The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

“A man would do nothing, if he waited until he could do it so well that no one would find fault with what he has done.” — Cardinal John Newman, British Clergyman

“I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.” — Anne Lamont, American author and political activist

“People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it.” — Edith Schaeffer, American author

As Voltaire once pointed out, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Think about that. As I interpret it, here’s what he meant: while a desire for perfection is admirable, it becomes increasingly difficult the closer you get to the goal. At some point, you have to admit to yourself that you’ve done what you can, and accept that it’s good enough.

It may shock you to learn that I’m in agreement with Voltaire.

No, I’m not advocating laziness or sloppiness; never! I’ll be the first to admit that perfectionism has its good points. A desire for excellence sets a high standard for achievement , encouraging us to do our best in all things. This is absolutely necessary if you ever expect to achieve SuperCompetence.

However.
Perfection is the realm of the divine; it’s just not going to happen very often here on Earth. If you expect perfection in everything, you’ll never be happy—and you’ll never be as productive as you should be, because you’re hung up on getting it right instead of getting it done. Worse, a quest for perfection can paralyze you if you wait for the ideal conditions to get started. I’ve heard this called “paralysis by analysis.” Some people call it “vapor-lock”—just like you get with an old car.

Let’s check to see if you’ve let your inner perfectionist take over. Do you:

• Always run at 110% capacity?
• Leave no room for error?
• Criticize yourself constantly?
• Expect too much from others?
• Get depressed if goals go unmet?
• Feel a constant fear of failure?
• Get defensive when criticized, even constructively?
• Have low self-esteem?
• Wait until everything’s perfect before starting a task?

If most of these points describe you, then to paraphrase comic Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a perfectionist.

Too much perfectionism is dangerous, because it inevitably limits productivity. If you want to achieve true SuperCompetence and move up the ladder of success, you need to learn to control your inner perfectionist. Look: while sloppiness shouldn’t be tolerated, good enough usually is good enough — especially on the first pass.

Here’s what I mean. Any experienced writer knows that you never get a manuscript right on the first draft. It’s a fool’s errand to try: the purpose of the first draft is just to get the ideas on paper. If you go back and edit yourself after every sentence, you’ll never get anywhere. The real artistry comes during the rewrite, when the writer cuts here, adds there, reorganizes thoughts, and tweaks words until they approximate what she was trying to say in the first place. Note the word approximate. It’ll never be just right. Trying to make it so is another aspect of perfectionism, one that can be devastating to productivity. At some point, you have to let it go.

Here are some tips for taming the beast of perfectionism:

• Step back and take a look at the big picture. Quit focusing on individual pixels!
• Set realistic expectations. Realize that perfection is an option, not a requirement.
• Establish deadlines for yourself. You have to draw the line somewhere.
• Give yourself permission to be imperfect.
• Stop comparing yourself to other people.
• Accept yourself as a human being, who will make mistakes.
• Understand that no matter how well you perform, someone can always find fault.
• Give yourself credit for what you do right.
• Learn to accept criticism as it’s meant.
• Focus on what you’re doing now, not on past mistakes or future worries.
• Quit overanalyzing and waiting for the perfect conditions, and get started.
• Lighten up! Learn to relax.
• Ask for help when you need it.

It’s fine to shoot for the best that you can be. In fact, you should harness your perfectionist tendencies as a motivational tool—without taking it so far that it starts causing problems. Do your best within your time constraints; then, if you have extra time to work on something, go back and kick it up a notch. If not, stop worrying. Just keep reminding yourself: productivity is more important than perfection any day.

You won’t manage to rein in your inner perfectionist all the time; accept that, too. But you do need to immediately get back on the wagon when you fall off. Otherwise, you’ll alienate others, you’ll never be satisfied—and you’ll burn out before you get very far.

“It is your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude.” — Zig Ziglar, motivational expert

“Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you are right.” — Henry Ford, American industrialist

Your Attitude is your state of mind toward the world around you—the precious combination of motivation, drive, and proactiveness that help define who you are. If you want to succeed in the workplace, you need to ensure that the sum of those factors is positive, so that your Attitude can pull you forward, rather than drag you down like an anchor. You must be willing to look beyond (or around or under) the expected, and take steps toward achieving what you find there. Not only will such an outlook help you achieve the improbable on a regular basis, it’ll help you get through those inevitable times when everything looks dark and difficult.

SuperCompetents always think positively, because they’ve learned that when your reach exceeds your grasp, you can accomplish amazing things.

This remains true even when your Attitude takes you to the rarified heights of the C-Suite. Attitude is one Key that translates more or less intact from the lower management levels; the name doesn’t even change. Like all the Keys, though, at the higher elevations it grows into something more encompassing than it was before. It’s now your responsibility—and your privilege—to expand that Attitude beyond your personal space to the entire organization that you’re in charge of.

Now, the elements comprising Attitude always remain the same, no matter where you stand in the corporate hierarchy. You’ll always have to safeguard your health; relentlessly persevere; harness your personal creativity; play well with others; and maintain a positive, upbeat approach. It’s hard work, admittedly—but it’s hard work with a purpose. And it’s not going to get any easier as you rise in the company, despite a pervasive belief to the contrary. If it does, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Here’s what I mean by that. While you’ll always have people upstream and downstream from you who are affected by your Attitude in one way or another, when you’re a lower-level employee, your influence is minimal. If you twist off and don’t get a report done, it’s going to be an annoyance more than anything else; and if it’s annoying enough, you might find yourself out of a job…and that’s about as far as it’ll go.

But as you rise in power, you also rise in influence. Whether you like it or not, the people subordinate to you will be looking to you for guidance, while anyone above you will eye you with certain expectations. That’s why, when you’ve finally hit the heights, your drive to achieve personal SuperCompetence must evolve into a drive to achieve organizational SuperCompetence as well.

You’re still just one person, but your influence at the C-Suite is so substantial that a failure of Attitude can affect the whole company. Last blog, I deplored the old “le etat, c’est moi” outlook, because it can destroy a company if upper-level execs let it go to their heads. But the thing is, it’s true to some extent. As the CEO, President, VP, or Chairman of the Board, you may not be “the state” per se, but people do look to you for leadership—and you can be sure that your Attitude, whatever it may be, will be adopted by others. If you don’t maintain a positive Attitude of striving toward excellence, then others will assume that’s acceptable…which it certainly is not in a world-class organization.

Worse, even those who attempt to maintain a positive attitude may end up being dragged down by those who don’t. The result will be a toxic work environment where the best workers can’t accomplish anything and don’t stay long.

Does it sound like the weight of the world is on your shoulders? In a way, it is. It’s one of the prices you have to pay for the kind of ambition that takes you to the C-Suite in the first place. If you want to enjoy all the perks at the top, you never really get to slow down. But that’s fine; because you get to shape the organization toward your own personal vision—and one way you do it is by maintaining a strong, steady Attitude. You must remain unremittingly positive, always striving to achieve that winning outcome.

“Ignorance is not bliss. It’s fatal. It’s costly. And it’s for losers. You either get organized, or get crushed.” — Donald Trump, American businessman

One of the Six Keys of workplace competence is Accessibility: your ability to organize the inputs and outputs in your work life, so that you can easily locate data in any medium—whether it’s in paper files, on your computer system, on the company Intranet, or distributed in your team members’ heads. Given the fact that modern workers are constantly bombarded with data and communications, just being able to access information efficiently can enhance productivity to a surprising degree.

At the C-Suite level, Accessibility morphs into Organization…and from a productivity standpoint, it’s more important than ever. Organization means more than just maintaining an efficient schedule and getting your personal workspace shipshape. By the time you reach upper management, you ought to be a virtuoso at that level of accessibility, and you should also have a personal staff to help you keep things accessible. But when you’re overseeing a whole organization, company, or division, your organizational bailiwick expands. At that level, true Organization requires a thorough understanding of not just personal accessibility, but also the systems that define and support your entire team. They need to be as tight and effective as possible, and it’s up to you to ensure that reality — if necessary, by imposing it from the top.

I think this is a perfect example of the kind of big-picture work that a top executive, particularly a CEO or President, is responsible for. It’s about as far from micromanaging as you can get, because it effects everyone in your group. You’ve stepped back even farther than a good hands-off manager, because you’re not worried about individual performance per se; you’re dealing with the “platform” on which all the individual “apps” in your organization run, if you will. You’re tweaking the code, and making everything work better for everybody.

One of your prime responsibilities here is to determine what you need to change in order to maximize Organization, which requires that you spend some time studying the entire range of systems and processes by which information is organized, stored, and transmitted within your organizational structure. Don’t expect this to be a quick process; if you try to rush change, you’re likely to make damaging errors. Ultimately, the changes might take months or years to implement—not only because you have to study things thoroughly first in order to determine what needs to be changed, but also because you have to figure out how to pay for those changes…and then you may have to convince a board of directors, the business owner, or other individuals or groups that you report to that the changes are necessary.

Warning: don’t get lost in the concept of change for change’s sake! The cliché of the new broom that sweeps clean is a popular one, but don’t forget the tinkerer’s Number One rule: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The idea is to tighten up existing systems to maximize efficiency, if at all possible. Replacing systems wholesale is unnecessary and wasteful if all you really need to do is streamline and modernize. What truly matters is productivity, and your employees can’t be productive if you’re reorganizing for no good reason.

Once thing I’d like to emphasize before I sign off is the fact that in order to accomplish this new level of Organization, you absolutely need to get all your lieutenants on board. By the time you’ve studied the situation for a while, you ought to have an almost instinctual understand of not just what needs to be done, but also how the individuals who have to implement your changes will react when you propose those changes. It may be that one of your first tasks will be to restructure decision making within your group, so that the Organization can be pulled off efficiently.

You’re the boss. You can’t let your subordinates control the flow of information and data at their whim, not if you want to Organize your company to achieve maximum productivity. If your managers are used to treating their teams as their own private fiefdoms, you’re going to have to break that stranglehold before you can get anything done.

“Accountability breeds response-ability.” — Stephen R. Covey

Once you reach the uppermost layers of management, Accountability becomes Efficiency—and as a C-Suite manager, one of your first tasks should be to implement Efficiency wherever necessary.

If you’ve made it to the C-Suite, you didn’t get there by accident. You were elevated to the position because of your demonstrated SuperCompetence in all aspects of your work life. It’s a truism that you can’t be SuperCompetent without having a highly-developed sense of Accountability; and as one of your company’s leaders, you’re a cornerstone upon which the entire organization rests. This means that you have to set the Efficiency example for your team to follow.

The buck stops with you because it has to; after all, where else can it go, when you’re sitting at the top of the heap? This being the case, all the factors that define this Key—quick, effective decision-making, accepting both credit and blame, streamlining your work processes, cracking the whip on yourself, eliminating time-wasters, everything—expand and take on more significance than ever before.

This can be an overwhelming responsibility, the maintenance of which requires a rigid and consistent level of self-discipline—the kind that got you to the C-Suite in the first place. Yes, you’ve finally arrived, but this is no time to relax! I believe that some of the more spectacular corporate implosions of recent years have been caused by the breakdown of this Key at the C-Suite level. With a relaxation of Accountability can come complacency and self-indulgence. All too often, this leads to a disregard for corporate welfare…or, worse, an assumption that what’s good for you is good for the company, the kind of “le etat, ces’t moi” thinking that brought down the French Empire back in the 18th century. It’s also one of the fast-tracks to corporate ruin.

Like all the other Keys, Accountability is a tool; and the only purpose of a tool is to be used. In addition to keeping you on the straight and narrow, this particular tool enables you to infuse Efficiency into your entire organization. Properly applied, your high level of personal Accountability can permeate your entire team, creating an organizational structure founded foremost on personal responsibility. Because that’s what it comes down to: everyone, at all levels, accepting the responsibility for getting their own work done efficiently and effectively. This means learning to implement stringent self-discipline and a tight focus, and finding ways to work around distractions and bottlenecks. Pointing fingers helps no one, because the only thing that really matters is results.

Efficiency involves tightening up everything, from the shop floor to the highest levels of management. This involves clearing out deadwood, cutting costs, streamlining paperwork, bypassing (and ultimately eliminating) clogs in the process flow, and tweaking systems until they operate as flawlessly as possible. Like Organization, Efficiency may require imposition from the top down…and if you really want it to work, you’ll have to be ruthless about it.

Don’t institute change for change’s sake, but don’t hesitate to get the ball rolling when something can and should be done. Your ultimate goal is to create a culture of Efficiency, in which your sharpest employees naturally assess systems, processes, and individual tasks, and take the initiative to be accountable for them. If you can do that, your less accountable employees will either take up the gauntlet of Efficiency…or be squeezed out by the employees who do.

These days, “Operational Efficiency” is a popular buzz-term in business circles; and while it isn’t precisely the same as C-Suite Efficiency, C-Suite Efficiency can certainly help to bring it about. If you can inculcate everyone in your organizational tree with a high level of Efficiency, you can sharpen focus on the most important aspects of your business, which can’t help but spark innovation, drive growth, and increase market share. Productivity will soar, and your organization will make a bundle—because you’re doing things that most of your competitors aren’t.

It all starts with you and your personal commitment to Accountability in all its forms, which cannot waver. If you expect to raise the flag of Efficiency over your organization, and to reap all the benefits that result, then you’ve got to lead from the front.

“The older I get, the more I see a straight path where I want to go. If you’re going to hunt elephants, don’t get off the trail for a rabbit.” — T. Boone Pickens, American financier

At the lofty C-Suite level, the SuperCompetent Key of Attention transforms into Focus. Suddenly, your capacity to concentrate on your work and only your work becomes paramount—much more critical that it was before, if only because your actions impact the company more completely than they ever have. A distracted, overwhelmed CEO or VP can be much more damaging than a middle manager who can’t keep his or her head in the game.

Worse, the higher you go, the more distractions you have to deal with. When you’re just Josephine Schmoe down in Cubical Land, it’s hard enough to filter out electronic distractions, sudden drop-ins, and the noisy neighbors who want to socialize all day outside your cube. When you enter management, you suddenly have even more people who want a piece of your time, and, often, more who actually deserve one; so you have to try extra hard to avoid wasting your time on distractions. You especially have to disconnect yourself from your electronic leashes (especially handhelds and the Web) and force them back into their original function as tools. Focus!

This becomes true in spades when you reach the uppermost tier of management, even as what is truly important shifts. No matter how hard you work, if you can’t maintain a tight focus on the key activities that directly affect your organization’s success, you’re never going to perform up to par—and neither will the organization you’re ostensibly leading. At best, you’ll be like the Red Queen, running as fast as you can to stay in the same place. At worst…well, let’s just say disaster looms. And again, as a leader, your failure hurts many more people than just you and your family.

I think the biggest problem of the modern-day executive isn’t a lack of commitment or work ethic. Most execs are perfectly willing to work hard, and for a distressing number of hours. And it’s not that they don’t understand basic time management, either: anyone who has made it to upper tier management (with the occasional exception of the boss’s son) has mastered the basics of time management, or they wouldn’t be there. The real problem is that many C-Suite executives haven’t learned to do expand and refocus their understanding of time management to take into account the realities of their new positions.

When you reach the C-Suite, your first task should be to take a very close look at your responsibilities, so that you can determine precisely what’s most important for your organization. Then, you have to trim away everything else. Everything! The most effective C-Suite managers do the following:

• Compartmentalize issues so that they’re more easily handled.
• Limit meetings, and make those they have shorter and fewer in number.
• Limit distractions of all kinds: drop-ins, phone calls, emails, etc.
• Hire staff to help them organize and prioritize their responsibilities.
• Practice healthy life-habits to enhance personal performance.
• Learn to say no when they need to, and to make it stick.

What they don’t do is micromanage or solve minor problems. They don’t have the time! Those things are rabbits, not elephants; and if you do have rabbits that need taking care of, then that’s what subordinates are for.

Which brings up, again, the issue of delegation. C-suite executives don’t have staffs just so that they can feel important; the real function of an executive staff is to handle all those distractions that would normally divert them from their responsibilities. When you’re at the top of the heap, maybe the buck really does stop with you, but you shouldn’t even see those measly little dollar bills, or even fifties or hundreds. At your level, maybe that plaque on your wall should read, “The Megabuck Stops Here.”

A good staff can’t keep you from wasting your time if you really want to, but they can definitely filter your calls and email, and keep people from barging through your door or otherwise bugging you when you’re trying to focus on more significant things. You need to be working on budgets, new marketing ploys, and how to respond to the Board’s request for your department’s priorities for the next fiscal year—not dealing with drama, or putting out low-level brushfires.

“There cannot be a crisis today; my schedule is already full.” — Henry Kissinger, American politician.

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” Stephen R. Covey, time management and productivity guru.

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.” — Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prizing winning author.

One of the core keys of SuperCompetence is Availability: your willingness and ability to protect your time, so that you can accomplish your desired activities. At the C-Suite level, this translates as Scheduling—and Scheduling is about more than just accomplishing the things that you want to accomplish. CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, VPs, Directors, and similar high-level executives have responsibilities that far transcend the average worker’s; the fact that they tend to face those responsibilities in much plusher surroundings doesn’t obviate the reality that, more than ever, they’re hemmed in by their need to limit their availability.

Like Prioritization, Scheduling requires very close attention to what’s truly important—and it’s critical to getting anything important done at all. Once you reach the top, you have to protect your time diligently if you want to keep accomplishing things that are valuable to the organization. You can’t allow yourself to be distracted by the mundane: that is, it’s not up to you to run around putting out brushfires, especially when other people can do so less expensively. That style of management comes perilously close to micromanaging, and it’s even more harmful for the upper-level executive than it is for lower-level managers, because it more directly harms the entire organization.

That’s something that you should always keep in mind as you climb the corporate ladder: in almost every case, what you do as a C-Suite executive—whether good or ill—will affect the organization more than anything you did while you occupied lower rungs on the ladder. You forget that at your peril, as debacles like Enron and AIG make readily apparent.

This applies at the personal level, too. Because you have to focus on high-level tasks, there’s not much time left to make yourself available to the lower echelon. While it would be nice to maintain an open-door policy like mid-level managers sometimes do, that’s not usually a realistic option for the top-level exec…even though some companies have started to move in that direction. Some, in fact, have gone so far as to put their upper executives in offices that leave them completely visible to all and sundry, a la Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s open-space office in New York City.

While this is an interesting and even refreshing change from the old days, when executives closeted themselves away in inaccessible inner sancta protected by secretarial dragons, I don’t believe openness and availability is going to work for them in the long run. To some extent, high-level executives have to remain cloistered from the hoi polloi. There’s nothing elitist about this: it’s just that people at the very top have too much on their plates already to be bothered by low-level considerations.

You absolutely have to take control of your time, in every way possible, simply to keep from becoming overwhelmed.

Aside from all the standard time management techniques that you should put into play as a matter of course, your primary tool in Scheduling should be delegation. It’s imperative to hand off as many tasks as possible to other people, and to empower them to perform those tasks with a minimum of interference and oversight. Your hands should be light on the reins, with an eye toward ensuring that things keep running smoothly rather than rolling up your sleeves and jumping in with both feet. You should strive to handle directly only those things that are most profitable to your company, whether that means meeting with the Board and defending your department’s budget, juggling million-dollar projects, or developing new marketing strategies.

A C-Suite executive also needs an Executive Assistant: not just to insulate them from the rest of the company, but to take on all the administrative tasks that come with an executive position. This is another form of delegation, if a very specialized one, and the EA isn’t just a glorified secretary. Like a chief of staff in the military, the EA takes on those aspects of the executive’s job which require specialized knowledge but minimal authority, as well as any housekeeping tasks required of the position: liaising between departments, organizing special events, research, information gathering, coordination of special projects…and, of course, handling the executive’s schedule, and acting as the gate-guard who limits access to their employer’s time.

It all comes back to Scheduling.

“Prioritization is about doing something. It’s not about an excuse for inaction.” — Bjorn Lomborg, Danish author and business professor

“We can do anything, but we can’t do everything… at least, not at the same time. So think of your priorities not in terms of what activities you do, but when you do them. Timing is everything.” — Dan Millman, American author
“First things first, second things never.” — Shirley Conran, British editor and writer

In my most recent book, SuperCompetent (John Wiley and Sons, 2010), I identified and described six keys that anyone can use in the workplace to maximize their performance: Activity, Availability, Attention, Accessibility, Accountability, and Attitude. Recently, I’ve been considering how all six affect C-Suite executives—that is, upper-level executives like the CEO, CFO, CIO, Presidents, VPs, and Directors. What issues, concerns, and challenges do senior leaders face in these areas?

As it turns out, these concepts look a bit different at the highest levels, so the standard approaches don’t necessary apply. In many cases, even the names have to be changed. This is why, at the C-Suite level, I prefer to refer to my keys as Prioritization, Scheduling, Focus, Organization, Efficiency, and Attitude, respectively.

In this blog, the first of six in a series, I’ll take a look at the C-Suite version of Activity: Prioritization.

In general, Prioritization is the order in which you organize those things most important to you: your religion, your family, your life goals, your daily work. It’s necessary to look closely at each one, and determine which items need to come first and how everything else should follow. All these categories are important, of course, but what we’re concerned with in this venue is the business aspect of the equation.

In the work arena, Prioritization may involve several different levels of responsibility, starting with the personal Activity standards required of any effective individual: a strong sense of self-discipline, written goals, strict to-do lists, a tight focus, and a drive for efficiency, just to name a few. However, in my opinion the most significant level of C-Suite Prioritization is the order in which you prioritize your organization’s operations and projects (at least those within your bailiwick). This involves careful, long-term planning in which cost/benefit analyses, delivery timeframes, resource allocation, and similar factors have to be taken into consideration for new projects, along with the organization (and reorganization) of existing projects for which all of the above have already been taken into account.

Large-scale Prioritization is rarely a solitary exercise. While you may or may not have the authority to prioritize by fiat, in most cases the most logical method is to sit down with the high-level stakeholders of the projects at hand (Directors, VPs, etc.) and hammer out which ones need to come first and why. If nothing else, this kind of review can make it easier for the executive team up the ladder to make its final decisions, and it prepares you to spring into action once those decisions have been made.

Properly done, Prioritization will also hone your organization’s efficiency. When you sit down to prioritize, look at ways that doing so might make the work flow simpler and easier, increasing speed and profitability. Keep in mind that true prioritization is proactive, rather than reactive; that is, you prioritize ahead of time based on projected needs, rather than prioritizing on the spur of the moment because the situation forces you to. Proactive planning allows for a level of flexibility and clean efficiency that reactive prioritization lacks. It’s very difficult to take every factor into account when you’re reactive, and eventually, that inefficiency will catch up with you.

And remember, Prioritization involves more than simply choosing which items come first: you also have to deal with lower-priority items, determining where they need to fit into the work structure—or if they should fit at all. Don’t be afraid to tap subordinates when making these lower-level Prioritization decisions. While the buck should stop with you, you must be willing to delegate some decision-making power in order to a) protect yourself from being overwhelmed and making mistakes; and b) to empower the people under you, so that they can use their own creativity to solve problems. Don’t abdicate your responsibility for anything, but be sure to oversee rather than micromanage. At your level, you need to free up the time necessary to revisit your objectives consistently and rattle cages, when necessary, to move things along.

Which brings up another point about Prioritization: at some level, the requirements of executives more senior than you may take precedence over your priorities. Even if you’re at the top of the heap, a Board of Directors or stockholder group may have the final say. But it’s your responsibility to convince them of the value of specific projects, and to make recommendations regarding their priority. They may or may not listen to you, but even so you have to do the best you can to champion whatever you believe is most important for the company or organization, based on your understanding of its priorities. Once the decision has been made, however, it’s up to you to prioritize based on those higher-level decisions, whether you agree or not.

“If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.” — Benjamin Franklin

Ben Franklin had it right. Of all the resources available to us, time is certainly the most precious. Unlike office supplies or even money, it’s impossible to get more; there’s no box marked “Time” in the supply closet where you can grab a spare minute or two. Once time is spent, it’s gone, and there’s no getting it back

And yet, we invariably waste it.

Look: you can’t afford to waste time at work. A firm grasp of time management is absolutely crucial if you want to succeed…although the truth is, when you manage time, you’re really managing yourself. You need to buckle down and control you.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the eight biggest self-inflicted time-wasters in modern business, so you can know what you need to avoid the most.

Time Waster #1: The Internet The Internet has to be the single worst productivity thief in the modern business era. Like many technological advances, the Internet is a two-edged sword. It’s useful, and it can and has built fortunes—but it’s also a siren that lures workers to waste time. In recent surveys, workers admitted to spending an average of two hours per workday online. Close that browser!

Time Waster #2: Socializing We all want a workplace where people get along and enjoy spending time together. However, too often we’re chatting when we should be working. That’s fine for lunchtime and breaks, but otherwise you should be at your desk. You should especially avoid chattering outside someone’s office or cubicle, because then you’re not just wasting your time, you’re distracting someone else.

Time Waster #3: Personal Communications These days, there are so many ways of getting interrupted by personal messages: IMs, texting, email, telephone. You know the remedy: turn off your cell phone, don’t check your personal email, and end any personal calls on the company line as quickly as possible.

Time Waster #4: Personal Business This time waster ties in with the above, but goes much farther. I’ve known people to balance their checkbooks or sort out their mortgage applications while at work. I think that people do these things at work because they can’t find any other time to do them: we’re working so long and hard these days that by the time we’re home, we’re exhausted. That doesn’t make it kosher, however. Keep personal business at home.

Time Waster #5: Smoking Some workers have a ready-made excuse for wasting time: they’re smokers. This is fine if you smoke only during your breaks or at lunch; but dedicated smokers often take a few minutes here and there to nurse their addiction. Given the fact that most employers don’t make this easy anymore, it can take 10 minutes or more to get to the designated smoking area, smoke a cigarette, and get back to work. That can add up to half an hour of wasted time per workday. The solution? Learn to control that habit.

Time Waster #6: Arriving Late/Leaving Early This one’s self-explanatory. Many of us pare a few minutes off the day here and there, and some of us make a habit of it. It may not seem like much, but get this: if you’re late or leave early an average of ten minutes a day, that adds up to a week’s paid vacation over the course of a year. Yow! Better start setting that alarm earlier.

Time Waster #7: Job-hunting There are jobs in which it’s necessary to spend company time maintaining your resume, but in most circumstances, it’s a big no-no. Yet many of us spend appreciable amounts of work-time keeping our CVs up-to-date, drafting cover letters, and even emailing resumes to prospective employers. Again, this is something better done at home.

Time Waster #8: Spacing Out It’s easy to sit at your desk, stare at your computer, and pretend to work. Many employees spend an appreciable portion of the day spacing out, either because they’re bored, lack challenges, or dislike their jobs. Snap out of it.

The Bottom Line The solution to all of these time-wasters is simply stated: “Stop it!” Of course, that’s easier said than done, and may require considerable discipline. If you identify one of more of these time-wasters in your daily routine, here’s my recommendation: choose the worst one, research how to fix it, and put what you’ve learned in play. Once you have a handle on that time-waster, move to another. I think you’ll be surprised at how much productive time you’ll free up over the long run.

“To succeed in life you need things like talent, diligence, persistence, skills, hard work and maybe a little luck. You can achieve great things—but in order to do so you have to do a lot more than just think about them.” — Paul Sloane, author of The Innovative Leader.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave since 2006, you’ve certainly heard of The Secret. This popular philosophy, as outlined in a self-help book of the same name, purports to relate the true secret of success in all aspects of life. According to author Rhonda Byrne, it’s all about optimistic thinking and a faith in abundance; that is, a belief that the Universe will provide for you through a Law of Attraction, assuming you keep believing in whatever it is you really want.

The Secret has been widely interpreted, by supporters and critics alike, to mean that all you have to do is wish really hard for good things to happen, and they will. Naturally, this has resulted in a cynical knee-jerk reaction from those who refuse to believe in fairy tales. To be fair to Ms. Byrne, I believe that her thesis has been willfully misinterpreted by many of her readers. At its root, I think, The Secret is really a reminder of the value of positive thinking and self-belief in creating success. There’s nothing wrong with either; in fact, they’re necessary ingredients to any success.

But let’s face it: you can’t hope things into existence just by thinking good thoughts about them.

True productivity requires action. That action may take a variety of forms, but usually it means getting up and energetically doing whatever needs to be done to get from Point A to Point B. You have to jump into your work with both feet, facing the problems that lie between you and your goals and dealing with them in a proactive way. If you’ve got to get a series of reports done by the end of the month, sitting around feeling positive that the Universe will provide and your reports will somehow get done, regardless of what you do, is a recipe for disaster. As the saying goes, motion always beats meditation—assuming you’ve already done your homework and thought about all the possible outcomes.

I think you need to realize from the beginning that the Universe has already provided for you—and what it has provided is you. So use your intelligence, energy, and problem-solving skills to grab hold of any tools available, and use them to get the job done. And always, always, keep your eyes open to the possibilities!

There’s an old joke about a little old lady caught in a flood. A fellow in a car drives up to rescue her, and she refuses to go with him, saying, “No, son, the Lord will provide for me.” Later, a man arrives in a rowboat to rescue her; nope, the Lord will provide. Later, as she sits on her roof, she refuses rescue by a helicopter, saying, “The Lord will provide.”

An hour later, she drowns.

When she reaches the Pearly Gates, she’s livid. She flies into St. Peter with, “I believed in you! I kept telling everyone the Lord would provide, and He let me drown!”

St. Peter looks at her strangely and says, “What are you talking about, lady? God provided you with a car, a boat, and a helicopter!”

The point here is that you have to recognize the tools the Universe has provided, and make use of them. Don’t close your eyes to reality.

In my opinion, the true idea underlying The Secret is that if you think positively enough, and open yourself up to all the possibilities available, then you’ll find a way to accomplish whatever it is you want to accomplish. You will solve the problem, not magical thinking. In this universe, you’re not going to grow wings just because you really want to fly. It’s stupid to expect that. But if you think about a problem enough, knowing that it can be solved, then you just might sit down and invent something that lets you fly…or, you may devise a way to save up the money so that you can take flying lessons, and eventually buy your own LearJet.

If you combine that positive visualization with positive action, the productivity that results will bring you the things that you want. If you just lie there and dream, you’re wasting your time and talent…and nothing productive will ever get done.

Know what’ll kill employee engagement deader than a doorknob? Micromanaging.

Even if you start out with an office full of bright, innovative people, looking over their shoulders and correcting them every step of the way will eventually grind them down. Before long, you’ll have a collection of disengaged grumblers who either can’t wait to get out from under your thumb, or who just hunker down and don’t do anything, in hopes that it’ll soon be over.

That’s because when you micromanage someone, you’re practically shouting in their ear: “You’re incompetent! I can’t trust you to do the tiniest thing right!” Now, how would that make you feel?

If you’re a micromanager, you may not realize it; you may just think you’re detail-oriented and want to be sure that your employee does everything exactly right…so you tell them what that is, down to the finest point. That is a mistake. Not only is it detrimental to employee morale, you don’t have time for it. Delegating tasks to other people is the manager’s defining trait. Even if you can wear all the hats in your organization, you shouldn’t. You have to focus on what you’re best at, and hand off everything else to other people and trust them to do it.

Trust is the key word here. You have to assume the employee knows their job, and you can’t watch every little step as they perform it. You’re like the lieutenant who’s told by a colonel to put up a flagpole: you don’t do it yourself, even if you can, and you certainly don’t stand there and direct someone else while they do it. You go to the senior NCO and say, “Sergeant, put up that flagpole!” and the Sergeant gets it done.

That’s what you’re expected to do. That’s what your boss up the line expects, and that’s what the Sergeant expects. Assign someone a task, give them what they need to do it, and then get back to your own work. Touch bases occasionally to see that it’s done, and don’t stand over someone and nitpick while they do it.

It’s up to you, as the manager, to take care of all the big-picture stuff. You can’t do that if you’re focused on one little pixel.