The Top 7 Ways to End Frustrating Wait-Time

Image source by Adryana Nicoleta

Life goes down the drain while you wait. Airports, repair shops, grocery lines, and doctor’s offices ruthlessly steal time.

Time is life.
Wasted time is wasted life.

Waiting:

1. Escalates anger.
2. Strains relationships.
3. Increases stress.
4. Reduces productivity.

Planning and preparation transform frustrating wait-time to satisfying productivity.

Top 7 Ways to End Frustrating Wait-Time

1. Create a list of things to do while waiting. Look around, and ask, “What productive activities could I do right now?” Do one.
2. Write thank you notes. (Prepare for waiting by keeping thank you notes with you.)
3. Journal. Turn off email, texts, and the phone.
4. Blog. Write a blog about waiting.
5. Connect. Grocery story lines are great opportunities to say, “Hi.” (For extroverts.)
6. Meditate or pray. People will think you’re sleeping.
7. Renew a relationship. Call an old friend and say, “I was just thinking about you.”

Bonus: Help someone. Look around and see who needs a hand. Pick up garbage if you’re a clean freak.

This post was inspired by Lets Grow Leaders.

How can leaders capture wait-time?

5 Ways to Become a Healthy People-Pleaser

Only people-pleasers succeed. The more people you please the more success you enjoy. The list of people who need pleasing includes:

1. Clients.
2. Superiors.
3. Boards.
4. Employees.
5. Colleagues.
6. Vendors.

“Just please yourself,” may be an excuse for lazy, self-indulgence. But, unchecked people-pleasing destroys people.

Five ways to become a healthy people-pleaser:

Please yourself in ways that please others.

I please myself when I write this blog, for example. I write short sentences, paragraphs, and articles. I leave stuff out. Not everyone likes it, but enough do.

Say “no” clearly.

“No” is part of leadership.

1. Listen carefully.
2. Consider prudently.
3. Seek advice.
4. Don’t rush.

But whatever you do, make clear, honest, compassionate decisions. Indecisive leaders, who need to please everyone, end up pleasing no one.

Anticipate information needs.

Eliminate the “wondering factor” with information.

Information pleases; being in the dark frustrates. Understand the information needs of those you serve and exceed them. Knock on their door before they knock on yours.

Wondering if they are wondering stresses you.

Manage expectations.

Pleasing others means meeting or better yet, exceeding expectations. Let them know what to expect. Consider deadlines, for example. Too much need-to-please causes you to accept unrealistic timelines.

Manage expectations before they manage you. Set realistic expectations and exceed them.

Leverage sweet spots.

Align your strength with their need, then trust yourself. Take coaching, for example. Curiosity is my sweet spot. Clients discover insights because I trust my curiosity. Do what you do best, most of the time.

Success is always about pleasing people. Healthy people-pleasers use knowledge of themselves and those they serve to build pleasing relationships and environments.

Still, you can’t please everyone. Don’t try.

How does people pleasing get out of hand?

How can leaders please others in healthy ways?

The Real Reason Teams Don’t Work

Overwork prevents teamwork.

Imagine the feeling of being close to missing a deadline. At 3:00 p.m. a team mate needs your expertise on their marketing project. Are you eager to serve? Or, are they an irritating pain in the a**?

You’re frustrated because you want to help but feel you can’t.

People who can’t get their own work done can’t help others.

When schedules are maxed out teamwork is out.

Overworked leaders don’t have time to help. They are too busy helping themselves. A corporate leader recently said, “My boss is buried. She doesn’t have time or energy to give me.”

Turf wars not teamwork:

“Overworked staff results in turf wars and office politics,” Andy Stanley at Catalyst. Can you see people jockeying for position? Jockeys aren’t team players.

Helping others help others:

1. Get real with workload or teamwork-talk becomes platitudinous drivel.
2. Reward and recognize helpers. Ask, “Who helped you?” at the end of projects.
3. Honor serving. Ask, “Who are you helping?”
4. Ask, “How are you helping others?” What get’s asked about gets done.

Supporting team work:

From Facebook: Leaders support teamwork when they _______.

1. … don’t try to do everything themselves.
2. … are willing to do the nitty-gritty work with team members.
3. … share opportunities, responsibility, and credit.
4. … affirm others’ strengths.
5. … treat team members as stake holders.

More at: Leadership Freak Coffee Shop.

What are the roadblocks to teamwork in your organization?

How can leaders support team work?

The Surprising Power of Stopping to Begin Again

The longer you work at improving something -
the fewer improvements you make.

Gold Medal swimmers work unending hours shaving hundredths of seconds off their time. Not so, when they began swimming.

Improvement – at the beginning – is quick and easy;
excellence – over the long haul – is slow and hard.

Large organizations may have time and resources to grind for that last hundredth of second but medium and small businesses don’t.

Begin frequently:

Spend time beginning – move on – then begin again.

For example, you’re working on streamlining customer service. Make a few obvious improvements, stabilize those improvements and move on. Go to another challenge with the idea you’ll go back to improve customer service in a few weeks or months.

Excellence is a process not a destination.

Pursuit of excellence calendar:

1. Stop wasting time on low impact activities, time is too precious.
2. Grab low hanging fruit. Identify high potential areas for improvement; perhaps current pain points, emerging opportunities, or process improvements.
3. Create an excellence-rotation calendar. January is customer service month and February is internal operations month, for example.
4. Identify goals that move you toward excellence. Answer every call within three rings, for example.
5. Determine and implement behaviors, processes, procedures, and technologies that achieve your goals.
6. Work on it for a designated time. Urgency suggests shorter timelines are better than long.
7. Evaluate, stabilize, and systematize improvements.
8. Move to your next opportunity. Accept progress – reject the need for perfection.
9. Return in a few weeks or months to evaluate and improve again.

Large organizations move forward on many fronts, simultaneously. “Stopping to begin again” enables smaller organizations to pursue excellence on many fronts, just not at the same time.

What modifications or additions can you make to these suggestions?

Subscribe to Leadership Freak today. It’s free, practical, and brief. The subscribe button is in the upper right of the home page. I’ll never sell your email address, promise.

Pareto: 80% of Your Time is Spent on Trivialities

The 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle) indicates 80% of your activities are trivial and 20% deliver results. Who wants to go to their CEO and say I’m wasting 80% of my time?

It’s shocking to suggest that 80% of an employee’s time is available for richer activities. It’s even more uncomfortable to apply that rule to ourselves.

You may be thinking, if 80% of my activities are trivial, why am I stressed out and time pressured? One reason, you haven’t identified triviality. What are you doing that doesn’t take you where you want to go – that doesn’t deliver results?

I was reminded yesterday that organizations support their mission with trivial activities. For example, when someone signs off on documents they don’t read, they’re engaged in trivial activities.

You may suggest that the sign-off is to keep them in the loop. Is the delay worth it? Would a weekly or monthly report satisfy the need?

Is your team spinning their wheels? Maximizing their time and energy requires clear direction, guiding values, planning, goals and objectives, prioritizing, scheduling, controlling, delegating, and more.

Drucker explained, “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”

80% of our time is spent on trivialities because effectiveness and efficiency require persistent intention and focus.

A word of caution:

Accepting the challenge of effectiveness and efficiency drives some toward ineffectiveness. You may believe honing processes, procedures, and getting more things done is the answer. There’s a place for that. But, effectiveness and efficiency begins with people.

Great teams love delivering meaningful results; enable them.

How can leaders create effective, efficient environments where team members spend more time delivering meaningful results and less time on trivialities?

**********

Don’t miss a single issue of Leadership Freak, subscribe today. It’s free.  It’s private.  It’s always practical and brief.

Go to the main page of Leadership Freak by clicking the banner at the top of this page, look in the right-hand navigation bar, enter your email and click subscribe.  Your email address is always kept private.  Note:  if it doesn’t arrive, check your spam filter for a confirmation email.

Be Quick but Don’t Hurry – John Wooden

One of my favorite quotes is, “Be quick but don’t hurry,” John Wooden. If you aren’t quick in today’s world, you’re done. If you hurry, things are poorly done or not done at all.

Creating Urgency:

Nothing gets done without urgency. With that in mind, shorter timelines are better than longer. They create urgency – Be quick.

Urgency and Quality:

Shorter timelines enhance efficiency.

Shorter timelines, on the other hand, threaten quality – Don’t hurry. Allow more time the first time but shorten timelines thereafter.

Urgency and Stress:

Shorter timelines increase stress. It’s easy to go too fast and stress out people. Moderate levels of stress enhance performance. But, go too far and performance drops. That’s where Wooden’s wisdom shines. Never hurry when it comes to people. Instead, “Go slow to go fast.”

Going Slow:

Go slow with people be quick with performance.

Take time to calm frustrated employees or volunteers who are stressed by short timelines. Listen to their concerns and frustration. They’re frustrated because they want to succeed and the timeline you established seems to block, not enhance success.

Move forward by asking if they think they can meet deadlines. If they say yes, express confidence in them and say, let me know if I can be helpful.

If they don’t think they can meet the deadline, ask what will it take? You may not be able to provide their request. In this case, express confidence and ask them to do their best.

Shorter timelines demand you manage emotions and provide support.

**********

How do you create urgency?

**********

Don’t miss a single issue of Leadership Freak, subscribe today. It’s free.  It’s private.  It’s always practical and brief.

Go to the main page of Leadership Freak by clicking the banner at the top of this page, look in the right-hand navigation bar, enter your email and click subscribe.  Your email address is always kept private.  Note:  if it doesn’t arrive, check your spam filter for a confirmation email.

Freedom to Decide

He asked her to marry him but she couldn’t give him an answer. She loved him. She wasn’t a decision maker.

Finally, he reiterated his love and desire for marriage but told her he needed her answer in two weeks. If she couldn’t decide by then, sadly, he would move on.

You might call it an ultimatum. From a business point of view, it was a deadline.

Launching

She always knew her answer was yes. However, fear paralyzed her. Twenty years later they have two children and a happy home.

Setting a deadline might seem harsh but it freed her to decide. Additionally, it enabled both of them to embrace a new beginning.

Deadlines create launching points.

For leaders

Realistic deadlines create urgency, refocus the team, motivate creativity, and enhance productivity.

Added benefit

Unfocused, indecisive leaders destroy morale and insult the ability of their team to execute. If you make a decision, great people can make it happen.

Indecisive leaders create teams that eventually turn on each other, create useless work, or begin making emotional irrelevant decisions.

Deadlines drain the drama by enabling meaningful work.

Deadline calendar

During the EntreLeadership seminar I recently attended, Dave Ramsey offered this useful decision making technique, “Write that deadline on the calendar as a reminder to pull the trigger.”

Best, better, unacceptable

Your best option is assigning deadlines when you assign tasks or decisions. If you didn’t assign a deadline, then go to the team now and set one. It’s unacceptable to let the decision making process drag on.

Beyond deadlines

A decision hasn’t been made until the outcome has a champion. Who’s responsible? Five words make all the difference, “Who does what by when?”

*****

What are the benefits or dangers of setting deadlines?

What deadline setting tips can you suggest?

*****

Don’t miss a single issue of Leadership Freak, subscribe today. It’s free.  It’s private.  Go to the main page of Leadership Freak by clicking the banner at the top of this page, look in the right-hand navigation bar, enter your email and click subscribe.  Your email address is always kept private.  Note:  if it doesn’t arrive, check your spam filter for a confirmation email.

**********

You’re invited to the Leadership Freak Facebook page. If you enjoy it, click “Like” and jump into the conversation

You only need three words

Time Management?

Everything you need to know about getting a grip on your time is contained in three words.

Eliminate … Delegate … Accelerate

Eliminate: Stop unnecessary or low priority tasks.
Delegate: Give tasks to others.
Accelerate: Become more efficient.

All time management tips either, eliminate, delegate, or accelerate.

10 Time management tips:

1. You can’t manage time you can only manage yourself. “One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
2. Settle. Some tasks don’t need to be done perfectly, they just need to be done. Don’t write and rewrite an email until it’s worded perfectly. The enemy of progress is perfection.
3. Find a rhythm. Personally, I’m more productive if I have few points of predictability during the week. Perhaps it’s lunch with a coach or turning off email for an hour every afternoon.
4. Work expands to the time allotted for it. Create smaller time segments. Does a meeting have to take an hour?
5. Get done by noon. Prioritize your tasks and determine to complete your priorities by noon. Deadlines create urgency.
6. Do the dirty deeds first. Procrastinating drains your energy and distracts your mind. Just get it over with. I’ve frequently noticed the things I don’t want to do take less time than I expect.
7. Use the just start rule. Set aside 15 minutes a day to work on a long term goal. Just start it. You may end up working longer but 15 minutes is progress. Progress feels great. “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” Henry Ford.
8. Make prioritized check lists. “We can no more afford to spend major time on minor things than we can spend minor time on major things.” – Jim Rohn
9. ???
10. ???

*****

Can you add the ninth and tenth time management tips?