Monthly Archive for May, 2006

During a poignant scene in Tennessee Williams’ play, “Sweet Bird of Youth,” the leading character faces with dread the fact that his life is passing by rapidly. He sees all the opportunities he has let slip by and realizes they will never return. “Time is the enemy of us all,” he declares.

Failure to recognize that time is inescapably a limited, fixed resource constitutes an ever-present threat to career achievements. This a reality that must be dealt with if success is to be won.

In his book, “How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life,” Alan Lakein puts it on the line: “Time is life. It is your life, but to master time is to master your life and make the most of it.”

Each of us has exactly 168 hours a week – 8,736 a year – to accomplish all we will ever get done.

The more acute the careerist’s sense of the passage of time, the greater his chances of success. It is rare to find a successful careerist who is not driven by a sense of urgency.

Urgency Is Essential To Your Success

Urgency is an essential ingredient, but it has to be controlled. It can drive us to run about in a frenzy, working away at one project for a few minutes only to drop it and dash off to another. That’s a sure way to burn up a lot of energy and accomplish very little.

Urgency can be a focused force, compelling us to organize our work, to set deadlines and meet them, to be energized and to keep pushing to achieve the next step up the ladder for more responsibility and greater use of our abilities.

Controlled, healthy urgency requires us to account for the way we use this limited resource. Alibis not accepted.

It is helpful to think of each day as being made up of 48 chips, each worth 30 minutes. We can bet them on life as we see fit. We can place them on work, study, family, play, self-pity, confidence, or time wasted. At the end of each day, we have to take an inventory of our wins and losses. If we have not made more good bets than bad on how we use our time, sooner or later we break our personal life bank.

Time experts have produced scores of books and videos on time management. Selected ones ought to be in the library of every ambitious careerist. But if we are not careful, we can get mired down in a swamp of how-to-do-it advice that becomes a great waste of time and an easy excuse to replace urgency with procrastination.

The idea of time is truly awesome, but the concept of what to do about it is simple, if we discipline ourselves to act.

In reality, the use of time does not require a few big, dramatic, earth-shattering, fork-of-the-road decisions.

How To Maximize Your Use Of Time

The way we use our time is determined by hundreds of choices – most of them little decisions – we make each day, week, month and year about what to do and when to do it.
The key for meaningful action to maximize our utilization of time (i.e., success) is to live by a simple formula.

DO

DO IT

DO IT NOW

“Do” means be active, always moving to accomplish the next step toward one of our goals.

“Do it” means act on specifics that relate to the goal on which we are working.

“Do it now” means act now on a specific step. If common sense calls for a delay on one project, move on immediately to act on another goal.

Time can be an alluring seductress. It seems to offer a bed of comfort to be enjoyed at one’s own pace with no due-bill to be paid sooner or later. Know time for what it is, a perishable resource with a finite shelf life. Every day, in every way, each of us uses up some of our potential.

Use it or lose it!

I wish you great success in the world of work.

Ramon Greenwood
Senior Career Counselor, Common Sense At Work

YOU CAN’T WIN ‘EM ALL, NOR SHOULD YOU

The idea of winning is at the very heart of the American work ethic. The gospel of our culture tells us winning is not just the best thing, it is the only thing.

But real winners know you can’t win them all, nor should you.

If you insist on winning every single point, you set up unnecessary opposition. Let’s face it; nobody likes anyone who always seems to win.

Fact is, it’s not necessary to win every point. It’s a very rare situation that has only one right answer. One instance would be in disarming a live bomb. Another might be brain surgery. Otherwise, several acceptable options usually exist.

Unless you are absolutely sure you have the only correct answer, or that your organization will be materially damaged if you don’t prevail, you should let associates win a few. Their abilities as well as their morale will be improved. This strategy of losing deliberately is especially desirable if your boss or your subordinates are involved.

But when common sense says you must win it’s time to fight with tooth and claw.

Winning is not a zero sum matter. There does not have to be a loser for every winner. When you win, it is just common sense to make sure others feel they won, too. When you lose, accept responsibility, no ifs, ands or buts.

You must take risks to make progress. If you take risks you will lose some of the time. You just need to be sure you win enough of the big ones to be a winner at the end of the run.

Thomas Edison recorded some 25,000 failures in his attempt to invent a storage battery. “Those were not failures,” he said. “I learned 24,999 ways not to make a battery.” R. H. Macy failed seven times before his first store caught on. Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times, but he also hit 714 home runs.

Dr. Harry Levenson, noted psychologist and adviser to management, declared that a key characteristic of successful managers is the willingness to take big risks. “Not crazy risks, but big risks. They are willing to endure the distress of fear and uncertainty until the results are known. They stick with their decisions even when there are some downers before their ideas begin to pay off. They envision outcomes that others, without the same range of perception cannot see, and then act on that basis.”

Perfect Is Not Normal

If you truly want to build a successful career, and you work in an organization that demands that you always be right, you are in trouble. You will either be suffocated or you will frequently be in trouble for trying new ideas and for making the inevitable mistakes that go with them. You should get out as fast as you can, unless you want to live in a restrictive bureaucracy.

You need to be particularly wary of the organization that loudly calls for risks taking, while expecting a hit every time you come to bat. Perfect is not normal.

David Ogilvy, a superstar in the advertising business, told the story of a toy buyer at Sears who made a mistake that cost his company $10 million. When Ogilvy asked the man’s boss if he planned to fire the erring buyer, he replied, “Hell, no. I fire people who never make mistakes, because they never take chances.”

Another business leader told his associates, “Make sure you generate a reasonable number of mistakes, otherwise I won’t know that you trying.”

Bottom line: Be willing to take common sense risks. Be ready to lose some in order to be a big winner in the end.