21st Century Time Management: Win the Battle of Overwhelm

The competitive edge and work-life balance is found in the mindful process of stepping back, prioritizing the choices coming in, and making good decisions on the things that really impact results.

By Kory Kogon

You may feel buried in things to do and simultaneously drained of the capacity to do them. You may feel agitated and anxious beyond reason, overly stressed when you are working and when you are not. It is a semi-permanent state of worried restlessness that pervades the culture and drains us of confidence and joy.

Today it is both easier and harder than ever to achieve extraordinary productivity. This is the heart and soul of today’s time management problem. Technology is the great enabler while at the same time it creates unprecedented information flow and unfettered accessibility. This paradox will only become more challenging for people who do not know how to tame the paradox and turn it into their advantage. 

There are three critical challenges revolving around this productivity paradox we face:

We are making more decisions than ever. The velocity of incoming decisions required to do our work is almost overwhelming.Emails, texts, employees, customers all represent decisions that must be made. And what most people do — because they are committed, hard-working people — is try to handle all this incoming information in a linear way. They take decisions as they come, handling them one at a time, making them as well and fast as they can, and then moving on to the next one like an assembly line.

The problem is that the highest-value decisions don’t come in a predictable order. They are nonlinear opportunities. If we are not aware, we might miss them entirely, or only address them in a rushed, low-quality way. A linear approach, which is the brain’s attempt at survival in a non-linear reality, is a recipe for failure. Putting our heads down and simply doing more faster does not create extraordinary productivity, just survival. The competitive edge and work-life balance is found in the mindful process of stepping back, prioritizing the choices coming in, and making good decisions on the things that really impact results.

Operating a franchise business is complex. And you know intuitively there are areas where the right decisions will make a huge difference in your results. The key is to install the process that allows you to mindfully mitigate and eliminate some of the “noise” so you can devote the time and energy to make the highest value decisions in a quality way.

Our attention is under unprecedented attack. While we are trying to handle all the incoming decisions, our attention is under unprecedented attack. The attack is coming from more than the demands of the people around us. All the beeps, buzzes, and banners that invade our mental space come at a cost to our ability to focus on the things that grow the franchise or system.

Even your own personal technology can become enemy territory, unintentionally. If you have ever Googled something important and then, 45 minutes of links later, realized you were off course, you have experienced how easily your attention can be taken from you if you are not conscious about it.

Bottom line: If we’re not careful, we can go on mental autopilot, moving from one stimulating and distracting input to another, and miss the things that are uniquely important or meaningful — the things that can make our business, relationships and lives, extraordinary.

We are suffering from a personal energy crisis. A productive life is a conscious life, and that takes mental energy. Running a business can be a 24-hour affair, and if we are not careful we will find ourselves barely mustering the mental and physical energy to operate at our best. A tired brain lessens the ability to master the key skills of productivity, making high-value decisions and having focused attention.

The latest brain science shows that we can overcome the “urgency addiction” and the personal energy crisis by rewiring our brain to pause and consider what is actually important. With this strategy, which is referred to as “Pause-Clarify-Decide,” we can pause our “Reactive Brain” long enough to use our “Thinking Brain” to clarify everything that is coming at us. Then we can make a conscious and intentional decision as to what is of high value and thus, worth our time and energy. The more we hone this skill, the more we will be able to accomplish the right things and get a better “ROM” — return-on-every-moment in our day.

The path to do this is through consciously making the five choices and mastering the skills of decision, attention and energy management.

The Five Choices

1: Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent. This choice helps us discern the important from the less and not important, as well as how to increase our ROM in the midst of fierce distractions. With Choice 1, we systematically filter the vitally important priorities from the less and not important so we can focus on what matters most.

2: Go for Extraordinary, Don’t Settle for Ordinary. Guide your decision making through a framework of what success looks like in your current, most important roles. Competing priorities often prevent you from achieving extraordinary results. Redefine your current roles in terms of extraordinary results to achieve high-priority goals. Pause, clarify and decide what you will do with every opportunity that comes at you, such as emails that are or are not important. In the midst of fierce distractions use more of your Thinking Brain and less of your Reactive Brain, which will increase your ROM.

3: Schedule the Big Rocks, Don’t Sort Gravel. Plan weekly and daily so that you execute with excellence on the most important things. Make the 30/10 Promise: set aside 30 minutes for weekly planning before the week starts and 10 minutes for daily planning before the day starts, so that you spend your valuable time on that which matters most. Create a consistent cadence of planning and execution that produces extraordinary outcomes.

4: Rule Your Technology, Don’t Let It Rule You. Turn your technology into a productivity engine. Leverage your technology and fend off distractions by optimizing platforms such as Microsoft Outlook and Google, to boost productivity. Detox your inbox; every email is really a decision, so use filters and rules to automate many of the day-to-day email decisions that take your valuable
brain power. 

5: Fuel Your Fire, Don’t Burn Out. Increase energy so you can think clearly, make good decisions, and feel more accomplished at the end of every day. Today’s high-pressure and intense franchise environment can burn you out. By applying the energy drivers in Choice 5, you will benefit from the latest in brain science to consistently recharge your mental and physical energy. Start with one of five drivers to increase your mental and physical
energy: Move.

These five choices, when consistently made, will help franchisees and franchisors personally and professionally feel more accomplished at the end of the day. Installing this as a system in your organization where everyone is discerning similarly through the lens of the time matrix, keeping the 30/10 Promise, working on their energy drivers is truly how to create a culture of productivity.

Kory Kogon is global practice leader for Organizational Development with FranklinCovey. She is one of the authors of “The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity.”