audience is important to making a good presentation. Equally important is understanding why someone declines the meeting invitation. If you can’t hold the meeting without them, ask for a delegate that can make decisions in their place or contribute to the conversation.

If participants are attending the meeting remotely, it’s a good idea to make sure the teleconferencing equipment, phone and desktop sharing application are accessible and available to the attendees. Include the logistic information on how to connect to the meeting remotely in the meeting invite and all meeting communications.

Don’t skip over the agenda. Roger Schwarz from Harvard Business Review talks about the importance of the meeting agenda, “We’ve all been in meetings where participants are unprepared, people veer off-track, and the topics discussed are a waste of the team’s time. These problems — and others like it — stem from poor agenda design.” Get a clear agenda for your meetings and list agenda items as questions that need answers not just bullet points. The agenda should fully support the meeting purpose and outcome.

Be clear on your expectations for attendees. If reading is required or materials are needed, state those expectations in the invite. A day before the meeting, send out the reminder about pre-work.

Execution Phase

Now the meeting time has arrived, you need to make sure the room or virtual conference is set up. Setup isn’t always possible in some cases when conference rooms are booked back to back without any time available for testing out the equipment or systems. Set up 10 minutes before the meeting starts.

As the presenter or facilitator, it can be nearly impossible to present and take notes at the same time. Consider an audio recording of the meeting if the audio microphones in the room are of high enough quality to capture all the questions. Another alternative is to appoint a person as a note taker for the meeting to capture all the major decisions points, questions, and parking lot items.

Focus on the agenda. If topics come up in conversation that is off topic to the meeting purpose and outcome, put them off to the side or in the “parking lot.” Publish and follow up on “parking lot” items after the meeting is completed.

Wrap Up Phase

This phase occurs near the conclusion of the meeting. Review all decisions and action items. Ownership of action items ensures owners will address action items after the meeting. Set dates for when the attendees could expect a response on the action item.

Post-Presentation Phase

Send out the meeting notes, a copy of the presentation, parking lot items and action items. Immediately sharing these items after the meeting keeps them fresh in meeting attendee’s minds. Share the meeting recording if the meeting was recorded. You can share the content from the meeting via a file share repository such as SharePoint, Google Drive or other services. It is also important to extend the delivery recipients to include those who could not attend.

Conclusion

Presentations are a great way to engage your project team and stakeholders to show value within your project activity. Carefully and thoughtfully plan your presentation and meeting. An organized presentation and agenda leave attendees with a positive impression of your communication abilities and organizational skills.

What other tips would you recommend?

Achieving The Elusive Work-Life Balance

Written by Neal Whitten,PMP on August 9, 2017. Posted in Articles.

I have personally wrestled with my own work-life balance issues for most of my adult life. In my younger adult days, I could easily have been categorized as a workaholic.

I was divorced after a 17-year marriage and did not see the break-up coming. I’m not saying that a better work-life balance would have saved the marriage, but a poor work-life balance sure didn’t help it any. For me, the integration of my work life and my non-work life has been a rough ride at times but—as a senior-aged person—I have learned a massive amount of knowledge and, dare I say, wisdom, about the highly important subject of finding a satisfactory harmony across all aspects of life. My mission here is to present you with some starter ideas that can fit into a relatively short article—ideas that can help you not only better understand your work-life balance but to give you ideas that can help you achieve the integration that is most important to you.

Work-life balance can mean something different to each of us. For purposes of this article, work-life balance is about achieving an acceptable harmony or integration between your work life—or career—and your personal life.

Studies show that a poor work-life balance can result in unhealthy levels of stress and unhappiness. At risk are your personal relationships, your career and your development as a person, to name a few. Moreover, too much time spent working has its own problems. You run the risk of burning out and hating your job, maybe even yourself. You wake up one day and realize you’re not happy with your life.

What does matter is that you create a personally meaningful life that helps you feel happy and healthy overall. While balancing work and non-work life might not be easy early in one’s career, figuring it out is necessary to lifelong satisfaction. Almost everyone wishes that they had realized the importance of life balance at the beginning of their career. Doing so would have meant less regrets and a more deliberate life. But whatever your age, you can still seize control and drive towards the balance you most desire.

I have created an assessment instrument—called the Questionnaire for Self-Assessing Your Work-Life Balance—to heighten your awareness of the behaviors that are affecting your work-life balance. The questionnaire will also provide a means to rate your collective behaviors and present a score that can give you insight into your effectiveness in achieving work-life balance. You can download the PDF and take the quiz now or later at your convenience.

Let’s examine eight important actions and behaviors that can help you in your quest to achieve the elusive work-life balance.

1. Create a Vision for What You Would Like Your Life to Look Like

Ask yourself what you would like your life to look like both from a career perspective and a personal perspective and how you see these two major components integrating. Then define what you envision a typical, desirable day would look like beginning from the time you wake up until you call it a day. That day could have interaction with family members, time for exercising, eating healthy, of course time for work activities, personal chores, special events and some downtime to compose and reenergize yourself. Use this vision as a baseline to ensure that you steadfastly adopt actions and behaviors that move you towards your vision. Then define the priorities in your life that are important to support this vision—including those priorities that are non-negotiable except for emergencies; examples could be special family events, sleep and exercise. The bottom line is that in order to improve upon your work-life balance it is essential that you have a vision of what you would like that integration to look like. If and when you would like to create a vision, I have created a sample vision to give you an idea of what a vision could look like.

2. Set Your Priorities Each Day

At the start of each work day, create a to-do list that includes the identification of your top three priorities to focus on for the day. If you have timeframes available of 30 minutes or more, do not work the bottom items of your to-do list, focus instead on the top three. Your top three items are so important that they define your overall value, contributions and success in your job. Work off your top three priorities every 2-3 days and replace them with your next set of priorities. If your top three priorities may take weeks or months to resolve, then, within 2-3 days, put a detailed, trackable plan in place to deal with the priority. Then remove that top-three priority from your list and routinely track your new plan until it is complete.

If occasionally you experience a day that is so hectic with fire fights and please handles that you never get around to working on your top three priorities, that’s okay; you work in a complex, demanding environment. However, if you frequently have days where you do not focus on your top three priorities, then you are the problem and need to seek help to effectively manage your workload.

If your personal life is as chaotic as your work life, consider creating the to-do list for non-work activities as well.

3. Track Your Time

For one week, keep track of where and with whom you spend your time during your waking hours both at work and in your personal life. Record in increments as small as 15 minutes. The objective is to identify time well spent that support your priorities and interests as well as time that—looking over the big picture—was not considered put to good use. This exercise is invaluable as you look for ways to fine tune your behaviors throughout each day. Experience shows that you will likely experience some “ah-ha” moments as you look more objectively into your routine behaviors.

4. Limit Time-Wasting Activities and People

This action will free you to spend more time on the important activities and people, and will likely provide you with additional time that you did not realize you had. Not only will your productivity benefit, the quality of your work and the satisfaction you get from your work likely will also increase. Many people spend too much time on things that don’t really matter. Time, arguably, is the most valuable commodity in life: It is the one thing you cannot buy more of. Therefore, don’t waste it.

The last tip we had discussed, “track your time,” can help here. Also, as your day unfolds get in the habit of consciously questioning if the time you are about to spend or the time you just spent is, indeed, an effective use of your time. After a while, this can become second nature and you will more effectively choose the areas where you dedicate your time.

5. Learn to Say “No”

Ensure that your commitments mostly support your priorities. Your inability or unwillingness to say “no” can easily allow you to lose control over your day and those things that matter most to you. If you need to buy some time to think about your final decision of whether or not to say “no,” then do so—even sleeping on it. Use whatever methods will help you better control where you commit your time. If you do not seize control over the commitments you make, your time will be surrendered to others… and you will not like the impact to you. You have far more control over your day and how you spend it than you may realize.

6. Minimize Time in Meetings

Minimize time in meetings, especially unstructured meetings. Most people spend a large portion of their time in meetings. Obviously some meetings are important for you to attend but many may not be providing you a sufficient return on your invested time. For starters, consider only attending meetings if they satisfy one or both of these conditions:1. Information you need to perform your job will be disclosed, or2. You have information that someone else needs to perform their job.

If you have information that someone else needs, consider turning that information over to the dependent person before the meeting starts and don’t attend the meeting. If you feel you must attend the meeting then do so only for the time necessary to disclose the information—say 5 minutes. Work with the meeting leader to determine the specific time when you should attend.

For meetings that you must attend, consider having a buddy who must also be in the meeting cover for you and afterwards inform you of what you need to know. And you reciprocate by covering for your buddy in a different meeting that you both also must attend.

7. Put Yourself First

Take care of yourself. Look out for yourself. Putting yourself first goes against what many of us learned growing up. But think about it: By putting yourself first, only then can you be your best and give your best to others. An example is on an airplane and the oxygen masks drop due to a potential emergency. You are directed to place the mask on yourself before helping someone in need next to you. You must make sure that you are in a position of strength before you can be your best for all that which comes your way and all those who may have a dependency on you.

Another example of putting yourself first is protecting your private time. Don’t be so quick to sacrifice your private time for other work and personal events. Your private time may be essential for catching your breath, recharging your energy and reaching a level of understanding and acceptance with yourself and all that going on around you. If you have serious work-life balance issues, not putting yourself first was likely a major cause of the dilemma you now find yourself embroiled in.

8. At the End of Your Day, Assess How Well Your Day Went

Pause and sit back to catch your breath. Then identify the actions you took that supported your quest for work-life balance. Give yourself some kudos for taking these actions. Also identify those actions that harmed your work-life balance. Imagine how your day could have been more productive and meaningful had you not engaged in the harmful actions. Ask yourself what you could or should have done differently so that you can change your behavior the next time a similar situation arises. See yourself incrementally growing stronger day to day, week to week.

Closing Thoughts

You get to define what work-life balance means to you. Balance is an individual thing and everyone must find their own. It’s not about what others think; it’s about what you desire for you. You achieve work-life balance by first defining the balance you most desire. Then you examine your current life and decide if that balance is being achieved. If it’s not, then, starting with the ideas presented in this article, you can put a plan in place that will deliberately move you into the desired direction. Then periodically revisit your work-life balance situation and adjust your actions and behaviors where and when needed.

Your work-life balance is something that can easily be put off for another day, another week, another year—but you already know that. Now is the time to seize the control over your life and to make it the life you most desire. It’s possible that this article could be the catalyst to change the rest of your life.
Now, become your imagined self!