StartSpeedReading.com

Photo by poopface productions

It often happens that people do not show up on the meetings or appointments on the right time. Being late for 2 minutes, 5 minutes or even a quarter of an hour is widely accepted. In many cases people accept others coming late as they frequently do not arrive on the right time either. If being late is a frequent practice in a company, then it may be accepted in the organizational culture, everyone will regard it as a normal practice and people start thinking that if a meeting is scheduled at 10 AM then it actually starts at 10.10 AM.

What is be the cost of being late? It can be estimated by giving the time a monetary value. Let’s assume that individual’s hourly wage is $24. If we add labor taxes and other overhead costs then employing that person may cost a company a double of it, $48. So 10 minutes of his/her time costs one sixth of it, which is $8. If there are 10 people participating in a meeting then delaying the start of it because of the late arrivers will cost the company $80. If there is a meeting each week then it will cost the company $4,000 per year. If this happens in a board of directors meeting where the wage cost could be for example 10 times higher, then the yearly cost of people being late will be $40,000.

Why people are late? Most people actually consider being late a bad thing, but they are careless in their time management and therefore they do not do much for avoiding it. If the meeting takes place in the same building where people work, then the causes of being late may be being late with other work tasks, drinking coffee or chatting with co-workers. It often happens that people do not notice how fast the time flies and that the starting time of a meeting has already passed, while they are still in their office. If the participants need to commute to the meeting then traffic jams are a common problem for being late. People tend to be optimistic about the commuting time, but they can get stuck in heavy traffic and be not able to arrive on time. It may also happen that individuals’ daily schedules are too intensely packed with activities, which causes time trouble in keeping up with their plans.

How can we avoid being late? First, everyone should start from themselves. We have to commit ourselves for not being late. Why should we do it? Besides the fact the fact that it will save the other peoples and companies time and money it will allow you to gain respect from the others. If you create an image of an always on time person then it is easier for you to stand out from the others, impress your boss and gain promotion. This image will increase your influence on the meeting and your arguments will be taken more seriously.

Good time management will help you arrive on time. Avoid over-stuffing your daily schedule. It is wise to leave a short gap in your schedule before the start of the meeting. Leaving a 10 minute buffer can be very useful. If you have to commute then leave your destination early. You can get stuck in traffic. If possible then avoid scheduling the tasks, which duration you cannot control, before the start of the meeting.

If you are always on time then you give an example to the others. If you are not late then other people may also start arriving on time. If everyone is arriving on time regularly then nobody wants to be the one who is late.

kristjan time management appointments, being late, schedule, time management

Photo by garryknight

Using a telephone can help you to save a lot of time and make your activities efficient, but at the same time it can be a huge time . A telephone is a good communication tool for some situations, while it is not so wise to use it in under other circumstances. If you want to use your time efficiently you have to know when it is appropriate to choose telephone as a medium for communication.

Making a phone call is justified, when you have to reach a person immediately. In comparison to written communication, which is slower as it may take a whole day to get a reply to your email, by making a phone call you can contact a person in seconds.

Phone calls allow instant two-way communication. In some cases it will be possible to make conference calls with more than two participants, but these types of phone calls are not commonly used.

At the same time phone call is interrupting. If you have not agreed with other person when will call, which is true for most of the phone calls, then you do not know what he/she is doing. In comparison to sending an e-mail with a recipient can read and answer when he/she wants, there is no such a possibility for a phone call. You have to answer the phone and talk when you are calling. It means that making a phone call will consume other peoples time more than sending e-mail and therefore we have to respect their time (if we want other people to respect our time) and do not make unnecessary calls.

Making a phone call is a good solution in following cases:

• Getting a fast opinion. If you have to make a decision and need an opinion of conformation from other person then a phone call will allow you to get it fast. For example, you need a conformation for making a purchase. It is important that the other side has the relevant background information, so you do not have to explain him all the details.
• Schedule an appointment.  If we want to meet an other person then making a phone call is an efficient way to agree the time and place of the appointment. To make it more efficient we should send the other party the relevant information he/she needs to be informed before meeting us by e-mail.
• Delivering fast messages. If there is anything that the other person needs to get to know fast then call him as it is the most efficient way of doing it. So using a phone is required in all kinds of emergencies and situations, which call for fast action. As the other person may not be able to answers the call, then you can send him a text message or leave a message to the voice mail.
• Social conversation. Telephone is a tool for keeping in touch with our business partners, friends and relatives. By making a phone call there are more possibilities for delivering emotions than sending an e-mail. At the same time it is not as time consuming as meeting people face-to-face. Phone calling allows us to keep in touch with our networks.
• Sending good news to a small number of people. If you want to appreciate someone for a good job or thank for a favor then making a call is a quick and easy way to do it. Making a call is more personal then sending a thank you e-mail and it will be more helpful for building warm relations. Similarly, it is a good idea to send good news to a couple of persons (if the number of recipients is higher then send e-mail as phoning people one by one will take too much time). Make a phone call to tell your team-member that our project was approved and see how much delight you can create with it.

Making a phone call is not a good solution in following cases:

• Delivering facts and information. If you have to send detailed information, which you want the other person to remember, then it is sensible to send it by e-mail. It is inefficient to read a price list by phone ant let the other person to write it down. In a similar way detailed information about products, time plans or meeting agendas should not be talked by phone.
• Complex discussions with many participants. While it is a good way to ask an option from one or two person by phone calling them, it will be a waste of time to discuss problems with ten people by phoning them one-by one. If there is a need to make decisions, where the active participation of a greater number of people is needed, then it will better to meet.

kristjan time management communication, phone call, time management

Today I participated in a quiz game in Pärnu Yacht Port Pub, where I was a regular player some years ago, but it has bee nearly three years since it was the last time I was there. It is a relatively popular social event in my town, which means that once in a week more then 50 people get together, play a quiz game and have a couple of beers.

It was nice to meet the club members after so long period and see how they are doing. My life has changed a lot since I stopped participating in these events. Three years ago I was aiming at a steady and stable scientific career. Being super-efficient and making a lot of money was not so important for me. Sitting in the pubs and drinking beer was a usual way of passing time for me and I enjoyed it. My life was much slower then and I was not so much result orientated as I am now.

But then I participated in a speed reading course and it changed my life. I saw so many new possibilities for working faster and being more successful. From that moment onwards I have been constantly looking for new ways of working more efficiently. I started to teach speed reading and time management to other people in order to make their life easier. I have got clear goals what I want to achieve in my life and I work on them. This has allowed me to achieve success and to some extent it has turned me into a different person.

When I met these people in that club today I realized that we are so different now. Their life seemed to be unchanged. They were still enjoying the same lifestyle as before. They talked about how comfortable jobs they have, which allow them watch TV or browse internet websites for fun during their working time. Some of them used that time for preparing the quiz game. And they could answer many more questions correctly in the game than I did. This seemed to be so pointless to me. Why are they wasting your working time? Is it because they are lazy or they do not want to achieve more in their lives. Most of them were not doing very well on their job and the economic crisis had worsened the financial situation for many of them. They knew answers about the early career of Finnish president Mannerheim and forty year old Estonian movies, but the there still driving old and cheap cars, wore inexpensive clothes and they can never afford a vacation in Hawaii or Brazil.

When I was giving on of them a ride back to home, then we discussed topics about setting goals in your life. For him it seemed to be not understandable why I was taking everything so seriously and why I was so much committed to my goals. I said that I like it this way and planning my time and being efficient is a normal routine for me. He said that he would be fully satisfied if he would make $50,000 yearly. It was not easy to guess that his current income was well below that level. I thought that if he is going to continue with his attitudes and life style, he will never reach that level. Many people have a wish that I want to earn a lot of money, but they are not actually taking any steps, which could make it happen.

For me being efficient allows me to earn more money as well as have sufficient spare time. If I had been working less efficiently I would not have been able to afford my present level of consumption and would not have been financially secure as I am now.

The people who are inefficient actually pay a high price for that although in most cases they do not realize it. The fact that there waste time on their jobs and that they do not have clear plans about achieving success will cause the result that they will never reach that $50,000 per year. Of course it is all about making choices and everyone can decide on his own what he wants from his life. Still I somehow feel that these people are not fully satisfied, they definitely want to achieve a better living standard, but they do not have will power to start improving themselves.

Actually it is not that difficult. If you start applying the principles of time management to your life step by step then you will gradually improve. You start setting your goals, thinking out plans how to achieve these goals and planning your time. As you progress you will learn new ways how to use your time more efficiently and working becomes easier and more enjoyable for you. You will start achieving success then.

kristjan Speed Reading efficiency, goals, lifestyle, time management

Stress can be defined as emotional and physical strain caused by our response to pressure from the outside world. Common stress reactions include tension, irritability, inability to concentrate, and a variety of physical symptoms that include headache and a fast heartbeat. Stress is one of the biggest problems for many people.

Stress has severe impacts on people’s lives, firm’s productivity and nation’s welfare. Stress is recognized as the number one killer today. The American Medical Association stated that stress was the cause of 80 to 85 percent of all human illness and disease or at the very least had a detrimental effect on our health. American businesses lose an estimated $200-$300 billion dollars per year to stress related productivity loss and other cost. To put this in perspective, this amount is higher than the total cost related to all strikes and the net profit from all Fortune 500 companies.

Stress can be caused by many factors, which are caused stressors. Stressors can be both physical and emotional. Physical stressors are for example pain, exhaustion, noise, cold. Emotional stressors can be negative feeling, fear, work related problems and so on.

Although different types of stressors should be dealt with in different manner, in many cases stress can be efficiently reduced by good time management. In many cases stress is caused by the facts that we do not have a clear picture what we should do, we feel ourselves overwhelmed, we miss deadlines and have too little leisure time.

One of the main causes of stress is that we do not have control over our projects. We know that we have to do something, but we do not know what exactly. In these kinds of situations we often do not now how to start a project, we tend to delay starting with it and when we finally get ourselves going we end up in doing wrong things. This results in poor work quality and missed deadlines, which again generates stress. We may feel that we are worthless and that we will always fail.

Many people spend much of their time on urgent activities. It means that they are always in a hurry. There are so many things that have to get done now (or actually they should have been finished earlier) It creates constant pressure and there is not much room for error. If that kind of situation is persistent then it results in high stress levels.

Time management will enable you to get things under control. Among other things it includes finding your life purpose and setting long-term goals. And then you start making changes in your time use, which will allow you to spend more time on the activities, which will give you benefits in the long run and on the activities, which you like to do the most.

If you focus more on the most important activities then it will make your life more purposeful and happier. You will not find yourself so much in a hurry than before and there will be less stress for you. Lower stress-level will increase your self-confidence and your work-performance will improve.

kristjan time management stress, time management

We spend a considerable amount of time on sleeping. An average adult sleeps about 7 to 8 hours in a day, although the amount of sleep may vary individually. Some people may sleep for more than 10 hours and some for only 5 hours.

From point of view of time management the hours we sleep may seem to be unmanageable or even wasted time as we can not control our actions while sleeping and we are not producing anything during that time. The more we sleep the less we have time for other tasks. This statement is absolutely true and if you sleep for example for 12 hours, then it will be a significant obstacle for being a successful person as you will have less time for achieving success then. At the same time sleeping is needed for resting. Probably anyone of us has felt that if he/she has had too little sleep, then he/she will be tired and it will be difficult to concentrate and work efficiently.

While certain amount of sleep is necessary for rebuilding our energy resources then too much sleep will not only waste time, but it actually exhausts us. We will definitely be fresh if we sleep continuously for 12 hours. In most cases we will feel more refreshed if we sleep for some 7 hours.

Actually, the efficiency of the sleeping process does not depend so much on the quantity of the sleep but on the quality of sleep. We will rest better if we sleep for a shorter time period, but if we have a descent and uninterrupted sleep. If you can sleep better, then you can lengthen your awake period and have more time for other activities.

So, what is needed for a high quality sleep? I will give you some tips for improving your sleep quality:

• Do physical exercises. You will get a better sleep if you have had enough physical activities during the day. If you have sat the whole day behind the desk, then it will be difficult to sleep well. Practice sports regularly and try to spend some time outdoors every day.
• Drink less coffee. Caffeine will disturb our sleep. It is good if you do not consume more than two cups of coffee per day. It is better if you drink it in the morning or midday as the effect of caffeine on your nervous system may last for five yours. So if you have a cup of coffee at 8 PM then it will affect you until 1 AM.
• Avoid eating late. If you have a strong meal before going to bed then it makes your stomach to work hard. It can be difficult for you to fall asleep and you will not rest properly. Avoid eating within the last two hours before going to sleep.
• Open the window. If possible open the window of your bedroom. It will let the fresh air in and it will also lower the temperature. You will sleep better in somewhat cooler room. For sleeping 18-20 degrees centigrade is optimal.
• Have a comfortable bed. If you feel uncomfortable in your bed then you will not get a good sleep. Your bed should not be too soft or not too hard. Having a good pillow and mattress will affect your sleep quality a lot. So buying them will be a worthwhile investment.
• Relax before going to bed. You may take a short walk, listening to relaxing music. Try to throw all negative thoughts out of your mind. If you have some problems, which you cannot solve this day, then say to yourself that it is not possible to deal with them now and worrying will not help.

You can also improve your sleeping quality by starting to get up early in the morning. Although it may not be the best solution for everybody, as some people are so called ‘evening persons’, then many of us can be still very efficient and productive early in the morning. If you start your day early, then it often happens that during the first hours of the day you can accomplish many tasks. At the same time getting up early makes you enough tired in the evening that you fall asleep easily and have a sleep well.

kristjan time management efficiency, sleep, time management

Have you ever been bored and tired from having to stay long hours in the office? Has it happened sometimes that you cannot leave office at 5 PM because you are behind your schedule? For most of the people the answer to both these questions is „Yes”.

Long working hours itself are not always frustrating. If you are working on a job assignment, which is interesting for you to perform or if it is a critical task, which will give you an award after being completed then it may happen that you work long hours intensively and you even do not notice how the time flies. And if you can succeed in your task then you will feel you self satisfied and relieved despite the long hours and fatigue. Unfortunately, not all long work days do provide you success. It can happen that although you spend long hours on your assignment, but you are still not able to complete it.

In many cases the fact, the you have to stay long at the office is caused by the fact you have been working slowly that day and probably you have wasted lots of time on unnecessary tasks. It may be the result of poor time management, for example you do not have clear work plans or schedule, or you have procrastinated a lot because you did not have a clear vision, how you should perform you tasks.

Besides poor time management, working slowly can be caused by the fact that lack of skills or knowledge is slowing you down. You may waste time because you are unfamiliar with the new software package, new legislation or Spanish language. But you may be slow because you are a slow reader.

A typical office worker spends about 25% of his/her working time on reading. So if you are a slow reader, it will really matter. If you work slowly you have problems with keeping up with the deadlines and it is likely to generate stress. You have to work longer hours, which means that you will get more tired by working.

In addition, reading faster itself can make your working more pleasure. If you can read faster, then you can think about the topics you read faster. According to a study by Emily Pronin and Daniel M. Wegner http://www.photoreading.co.uk/2006FastThinking.pdf the thinking speed affect persons mood and happiness. In this study, there were made experiments with people, who had to read given statements at different speed. The results indicate that when the survey participants read the statements at faster speed then the participants were more likely to experience positive mood.

If you read and think faster then it can give you more confidence. You will feel that you have the control and you are less stressed by the fear that you cannot finish on time. Fast reading and fast working may create excitement.

So, it means that speed reading skill will first give you an opportunity to save your working time and prevent you from working late hours. Second, it will give you a possibility to get more happiness from the work process itself.

kristjan Speed Reading, time management fatigue, office worker, pleasure, speed reading, stress, time management, working time

Every work day starts from its beginning. The way be start our day is very important. Frequently, the very first activities of the day will affect the efficiency of the whole day ahead. It is mostly related to psychological factors. If we start our day successfully, then it will give a positive charge for the rest of the day. But if the start of the day is a failure, then it will have a negative influence on our following activities.

Good work day is a day when we know exactly what we are doing, what is waiting us ahead and in which order we carry out different tasks. It is wise to plan your day on the previous day. It is even better if we play through the next day in our mind on previous evening or in the morning before starting with our work. If we have visualised the upcoming tasks then we can quickly get on to our activities and we avoid wasting time in the morning and thinking what and how we have to do today.

Our work efficiency is not the same on different parts of the day. Although it does not apply for everyone, but still a big number of people are most productive in the morning. Usually we are fresher in the morning than at the end of our work day. If this is true for you, then you should not waste your time in the morning. It is also bad to use your most efficient time of the day on routine or repetitive tasks or activities, which do not require much effort or creativity. It is not sensible to use that time for compiling standard writing invoices, writing a routing monthly report or filing documents. You benefit more is you use your best working time for more sophisticated tasks like doing different analyzes, writing articles, brainstorming etc.

Still it is not a good idea to choose the very first task of the day a long-lasting and complicated work. It is important to get a strong positive emotional charge at the begging of the work day and to get in to a good working rhythm. Therefore is wise to start your day with some small tasks, which you can finish in a couple of minutes. These tasks are like a warm up for more difficult challenges.

One possibility to get a good start for your day is to send out e-mails to the people you want to contact. If it is in your mind what do you want to write them, then you can compile a number of e-mails during a short period of time. I mean sending out e-mails and not reading the incoming messages, which can be a relatively time consuming process if you receive a lot of mail. Early morning hours may not be the best time for reading and answering incoming mail as if you have checked your mail at the end of the previous work day, which is a good idea, then you may have not so many unread messages at the start of your work time. If this is a case, then it is better to deal with incoming mail a bit later as then you will have more incoming messages and you can process more e-mails during one block of time. Paying your bills, asking for price offers, making some database queries of searching some simple information in the internet are also good choices for starting your day.

In that way you can finish five, seven or even ten small tasks during the first 30 minutes of your work day. From the emotional point of view it is very important that we get a number of tasks completed at the beginning of the day as the more tasks we have accomplished the better we feel ourselves. Every task we manage to finish, gives us a positive charge that we have again succeeded with one thing.

Now you are ready for the most demanding challenges of the day. Now you are warmed up and fully in your working mood and have received plenty of positive emotions. You know exactly what you have to do now as you have planned it yesterday. Now get on to new tasks right away. Do not make pauses or waste time as it is important to maintain a stable working pace. In that way you can achieve the most demanding tasks successfully and efficiently.

kristjan time management emotional charge, time management, time of the day, wasting time, work efficiency, working time

Every day you have many small gaps in your daily schedule, when you have 5 or 10 minutes of free time before the start of a new activity. It can happen when you are waiting for a meeting to start, if you arrive an appointment 10 minutes early, if a person tells you that he/she will call you back in 5 minutes. Most of people do nothing during those moments. But using those gaps purposefully can make your time use much more efficient. If you add all those small intervals together during one time, it can make one, two or even more hours.

There are very many options for using those time gaps and here I list a number of them, which are suitable for most of us:

• Read and process your e-mail. Although you should have certain times during your day when do you read e-mail, you could still benefit using extra time to read and process your mails. It is important that you just don’t read your mail, but also processes it, i.e. reply it or schedule following actions depending on the message. So you can follow the rule, that you deal only once with one message.
• Check your schedule. It is always good to constantly check if you are following your schedule. Have you missed something? Have there been changes to your plans? Those moments give you a brake to monitor your progress.
• Social conversation. If someone is nearby you, then it could be a good idea to chat with him/her for a minute or two. Maybe a person next to you is potentially a good customer or business partner for you. A couple of minutes of conversation may lead to long-lasting relationship.
• Make a phone call. Those kinds of moments are suitable for making quick phone calls, especially for social purpose. Just call a friend or relative you have not met for a while.
• Read a book or journal. It is a great idea to read books or journals, which you could benefit from your job. You could read one book every week on those 5 to 10 minute gaps in your schedule, which means 52 books a year. If you read so many professional books in a year, it gives you a huge advantage over your colleagues.
• Do physical exercises. You can just stand up from your desk and stretch yourself, but you can also do some breathing exercises or even push-ups or sit-ups if possible.
• Arrange your desk. Look at your desk, are all things in their correct places. Do some papers need to put into their folders or are some papers unnecessary and can bee thrown away. Arranging your desk can make a work much easier and it give avoids the negative emotions from the mess around you.

In fact, there exist many more things you can do in such short period of time. Which ones these are depends also on your profession and activities you do. Think creatively about it. I am sure you will find many new ways of using your time more efficiently.

kristjan time management business partner, couple of minutes, e mail, free time, social conversation, time gaps, time management

Yesterday I was very busy working on a recruitment plan of a new company. Although this was not so urgent, I wanted to complete the draft before I went to sleep. It was definitely too much, but I still wanted to see if I could succeed. As I progressed with my work, I got more and more tired and started to feel sleepy. Still, I decided not to give in, even though it was already 11 PM. I drank a lot of coffee to stay awake and kept on working, but it was getting very difficult to be productive. In the end, I did get it finished, but by that time it was already 2.20 AM.

As I got to bed so late and had consumed too much coffee, I did not sleep well. Obviously, when I woke up in the morning (I set an alarm to 8.30 AM) I did not feel very well. I was sleepy and it took me a lot of time to start working. Yesterdays late working hours had a very negative effect on my productivity in the next morning. Soon I realized that if I had stopped working earlier yesterday, then I could have completed the recruitment plan in just an hour or two in the morning. So, not only was I unproductive with finishing that plan, but, by working so late, I also ruined the start of the next day

That kind of experiment proved the fact that working for more hours means less efficiency. The more you work, the more tired you will get and the less productive you will be. It means that the amount of work done per one hour will decrease. Therefore if you work three hours on top of your normal working day, you might not get the three hour’s work done. Maybe instead you will only manage to complete the amount of tasks, which under normal circumstances would take you 2 hours.

The concept is so easy and everyone knows it but we still violate it. One reason is that we are behind schedule with our work and if the deadline is the next morning then we have no choice but to work late into the night. That kind of situation is the result of poor time management. It can be avoided by better planning, delegation, working more efficiently etc. This, however, was not the case yesterday, as I was not in a hurry with that project. There were still three more days remaining until the deadline. And yet, I did not stop working at the right time.

The reason that I worked for so long was that I was too eager to carry on with my work that I did not consider that it could be very ineffective. I overestimated my abilities and did not want to waste time on that tomorrow. I wanted to spend tomorrow’s time on new tasks. As a principle I succeeded, as I did not have to work on the recruitment plan on the following day, but as a result, my productivity was low. Therefore working late last night still wasted time the following morning.

How could this have been avoided? First, if I had not decided to finish that plan yesterday, there would not even have been such a problem. It is good to remind yourself that completing a task is likely to take more time than we think. If I had kept my schedule less tight then I could have avoided working so long.

Second, I should have followed the main rules of time management. Work less, work smart is a well-proven rule and there is no need to experiment about it.

Third, at the point were I noticed I was behind my schedule I should have admitted it and made a change to my schedule and finished that task on the next day. It takes some bravery to do it, but it pays off.

And fourth, I should have simply kept in mind that I should not work at night if there is no absolute need to do that.

kristjan time management efficiency, productivity, sleep, time management, working hours