At the turn of the 21st century, every well-accessorized executive walked into every important meeting carrying a leather-bound planner. FranklinCovey seminars around the country translated Stephen Covey’s “habits of highly effective people” into lists of values, goals and daily tasks, all dutifully recorded in planners of every shape, size and color, status symbols of the time.
“Right out of graduate school, I started my first job and quickly became a Franklin devotee,” said Melissa Gratias, a Chattanooga, Tenn., consultant who travels the country teaching executives organizational and time management. ”I carried it with me everywhere, and it really did work for a good many years.”
PLANNING PRINCIPLES
It worked for hundreds of thousands of other people, too. Reviews hailed the FranklinCovey training seminars as instrumental in helping employees “meet 21st century challenges,” “accomplish (the) most important business goals” and “bridge the gaps that sometimes exist between titles, positions and roles.”
But the workshops also encouraged personal development through planning.
“Until you value yourself, you will not value your time,” a FranklinCovey consultant opined at a Northwest Arkansas workshop a few years ago. “Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”
The concept of time management started with looking beyond day-to-day survival in the busy world of the changing workplace and the multi-earner home and determining life-governing principles that bridge both worlds. FranklinCovey workshops begin by asking participants “what matters most?” The individual answers — lifelong learning, physical fitness, time with family, simple happiness — become the top of a pyramid that flows down to daily tasks.
From those values come priorities and goals. For example, if a defining value states, “I am successful in my work,” then goals might be to be on time every day, to improve customer care skills and to coordinate an upcoming project. Having set the goals, time management devotees learn to prioritize them and create a timetable for accomplishing them, step by step. For example, in time away from work, one individual might want to collect family recipes to create a cookbook. On one day, she might email relatives asking for recipes. On another, she might visit the library to look at local cookbooks. On a third, she might research publishers. On a fourth, she might sort family photos to use in the book.
None of these tasks takes a lot of time, but if she waits for one big block of time to start, according to FranklinCovey trainers, she’ll still be waiting when the new year is old.
Priorities are also a big part of the process. Having set as a defining value to be an “adequate” homemaker, a busy mom could run around like the proverbial chicken with its head off trying to be adequate at everything. Planning principles say that’s not necessary.
If it’s very important to have the cleanest house in Northwest Arkansas, then make that a priority. But if it’s more important to spend that domestic time with children, invest toward that end. Worrying about what doesn’t get done is simply time wasted.
THE PLANNER
According to FranklinCovey training, time managers should sit down with the planner at the end of the month and look ahead. Make note of birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, days off and days the children will be out of school. Put these events on the monthly calendar along with project deadlines, business trips and meetings, where they can be seen at a glance, then carry them over to the daily pages. Smart planners don’t omit something because they “know” they’ll remember it. Part of the point of a well-used planner is to free the mind of those nagging mental notes.
Be sure at the beginning of each month to set some personal and business goals. Don’t plan to lose 25 pounds and redesign the office communications system, the experts say. Make reasonable plans to organize the desk so it’s most efficient, paint the guest bathroom and use a planner daily.
Having all the events of the day at hand saves searching the desk, the email in-box and the mind. The planner works well for more concrete items, too, such as the tickets purchased for Little Big Town April 19 at the Arkansas Music Pavilion. Tape that little ticket envelope into the planner on the date of the show. And they’ll be right there, because the planner will be right there, too. Or will it?
A NEW ERA
It was email that killed — or at least seriously wounded — the paper planner, consultant Gratias believes.
“I was getting 100 to 150 email messages a day, and I was spending a whole lot of time making lists and transferring things and feeling like I’d accomplished very little,” she said. “I struggled for about 18 months to two years to find my way to a new system that would encompass all the tasks coming in through email. Email management and time management became linked. I couldn’t manage one without managing the other.”
That quest inspired Gratias to quit her corporate job and use her doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology to become a professional organizer for businesspeople across the country. She found that the workplace skills she sought to teach — ways to be more productive, more eftective, to be good leaders and to see workers “measured appropriately” — had to change with the times.
“Our work world today is becoming more and more complex,” Gratias said. “Companies are downsizing, and people are wearing so many hats, they’re doing totally different things every 15 or 20 minutes. I think this is not going to change.”
Although some of her clients still use paper planners, Gratias said it usually means they’re using other systems to deal with email, voice mail and other “action items” that don’t fit the paper planner system.
“My first recommendation to my clients is to pick one that works for you and dedicate yourself to that,” she said. “If you’re spreading across systems, the human brain is designed to prioritize whatever is in your face at any given time. So if you’re looking at email, it’s most important; if you’re looking at your planner, it’s most important; but the most important task may be in the stack on your desk.
“Consolidation is the first rule of thumb. The other is (choosing a system that is) comprehensive. At least 90 percent of what you need to work on has to be in one place. If it’s not comprehensive, you’re going to be misprioritizing.”
ELECTRONIC ANSWERS
Gratias shared her assessments of a few electronic planners in her newsletter, available at mbgorganizing. com:
Outlook Calendar and Tasks — “This is what I personally use,” she wrote, “and train many of my clients on because it is functional — if used correctly — available wherever Outlook is the mail system in place and can be shared with other Outlook users. I recommend Outlook for users who receive a high volume of email because emails can be easily converted into tasks, calendar items, or even contacts.” Downsides to Outlook: Tasks do not sync well with Androids and iPhones, and the Mac version has limited functionality.
Google — Google, she wrote, is “famous for the ability to have information in the cloud and therefore accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection.” The calendar works much the same as other online calendars, but the functionality within Gmail to manage to-do items is limited unless it syncs with Outlook or another tool.
Remember the Milk — Works with most anything hand-held or in the cloud. RTM is clean and easy-to-use. Tasks can be grouped and reminders can come via email, text and instant message. It integrates with Gmail but not Outlook.
ToodleDo — ToodleDo has similar features to Remember the Milk. A main benefit of ToodleDo is its ability to sync with Outlook Tasks in a robust manner; this is especially important if the user has an iPhone or Android that generally won’t “talk” to Outlook.
COMPARE/CONTRAST
Today, Gratias said, executives — and moms — walk into meetings with their smart phones and tablets, both bearing the electronic planners that are more frequently used than leather-and-paper versions. But Gratias said FranklinCovey remains the benchmark when it comes to “the fact that daily tasks should trace up to values and strategic initiatives. You want to make sure you’re working on the right tasks to begin with, with the big-picture goal in mind.
“Those people who started out as FranklinCovey proponents are still the people effectively setting goals.”