Is your personal time management efficiency driven or effectiveness driven? Efficiency comes from doing things right the first time. The adage goes, if you don’t have time to do it right the first time when will you ever have time to do it right the second time. Perhaps the real question is, “should you be doing it at all”?

Don’t confuse activity with results in your personal time management. For example, a sales person could spend the day getting all their client files color coded and neatly organized, so they could immediately access a file and have all the information they need at their finger tips. That’s certainly an example of increasing efficiency, but does it increase effectiveness? You’re effective when you’re doing the right things. The right things are those things that produce the results that people pay you to produce. In the case of our sales person, no one is paying the sales person to have the best files and filing system in the company. The sales person is paid to secure new customers, and to obtain repeat sales from current or old customers. Sales is the key objective, and when the sales person is focused on sales activities they are focused on the right things thus being effective.

Don’t confuse being busy with producing results. You can be very busy about doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with results. Unfortunately, you usually don’t even realize when you’ve allowed yourself to get caught up in this busy trap. What does it mean for you to be personally productive in your job or business? How much of your work day do you actually spend on those productive activities? I’m being serious here, I want you to actually track how much time you spend on the activities you actually get paid to do each day for a week, and then come up with a total for the week. I predict that you’ll be shocked. Research has shown that the higher up in the company you are the less time you spend on the things that are truly an effective use of your time.

Your personal time management objective should be to transfer or eliminate the busy work. What activities are you doing now that you can transfer to someone else or eliminate entirely? If you were to do that how much time would you free up to use for effective work?

How much personal satisfaction would you gain, and how much stress could you remove if you increased the amount of time you spend on effective activities? What if you focused on spending just one additional uninterrupted hour each and every day on your effective work? What would that translate into in terms of the results you get paid to achieve? How much less stress, tension, and unnecessary clutter would you have in your life if you transferred or eliminated the busy work?