Posts Tagged ‘time management’

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Do You Have Enough Personal Energy To Be An IT Manager?

Thursday, October 27th, 2011
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Do You Know How To Manage Your IT Manager Energy?

Do You Know How To Manage Your IT Manager Energy?

So what’s it going to take to make you a successful IT manager? Is it going to be your understanding of a wide variety of emerging technologies? Is it your ability to understand where the company stands in the marketplace and where it wants to go? Or is it your business skills that allow you to seamlessly network with the rest of the company in order to lead your IT team?

Turns out that these are all good to have; however, what it’s going to take to get you to the finish line is something much more valuable: personal energy.

Why You Are Doing A Poor Job Of Being An IT Manager

How would you be able to tell if you were doing a poor job of being IT manager? I guess one way would be to determine that you were not getting things done – more and more tasks were just sitting around waiting for you to get to them. Is this happening? Maybe we should take a look at your email inbox – is it getting rather full?

So what’s going on here? You’ve probably read that “Getting Things Done” book, you’ve studied the 7 habits of effective people, how much more time can you spend managing your time? Tony Schwartz has looked into what is going on here and he believes that we are all experiencing what he calls a “personal energy crisis”.

Look, for years and years we have all been finding ways to do more in a fixed amount of time – thank you smart phones and laptops. However, we’ve just about used up all of our available time no matter how hard we try to free up more time to do stuff. We are out of time. Going forward it’s not going to be so much about finding more time to get things done, rather it’s all going to be about finding the personal energy to get things done.

How To Find Your Personal Power

The concept of having enough personal power to get the important work done seems straightforward enough. But how does one actually go about doing this? Here’s what we are all missing: we are human beings and that means that at a biological level we are programmed to work for a while and then to take a rest. We are not computers sitting in some data center somewhere that can be plugged in and run for months or years without stopping.

Ooops, did I say rest? Doesn’t that go against just about everything that you are currently doing? Didn’t you get to the position of being an IT manager by working harder than everyone else? Getting in early, staying late, working weekends is what it takes to succeed, right?

Bad / Good news – turns out that we’ve got it all wrong. Because we are human beings, we do need rest. But the good thing about rest is that after we get some, we have the ability to do more work than before. Studies of pilots have shown this to be true: a short half-hour nap boosted their reaction times by 16% while pilots who didn’t nap had their reaction times drop by 34%. I suspect that most of us are in the 34% crowd.

A sleep researcher names Nathaniel Kleitman came up with the concept of the “basic rest activity cycle”. What this means is that during the day we all cycle through a 90-minute cycle where we go from high alertness to low alertness. Clearly your body wants you to stop and take a break every 90 minutes or so.

To become a more effective IT manager you need to make some changes in how you run your day. You need to schedule your work so that you are running at a higher focus for a shorter period of time. After this period is over, you need to take the time to rest and allow your body to renew itself. By doing this you will find that you really can get more work done in less time!

What All Of This Means For You

In order to be an effective IT manager you are going to have to be able to get an awful lot of work done. The question that should be smacking you in the face right about now is just exactly how are you going to get all of that work done? It turns out that time management is only going to get you so far. You are eventually going to run out of time.

This means that you need to become a strong leader, not one that runs out of steam. You are going to have to switch from managing your time to managing your personal energy. We humans are designed to work in 90 minute cycles. What this means that is that we’ll go from being very alert to being not so alert every hour and a half. Understanding that you have this cycle and designing your work schedule around it will be the key to becoming and remaining effective.

p>You can become the IT manager that everyone turns to because they know that you can get it done. However, the only way that you’re going to be able to do this is to make sure that your personal energy is up to powering you through day after day of charting your company’s technological future. Start living your work days 90 minutes at a time and you’ll be the IT manager that everyone looks up to.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to make sure that you can divide your day up into 90 minute blocks?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT manager, one of the biggest management challenges that you’ll ever face is setting an effective strategy that your entire team can rally behind. As though this wasn’t difficult enough, there’s a little secret about IT strategies that nobody probably ever took the time to tell you about. They don’t last.

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Posted in career | No Comments »

IT Managers Know That Their Goals Are The Secret To Time Management

Thursday, January 6th, 2011
Image Credit You've Got To Let Your Goals Show You The Way To Spend Your Time

You've Got To Let Your Goals Show You The Way To Spend Your Time

Doing a good job of managing your time is a challenge for every IT manager. Every day it seems like there are more and more things that you are being asked to do while the amount of time that you have to accomplish them keeps getting smaller and smaller. If only there was some way to organize what you had to work on so that you knew that you were making progress every day…

The Secret To Time Management Success: Goals

Look, the simple fact of time management is that we all start in the same place: too much to do and too little time in which to get it all done. To top things off, everything looks the same – we don’t know where to start.

This is where the power of your goals comes in. Assuming that you’ve taken the time to create good goals, ones that actually mean something to you and which are valid things for you to be striving towards, then you’ve got the guiding light that you’re going to need in order to get your limited time under control.

Your goals will help you guide your time by allowing you to identify just exactly what specific tasks you should be working on in order to achieve your goals. The side benefit of doing this is that your goals will also show you what you should NOT be working on because it’s not going to help you to achieve what’s really important – your goals.

Three Ways To Use Your Goals To Mange Your Time

In order to do a good job of using your goals to solve your time management challenges, you need to know how to get from having goals to having a time management solution. There are three basic steps that you are going to have to follow here:

  1. Break ‘Em Up: Your goals are probably high level statements like “replace such & such system” or “solve such & such problem”. These are fine for goals, but not so good as time management tools. You need to sit down and spend some time breaking up your goals into a smaller set of manageable tasks. In order to make sure that you’ve captured everything that you need to do, keep this list of tasks in sequential order.

  2. Make Time Guesses: Before you can come up with a plan for how you are going to get your work done, you first need to know how much time it’s all going to take. Take a look at each of the individual tasks that you broke each goal up into and estimate how long it’s going to take you to complete that task. In my world, after I’ve come up with my best guess I often double it in order to cover unexpected things that can delay me in getting it done. If you’ve never done something before, then ask others who have how long it took them to do it.

  3. Create Priorities: All goals are not created equally. Some are more important than others. In order to make sure that you spend your valuable time working on the right things, you’re going to need to prioritize your tasks. Some tasks may have to be started earlier than others because they will take longer to accomplish or because they require resources that are not currently available. It’s generally best if you group your tasks into one of three priorities: high, medium, low or whatever. This will show you what you should be working on now and what comes next.

What All Of This Means For You

As our lives as IT managers keep getting busier and busier, trying to do a good job of effectively managing our time can easily become a real challenge. It turns out that by using our goals as a way to get our bearings, IT managers can quickly establish a good time management system.

Just knowing what your goals are is not enough. You need to use three simple rules in order to use your goals to manage your time: break them down into smaller tasks, estimate the time each will require, and prioritize.

Although this may seem like a simple solution to a complex problem, you’ll be amazed at how quickly it works. In no time you’ll be on top of what you have to do and you’ll be getting the right things done. Perhaps you should start planning on what you’ll do with your free time…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How many goals do you think an IT manager should have?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

With a little luck, every IT manager realizes that they are only as good as the people that they have working for them. What this means is that they need to be a good boss if they want to be successful. This leads to a critical question: how good of a boss are you? It turns out that most of us seem to think that we’re a better boss than we probably really are…

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Posted in time management | 1 Comment »

Why 168 Is Not Enough For An IT Manager (The Secret Of Time Management)

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Image Credit Learning To Mange Your Time Is Critical To Your Success

Learning To Mange Your Time Is Critical To Your Success

How are you doing with managing your time? Nobody ever told you that being an IT manager was going to be this tough, did they? How did you spend your last day at work: a lot of phone calls (some completely worthless), a lunch meeting that may have been rescheduled at the last minute, work that is due soon, staff conflicts that only you can resolve, oh, and that budget thing is coming up again…

There simply is not enough time in the day for you to get everything done – we all have the same 168 hours each week; however, some IT managers seem to be able to get more done than others. How do they do it?

Looking For A Solution To The Time Management Problem

I had the same time management problem that you are facing now a few years back. I was simply overwhelmed with work and couldn’t even begin to find my way out from under all of the tasks that I had to work on. I knew that it was time to go to the library and do some reading.

I must have read every book that my library had on time management. What I discovered surprised me: there didn’t seem to be one magical “silver bullet” approach to solving the issue of having too little time and too much to do.

Instead, I finally uncovered more of a philosophy to dealing with limited time rather than a quick solution. The approach that ended up working for me had to do with starting in the right place: finding out where all of my time was going. Although this sounds simple, it’s actually quite difficult to do correctly.

It Takes A Log To Know What You Don’t Know

The idea is for you to create what the experts call an “activity log”. The whole purpose of this exercise is for you to write down what you are doing during the course of a day. I’ve found it helpful to write down a quick note on what I’m doing every 15 minutes during the day. If you wait too long to write things down, then you’ll pack a whole bunch of activities into a time period and you’ll forget what you’ve done.

You’re going to want to keep your log for a week. During this time you are going to want to note both what you’ve done and how long you worked on it. Once you’ve collected the notes for an entire week, you are going to need to sit down and do some analysis. The first thing that you’re going to want to do is to group the things that you did into categories for each day:

  • Calls

  • Meetings (scheduled)

  • Meetings (unscheduled)

  • Admin work (time cards, evaluations, etc.)

  • Reports / presentations

  • Travel

  • Lunch / breaks

  • Etc.

What To Do With All That Data?

So how do other IT managers spend their time? A 1990 study by Henry Mintzberg revealed that 48% of a manager’s time is spent dealing with staff. Interacting with clients, suppliers, and associates took up another 20% while working with peers accounted for 16% and the remaining 14% was split between dealing with senior management and “others”.

After you’ve categorized how you are spending your time, think back to what your goals for the week were (you did have goals, didn’t you?) How much of your time was spent working on things that were related to what you really wanted to accomplish?

If, as it often does, most of your time was spent working on things that were not related to your most important tasks then you’ve got some changes to make. The easiest thing to do is to stop doing the things that don’t matter. This could be as simple as delegating this work to other members of your team so that you can focus on what really counts.

What All Of This Means To You

Not having enough time to get everything that you need to accomplish done is a problem that every IT manager faces. The good ones eventually solve this problem.

The first step in getting a handle on your time is to keep a time log for a week and find out where all of your time is going. Once you’ve got the data, categorize it so that you can find out if you are spending your time working on the tasks that relate to what you really want to accomplish.

If it turns out that your time is not being spent correctly, make some changes! Ultimately good time management comes down to you having the ability to recognize where your time is going and having the ability to adjust how you choose to spend it…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that keeping a time log for just a week is long enough?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Doing a good job of managing your time is a challenge for every IT manager. Every day it seems like there are more and more things that you are being asked to do while the amount of time that you have to accomplish them keeps getting smaller and smaller. If only there was some way to organize what you had to work on so that you knew that you were making progress every day…

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Posted in time management | 2 Comments »

The Answer Is 9, But Do You Know What The Question Is?

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

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Your Technical Skills Aren't Going To Get You Your Next Promotion...

Your Technical Skills Aren't Going To Get You Your Next Promotion...

What is it going to take for you to get promoted? What set of skills as an IT Leader do you need to develop in order to have any chance at moving up to the next level? If you don’t know what you need to know, then how is that promotion going to happen?

It turns out that once upon a time that the oldest man in the IT department at my company sat me down and explained to me what it was going to take to move up in my IT department. Now I’ll pass that information on to you.

The Oldest Man In IT

Ah, the early days in your IT career. All you really needed to know was one programming language and maybe some database skills and you were off and running. Nowadays it seems like you’ve got to know three or four languages, at least a couple of database dialects, and one or two web-based frameworks to get your job done.

What I hadn’t realized in my youthful exuberance was that learning more languages, databases, or web skills was NOT what the company wanted me to do in order to be considered for my next management promotion. This is what Carl told me on that day that changed my career forever.

Carl was the oldest guy working in the company’s IT department. Nobody actually knew how long he had been there, but we all knew that it was longer than we had been on board. Carl’s cube had the most amazing collection of “stuff” from magnetic tapes stacked on the floor to punch cards left over from when the “big transition” had happened to online storage. Oh, and he had a lot of ashtrays from when you could still smoke at your desk – that’s how long he had been on board.

Life Lessons From Carl

Carl and I got along fantastically. I don’t think that I had any special qualities, it was probably just that I was less of a young jerk than everyone else. The fact that I could admit when I was wrong and ask for help probably went a long way also.

At any rate, after I had been in the same frontline programming job for a couple of years, I happened to be having lunch with Carl one day and I blurted out that I was unhappy with my job. I told him that after two years I thought that I deserved to be promoted and I couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t happened yet.

Carl, in his slow, easy going way, asked me what I was going to do about this. I told him that I was going to show the powers that be that I deserved to be promoted: I was going to sign up for every training course and get every technical certification that I could. Carl sorta smiled at me and said “You can do all that, but it’s not going to get you promoted.”

Just How Do You Get Promoted In IT?

Carl went on to explain to me that I was looking at the problem all wrong. He said that in IT as in all parts of a business, management really just does two things. Oh yeah, sometimes you’ll see exceptions to the rule in IT where managers will still be coding, but watch them: they probably won’t go far above their current position.

What Carl told me next is what has stuck with me for all of these years. He told me that in IT, just as in the rest of the company, mangers don’t actually do anything. That is, they don’t actually create things. Instead, the work that they do can be broken down into two separate tasks: they manage people and they manage budgets. If you understand this, he told me, you’ll be on your way to being promoted.

“Great, I don’t have experience doing any of that” I can remember telling him. Carl looked at me and said “Well then, there are nine things that you are going to have to learn before you can be promoted.” You can bet that I was reaching for a napkin to write down this golden advice. Here’s the list of things that I was going to have to learn to do that Carl shared with me:

  1. Understand your workforce
  2. Active listening
  3. How to be truly appreciative
  4. How to communicate clearly
  5. Use humor wisely
  6. Inspire a team
  7. Organization
  8. Time management
  9. Budget management

I can remember looking at that list somewhat in disbelief – I had none of these skills, how the heck was I going to prepare to be promoted?

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

Knowing what it takes to get promoted into the higher levels of IT management is, of course, only one part of the battle. I would argue that knowing what you need to learn is the first and the most important part of getting your next promotion.

You are not going to find all of the information that you need in one place. Sorry, going out and getting that MBA is not the silver bullet that will get you your next promotion.

What you are going to have to do is launch a multi-pronged strategy to acquire the skills that you need. Initial knowledge can be picked up by doing some reading; however, to really learn what you need to know, you are going to have to find ways to actually do the work in the real world before you get promoted.

Everything is possible, you just need to realize that even in IT, technical skills will only take you so far. Learning the skills that you need to become an IT leader is what is going to allow you to get to the next level in your career.

What single skill do you think that is a must have in order to get promoted in IT?

innovative?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Bad things happen. Sometimes they are not all that bad – key employees leaving for example is bad, but not really all that “bad”. However, sometimes things really are bad: staff die or become seriously ill for long periods of time. What’s your plan for when this happens? What’s that, you don’t have a plan? You think that it’s the role of HR to take care of personal issues like this? Guess again…

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Posted in promotion | 3 Comments »

IT Leader Job Hunting Secrets

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
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You’ll Bag A New Job Quicker If You Know How To Hunt For One

You’ll Bag A New Job Quicker If You Know How To Hunt For One

It’s All About How You Use Your Time

So I like to talk about how to be a better IT Leader just as much as the next guy, but what are you supposed to do when your job has gone away? I’ve been getting a lot of email from IT managers who are finding themselves unintentionally “in-between jobs” for the first time in a long time. The first thing to realize is that no matter how long it takes to find the next job this is just temporary. The next thing to understand is that there are secrets to speeding up the finding of your next IT job…

The #1 problem that I see in IT managers that I’m working with who are searching for a new job after having lost their last one is that for the first time in a long time they don’t know what to do with their time. When they were working it seemed like they never had enough of the stuff. However, now that their job has gone away, they don’t know what to do with themselves.

The first thing that we all need to realize is that you’re going to need is some structure in your life if you want to hurry up the process of finding your next job. If you don’t have any structure to how you are spending your day, then you won’t be organized and you won’t be focused. This means that you won’t be able to get to where you want to go.

Job Hunting Is Like Having Another Job

When I’ve been between IT jobs, it took way too long for me to have this mental breakthrough: job hunting IS my job. When you have this understanding, a lot of other things start to fall into place. Just like any IT job that you’ve had in past, you need to structure you new job hunting job so that you have specific work hours and a schedule for getting things done along with deadlines.

The secret to making your job hunt a success is to treat it like a full-time job. This means that you’re going to have to do things like set aside some physical space for your job hunting work: that’s exactly what your home office was created for.

All too often immediately after having lost an IT job, we’ll sit down, sign onto Monster.com, and start applying for every job that we can find. Don’t do this.

Instead, go about starting your job search in the right way. The first thing that you are going to want to do is take some time to get well organized. This means that you’re going have to start off by taking the time to spend several days or even as long as a week to really get set up for your job search.

Getting set up means doing several things that are important to do, but not necessarily related to applying for any one specific job opening. Instead, you need to spend your time getting your resume in order, maybe creating some cover letter templates, even chasing down some good references would be time well spent.

The Three Bucket System

Face it, when you suddenly find yourself running a one person business in which you have to do everything, it’s pretty easy to reach a point where you just throw your hands up in the air and say “I give up!” Don’t do it. Julie Morgenstern a productivity author suggests that you view your day as being divided up into three separate compartments: preparation and research, meetings, and follow-up.

Her main point is that it is dangerous for us to spend too much time doing any one thing. What we need to do is to try to schedule a meeting every day (or at least five meetings a week). Instead of spending all of your time hunched over your laptop, this will help to keep you better connected to the outside world.

Julie also suggests that we end every day by planning the next one, plus the two days after that. This sets up a time horizon where we start to feel as though we know what’s coming up and so it’s not so scary. Face it, we are energized by getting things done and this will help us do that.

What All Of This Means For You

Losing an IT job is never good, losing an IT manager’s job is even worse. It’s all too easy to get lost in feeling bad for ourselves when this occurs.

The experts tell us that we need to sit ourselves down and realize that we have a new job: finding our next job. Getting organized and coming up with ways to divide up our days into productive segments will help us to get there.

The most important thing to remember when you are hunting for your next job is that you will find it. The only thing that you can’t control is how long it will take. Use these suggestions that we’ve discussed and that hunt will take less time!

Do you think that how well you are organized can reduce the amount of time that it takes to find your next job?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Posted in jobs in information technology | 2 Comments »

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