Author: Flower Pioneer
Source: Zhenghedao (zhenghedao)
Shakespeare said in Shakespeare's Plays: "He who abandons time, time will also abandon him." ”
Tao Yuanming also has a poem: "The golden year does not come again, it is difficult to get another morning; when it is timely encouragement, the years do not treat people." ”
Bill Gates and Buffett also found that they had a consensus: "Basically they can spend money on anything they want, but they can't buy time."
Time, especially the time of managers, no matter how much it is cherished and how much it is emphasized, it is not excessive.
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, said: "The core of all 'management' is 'self-management', and the core of 'self-management' is 'time management'. So what does Peter Drucker think about time management?
Managing 7 companies at the same time, raising 6 children, ordinary people even if they have three heads and six arms, they may not be busy, how does Elon Musk do it?
At the same time, he is also the chairman of two fortune-500 companies, has published nearly 20 books so far, often travels to Tsinghua Peking University and other famous economics and management colleges to give lectures, and the achievements in each field are no less than those of professional workers in their fields.
With these questions in mind, we delved into the time management of Peter Drucker, Elon Musk, and Song Zhiping, which have similarities and different ways, which are worth savoring:
Meetings must be exceptional, not routine
First, let's look at the observation of Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, who believes that the biggest difference between effective managers and others is how much they value time.
Drucker found that effective managers often don't start with work tasks, but with time, and the first thing they do is not to make a work plan, but to figure out where their time is spent first.
They then try to manage their time by rejecting requests that don't pay off but take time.
Finally, they concentrate their "disposable time" as much as possible into as large a continuous period of time as possible.
To sum up, it is actually three steps: record time, manage time, and concentrate time.
1. Record the time
The first step for managers to achieve effectiveness is to record the real use of time, but one thing to pay attention to when recording is "real-time" recording, that is, recording when the event occurs, rather than recording it from memory afterwards.
In his work, Drucker found that many effective managers keep records on an ongoing basis and then regularly review, rethink and schedule themselves each month.
However, after 6 months, they will all find "drift", that is, they will find that they will waste time on trivial matters. Therefore, managers have to find out the unproductive and time-wasting activities and do their best to cut them off.
First, for all the activities on the time record sheet, the question is raised item by item: "What are the consequences if this thing is not done at all?" ”
If the answer is "there will be no consequences," then stop doing it.
Second, then ask yourself: "What activities on my time record list can others do well, or even do better?" ”
In fact, after observation, you will find that most of the work done by managers is easily done by others, so we must boldly divide all the things that others can do, and give yourself time to do the most important things.
A good example is Harry Hopkins, who, as President Roosevelt's personal adviser during World War II, was a dying man, tortured every step he took, and could only work a few hours a day, forcing him to cut down all kinds of chores and leave only the things that really mattered.
As a result, not only did he not lose his effectiveness, but he also became what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called "Mr. Key", and he accomplished enough things to make him proud of anyone in the US government.
Of course, this is an extreme case. But it shows both how much control one can exert over one's own time if one really tries, and how one does not lose one's effectiveness even if one cuts off time-wasting matters.
2. Manage your time
The first two questions are aimed at unproductive but time-wasting activities, which are actually more or less controllable for each manager, but the waste of time caused by poor management and organization is often relatively hidden and not easy to be discovered by managers, there are the following:
First, activities that waste time because of a lack of system or vision behave in the same "crisis" that occurs repeatedly in the company. Within an organization, if a crisis is already happening for the second time, it cannot be allowed to happen a third time in any way.
Second, because of the activities that waste time because of overstaffing, the first-grade homework has such a question: "Dig a ditch, if two people dig, it takes two days to dig well, then four people digging, it takes several days to dig well?" ”
The correct answer for first-year students is, of course, "one day," but in the work of administrators, the correct answer can be "four days," or even "forever."
Drucker found that sometimes having too few people does affect the quality of work, but that's not the norm. The general situation is that too many people lead to poor effectiveness, because more and more time is spent "communicating" rather than working.
If top managers, especially the top leaders, spend a fraction (perhaps more than 1/10) of their time dealing with interpersonal issues, defusing grievances and frictions, mediating disputes and cooperation, it is almost certain that there are too many people.
Third, the organizational structure is flawed, and its manifestation is that there are too many meetings. Looking at our time records, as long as the meeting time reaches 1/4 or even more, it means that there is an organizational defect that causes wasted time. Explain that the job structure and department design are not reasonable; that work that should have been done by one position or department is dispersed across multiple positions or departments; that responsibilities are decentralized and that information is not reaching those who actually need it.
Organizations always need so much cooperation, but meetings must be the exception, not the norm. An organization in which everyone is always meeting is an organization in which no one does anything.
Fourth, time-wasting activities because of information failures, such as the president of a major hospital who has been plagued by help calls for many years, and doctors in the hospital often ask him to arrange beds for patients.
But the inpatient department said that there were no empty beds, but the dean could find several empty beds almost every time, because the inpatient department would not be notified immediately when the patient was discharged, and it did not require much wisdom to solve the problem.
3. Concentration time
There are many ways to focus their time, some people choose to work from home one day a week (usually high-level people), and editors and researchers generally do the same.
Others schedule two days a week (e.g., Monday and Friday) to handle various daily tasks, such as meetings, reviews, discussions, etc., and set aside the entire morning of the other days to deal with important matters continuously.
Drucker once served the president of a large bank, and during the two years of service, Drucker met with him once a month.
To Drucker's surprise: not only did they see each meeting for the same hour and a half, but there was never more than one item on the agenda for each meeting, and even at 1 hour and 20 minutes each time he would always say, "Mr. Drucker, I think it's time to wrap up and schedule the next time." ”
After about a year of this, Drucker finally couldn't help but ask him, "Why is it an hour and a half every time?" He replied:
"It's very simple, because the time limit for my concentration is about an hour and a half, and no matter what I talk about, as long as I exceed this time, I can't talk about anything new." Moreover, if it takes much less time than this, then no important thing can be handled well, nor can it be understood enough to understand what is being discussed. ”
Drucker also found that during the hour and a half of his month in his office, he never heard the telephone ring, nor had he ever seen his secretary poking his head through the crack in the door to say that some important person wanted to see him at once. One day Drucker asked about it again, and he replied:
"I have solemnly told the secretary that no one can come to me, except for the president of the United States and my wife, but the president rarely calls, and my wife knows my habits. Everything else, the secretary would help me block it until I was done here. Then I'll spend half an hour answering all my calls, making sure I don't miss a single message. I haven't had any crises so far, and I can't wait 90 minutes to deal with them. ”
He understood that when time became fragmented, it was useless, and he needed a whole piece of time, so he arranged each meeting with Drucker in an hour and a half, that is, he arranged work in an hour and a half, which actually led to a basic concept of time management - time granularity.
Teacher Liu Run said that looking at a person's time granularity, you can see his degree of professionalism. The bank president's time granularity is one and a half hours, so what level does this time granularity belong to? Let's take a look at how Musk did it.
2. Work is arranged in 5 minutes by second
As one of the most successful and busiest men in the world, Musk manages 7 companies and raises 6 children, how did he do it?
1. Set the duration for the task
Musk's trick in using time is to create a "time limit" rather than a "timeline", and he advocates the "Time Boxing" method of working, which is to set the duration of the task.
Whenever he is awake, Musk will schedule in 5 minutes, and his day is cut into hundreds of "time cubes", that is, his time granularity is five minutes.
Don't be overhyprising, as is bill Gates, the richest man in the past, and even some short meetings and handshakes are arranged in seconds.
According to Liu Run, bill Gates visited China in 2003 and came to the Shangri-La Hotel in Beijing to attend some important meetings. At that time, Microsoft China employees measured over and over again how many steps to take from the elevator entrance to the door of the conference room for his arrival, which took several seconds.
They arranged the important guests who needed to shake hands and sign in different conference rooms, and when Gates came, they let him enter each room in turn, shake hands, sign, take pictures, and leave, Teacher Liu Run witnessed the whole process, and the result was almost the same as the planned time.
The core of the "Time Boxing" method of work is not to do it all the time, but how long it takes to do it. Parkinson's Law on corporate bureaucracy also mentions that work fills up allotted time. That is, the more time you allocate to a task, the more time it takes to complete the task. Obviously, the information can be checked in 30 minutes, and if half a day is arranged, it may really take half a day.
So in order to avoid the waste of time, be sure to arrange some low-value matters less time, for example, Musk will choose to eat lunch in 5 minutes. This method of time management is fundamentally different from the time management method that arranges to-do items according to a large number of schedules on the market, but it is especially useful for people with complicated and irregular schedules.
2. Love email
Another trick Musk has in using his time is his penchant for email.
Focus and deep work can lead to progress, but Musk has a lot of chores, which means that only by living as asynchronously as possible can we reduce distractions from the outside world. So Musk loves emails because they don't need to be answered in time.
In his own words: "I love email and try to communicate asynchronously as much as possible, I'm very good at writing emails. ”
So he chooses to solve a lot of things by email, and he rarely uses the telephone because it avoids interruptions in the efficient state. And he also used an email address that was hard to guess to avoid getting in touch with people outside the company so he could focus more on the actual work of the company.
He once joked at a conference: "I've written a lot of emails — and I'm very good at it, that's my core competency." He often communicates to the whole company via email how to communicate, the company's vision and mission, and how to work efficiently.
On July 1, 2018, Musk sent a long-awaited email to all employees: "I think we just became a real car company. We built 5031 Model 3s in seven days. With a weekly capacity climb of more than 5,000 units, Musk told everyone about Tesla's most landmark achievement by email.
In fact, Musk's email skills are also trained, and the language is clear, concise, and direct. If he can use two words instead of ten, he will use some appropriate trick-type words, such as "I hope..., can you do it?" Once you say yes in the email, it's like you promised to complete the task, rather than he pressed it down and had to be completed.
In addition, Musk also applied Pastore's rule in the allocation of personal management energy: spend most of his energy on the two most important companies, namely Space X and Tesla, according to the survey, he works an average of 42 hours a week at Tesla and 40 hours a week.
Finally, double-minded or even triple-purpose is another feature of Musk's management of time, he often uses his mobile phone to handle work in meetings, replies to emails when checking invoices, and sometimes takes time to reply to emails when holding children and playing on his lap...
If you still don't feel good about learning after reading this Western entrepreneur's time management, let's look at another example of a Chinese entrepreneur.
Spend your time studying and your mind on your work
Song Zhiping is the president of the China Enterprise Reform and Development Research Association and the president of the China Association of Listed Companies.
As a business, he has achieved two fortune-making 500 companies;
Teaching, he is one of the most popular practical professors in famous economics and management schools such as Tsinghua Peking University;
Writing books, he has published even more than full-time authors, and his reputation has long been well-known in the business and management circles.
How did he do it?
1. Day by day, without hurry
In an interview with Zhenghe island, Chairman Song Zhiping said that "spend time on learning and thinking about work" is a true portrayal of him, and he believes that no matter what work we are engaged in, we need to calm down, deep learning, deep thinking, and deep work.
What is depth? It is meticulousness, that is, seeing the small things, that is, perseverance. Because of this, Chairman Song kept getting up at five o'clock every morning for two hours to think and write, and two hours to read every night from ten to twelve o'clock, for decades.
This point is actually very similar to Zeng Guofan, who said: "We must not be able to break every day when we study." "If your goal every day is to read at least 30 pages of books, but you are really busy reading 30 pages today, then you can read 10 pages, in short, you must not be able to break, you can't say that you will not read today when you are busy, and read sixty pages tomorrow."
Only by continuing day by day can we not rush forward.
2. Restrict your phone
For replying to the message, Chairman Song and Musk's attitude is the same - centralized processing.
Now people often reply to messages in a timely manner as a virtue, and there are often micro-words about delayed replies, but you can actually think rationally, if everyone is replying to messages in seconds and staring at their mobile phones all day like the operators in the past, can they still do work?
In this era, for many people, constantly and uninterruptedly looking at mobile phones has become a habit, or as addictive as smoking and drinking.
Chairman Song's method is to plan the time to use the mobile phone, such as every day before and after breakfast can deal with the mobile phone information, you can also browse the news, you can deal with the information before going to work, deal with it again after lunch, deal with it again before the afternoon work, and look at it again before going to bed at night, each processing time is about 15 minutes.
The advantage of this is that the phone usage time is centralized, rather than looking at it for a few minutes from time to time. The brain has the function of delaying memory, if there is always new information entering, the brain will be disturbed by these chaotic information, can not get rid of, so if you want to work deeply, you must make certain restrictions on the use of mobile phones.
3. Be good at using fragmented time
Chairman Song's third way of managing time is to be good at using fragmented time. For example, on the train and on the car, these commute hours, President Song will use it to read. This is actually the "parallel" that we learned in high school physics, that is, trying to find tasks that can be paralleled by all means, and then letting them parallel, which is also what we often call the superposition effect.
The superposition of study, work, thinking, and writing is one of the secrets of President Song's ability to blossom more.
Yu Minhong, chairman of New Oriental, is also a master of time management, in addition to managing the company, he can also read more than a hundred books every year, write more than 600,000 words, produce one or two books, and go to all parts of the country for cultural tourism, note that cultural tourism, the so-called cultural tourism is not simply to play to see a card so simple, but every time you go to a place to investigate its culture, and write out words, shoot videos.
How did his time come about? In his speech on the show "Opening Remarks", he also said that time is reused. He must be listening to lectures when he is walking, he must be listening to lectures when climbing mountains, and he must be reading in the car or working on the computer on the way to work in the car.
The same is true of Liu Run, a business consultant, who spends no less than 1,000 hours a year listening to lectures on the APP, not including the time he writes (outputs). And his listening speed is 2 times faster. That is to say, he gets 2,000 hours of input every year just from getting, an average of 6 hours a day.
So busy as a business consultant, how did he do it?
I found the answer in one of his articles:
Get up at 7:30 a.m., turn on your phone, connect to the hotel's Bluetooth speaker and start listening.
After washing your face and brushing your teeth, connect your Bluetooth headset, and go downstairs to eat and continue listening.
Then go out and listen on the way to the event site. The activity starts at 9 o'clock and has been listening for 1-1.5 hours.
End of the event and arrive at the airport 2 hours before your flight departs. Listened to it for another 1.5-2 hours on the way.
Download the content in advance, 2 hours on the plane.
1 hour on the way home after landing.
That day, he listened for 6-7 hours. Coupled with 2 times the speed, listening to 13-14 hours of content in a day, this is really the ultimate use of fragmented time.
Iv. Conclusion
The most important thing about time management is not how to save 17 seconds from 17 minutes, but to determine whether the 17 minutes are worth doing something, and how to save 17 hours with 17 minutes.
The above methods are easy to say, but difficult to do.
An Anglo bishop said in his last words:
"When I was young, full of infinite fantasies, I dreamed of changing the world, and when I grew up a little, I found that the world would not change;
I decided to shorten my gaze and change my country, but the country does not seem to be able to change;
In my twilight years, I decided to make a final attempt to change my family, but they never changed.
Now, as my life was nearing its end, I suddenly realized that if I changed myself first and then led by example, I might change my family, and with their encouragement, I could make my country a little better, and maybe I would change the world. ”
The improvement of time management ability is by no means achievable after reading an article, but must be practiced and practiced by oneself.
Drucker said that knowing you for a long time is something that everyone can do if they are willing to do it, and this is a person's free path to success.
Finally, what are your time management methods and experiences, welcome to leave a message in the comment area, we will discuss together, and practice together.
In the future, let us act together and be the masters of time.
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