From the course: How to Organize Your Time and Your Life

Three steps for organizing anything

From the course: How to Organize Your Time and Your Life

Three steps for organizing anything

- You mentioned there's three steps for organizing anything, the analyze, the strategize, the attack. So, could you kind of walk us through how we might approach that in organizing time or task things for professionals? - Yeah, so, I just was coaching somebody yesterday who is a very overwhelmed executive, incredibly accomplished man in a very senior position in a big mid-sized company, very well-established and he's working like 15 hours a day, seven days a week, he's getting everything done, but the cost is so high. He's exhausted, he can't get to the proactive stuff, he's just doing the reactive stuff and he's not really present for his family or himself and he's spread so thin that it's sort of catching up with him. And so he's like, how do I fix this? So, I can't just come in and say, hey, let's get you a to-do list as a starter. That'd be an outside in approach, right? That's sort of an attack first ask questions later approach. So, analyze strategize attack is, it's a three-step process to finding the system that will work for that person. Analyze is you first have to ask a series of questions to really zero in on what needs to be fixed and what doesn't. So, I always ask questions like, tell me what is working, right? What's working about your system right now? What are the things that always get done? In his case, everything was getting done. That was working. What wasn't working was the number of hours that it was taking, so that starts to lead to narrowing in on the problem to be solved and what is it that you're trying to juggle your time between? That's part of the analyze, which is what do you need to fit in time for to be truly balanced? And all of us have to decide that when it comes to our time. What am I really trying to balance my time between? What are the core, like the big buckets? It could be like, in your field you do a podcast, it's researching guests. There's research, there's writing, there's production and then there's like administrative follow up. That would be like the four buckets, maybe. So, we all have that and analyzing is to really understand what is it that I need to balance my time between? And then, where's my time currently going? And I always do that and encourage people like, you have to think of your time as a, it's like a closet. It's a limited amount of time that's only going to fit so much, so how much time do we have to work with? Are you working 10 hours a day? Eight hours a day? 12 hours a day? What's the size of the container for your work? And then what has to fit inside and how are you organizing it right now? What order do you tackle things in? How do you handle your mornings? When do you do your administrative stuff? Is there any order at all or is every day different? So, that's the analyze? Where are we right now? Then strategize is, where are we trying to get to? So, what would your schedule look like if it was in that shape, size, container and it fit everything you really needed to do? We kind of really do a graph, we figure it out. Here's your ideal schedule and then attack is how do we get you from where you are to that ideal schedule? And that's all the time management skills. What do you add to your schedule? What do you take out of your schedule? What in your schedule needs to be done more efficiently? And then you just tool it until you get the person where? Into that ideal state. It's very concrete and actually very practical and doable.

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