Time to ACT. What does that say to you? Time to do what you need to do? Now’s the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country? You get the idea. It means time to do what needs to be done. Ok, Let’s take it to another dimension.  What if it means having “time enough” to get things done.  Hm.  Peaked your interest? Good. That’s the topic of this blog.

We are busy people. It’s a busy world. How often do you hear people say “if only I had 2 more hours in the day.” Often. Well, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. That means we have to take control of our own time destinies to keep them in check. There are tons of time management seminars and tools and I’ve probably taken them all. Their purpose is to help you understand what are YOUR time drains.

Types of time drains are interruptions, emergencies, answering email, reading blogs (just had to say that), answering phones, opening paper mail, responding to people coming into your office, searching for information missing from a project, not having a work process in place and working on your calendar. I bet you spend a lot more time on these processes than you imagine. Many many years ago, I was part of a project that was working on winning a Demming Award. A Demming award is for superlative process management. One of the things we had to do was record everything we did, by hour, by day, for two weeks. We did this on a spreadsheet. We were even given watches to keep track of the time. This was an eye-opening exercise. And this was before email, Facebook, Twitter and the Internet. It is extraordinary how you can flitter away time on the littlest things.

You should try this exercise as noted above, and then figure out how can you fix some of the issues. What I am going to show you here in this blog is how you can do that with a contact manager. My contact manager of choice is ACT!. Not all of them do what ACT! can do, so if I talk about something here that your contact manager (if you have one) doesn’t do, then consider moving to ACT!.

Ok, here we go. I’m going to list some common time drains and show you how ACT! can help you manage the time drain demons.

Interruptions.
This one is easy. You need to go into your calendar and put in an activity that says “Busy” or “Door closed” or whatever makes sense to you. If you are more productive in the morning, put it in this time slot then. The idea is your calendar is flagged as not available so you can work on things that need your utmost concentration. We can’t avoid all interruptions, but we can sure try.

Delegation.
Ever get a project that is missing information? You need to send that project detail right back where it came from to get that data. Open a Todo in ACT!, call it “gather missing data”. Put a time frame for a week or so and set it so it alarms. Send an email to the person who hasn’t sent you the data. Your Todo will pop up reminding you that you are waiting on information. The good news you should have put that project into the “waiting on details” pile and can now go find it. The better news was by setting the alarm, and “delegating” it back to the person who has the details removed from your work pile. In essence, you moved the “work monkey” back to where it belonged. You can also use Activity Series in ACT! to assign steps to someone else, there by delegating to another and off of your desk.

Work processes.
When you work on a process, you typically go through a standard set of steps. Do you call people asking for detail? Do you send emails asking for more information? Do you do the same steps all the time. Then you have an activity series. In ACT!, you can design an Activity series to remind you of events that need to happen at a set period of time. You can even “delegate” them to other people (one of the best ways to get things off your plate.) You can even design more than one type of activity series. These are very powerful.

Keeping on track:
Your calendar is your most valuable tool in keeping on top of your time. If you earmark times for “busy” or “working on mail” or add an entry that says “follow up on pipeline” you have alarms popping up that tell you where you need to be and when or what you have to do. Someone walks in your door – you get tied up talking to them. You forget you have an appointment. An audible alarm from a calendar entry can get your attention and help you shoo that person out the door. Use this tool to your best advantage. Alarms are an excellent way to keep you on track. One of the things you can do in ACT! is set the priority of your calendar items. Use this – and use it wisely. Make critical appointments High priority. If the entry is a low item, make it a low priority and don’t bother with setting an alarm. ALL HIGH PRIORITY ITEMS SHOULD HAVE AN ALARM. Period.

ACT! is more than just a contact manager. It’s a way to keep track of the who, what, when, where and why of things (but that’s another blog.) It can help you keep on top of your day. Time management doesn’t have to be a nightmare. Use tools to help you. After all, it’s all about having “time to act.”

An adage from an old Chinese proverb says a picture is worth a 1000 words. It seems this is especially true with visual people. In my travels around customers, I’m finding that sales and marketing people tend to be visual – not all of them, but a great percentage. The same applies for management. That’s why graphs and charts are so popular.

This sunk home to me recently during a training session on ACT 2009. This was one of those sessions where the people in the room were somewhat reluctant about using ACT. Management said they had to use it – but that didn’t mean they were going to like it. One of their comments was “well, management isn’t going to look at this anyway, so why bother.” Here’s when things got interesting.

One of the people in the room had decided they actually did like ACT and found it very helpful in keeping him on track with the 20+ meetings they needed to handle every day. Yes – 20+. Wow, I myself would need something to keep me sane.

Training was going along ok, Some grumbling, some “gee, I won’t have time to do my work because I will be spending all my time doing data entry.” All the general comments of people who haven’t yet seen the value. No problem, we’ll get them there. Then, I got to the part of showing them the Dashboards. The dashboard I started with showed activities and calendar entries and one of the panels was a bar chart. Remember I said one of the people had been using ACT extensively. Well, his “bar” was much larger than everyone elses. By a lot. Now, this group was a very competitive group – typical for marketing and sales departments. When they all saw that their bars were shorter, they weren’t happy. It then became very obvious who was entering data and who wasn’t. At that exact moment, two of the partners walked in the room and saw the dashboard. They said was this always available – even on the web version of ACT. I said indeed it was – they both said, “well, this is what we wanted all along.” They could look at one place and see everything with out needed to go to a bunch of screens. Ok, now that meant management was indeed going to watch what was going on.

You can imagine what transpired after that. Everyone started using ACT – yes, it was in a competitive manner – but ultimately does anyone care why data is entered? No, the issue is get the data there. I chatted with my client a few months later and he said that was the catalyst that got them on their way.

With ACT 10.2, Sage published a really nifty plugin where you could build more customized dashboards. Now, I can build dashboards to show custom fields in the clients database so they can track not only activities and opportunities but things specific to their organization. The client I chatted about earlier in this blog sends me periodic requests for some more involved and exotic dashboards. They have fallen in love with the visual interpretation of data and how quickly they can see where they are with regards to products, states, country penetration, and all kinds of data tracking.

I’ve since started building custom dashboards for clients and it is indeed true that a picture is worth a 1000 words. Now, I’d love to take that adage to the next level and guage how much money the pictures are worth as well. More later.

Note: cartoon courtesy of wikicommons.