“What’s the payoff?” Stephanie Winston, author of Getting Organized(New York: Warner Books, 1991, revised), asserts that this is the essential question to ask yourself when you begin to prioritize.
The payoff approach certainly fits well into a long tradition of viewing time as a sort of currency. “Time is money,” declared Benjamin Franklin over 200 years ago, when the leisurely pace of rural America still dominated life. Now, with the flood of infor-
Lining Up Your Ducks: Prioritize! 35
mation, duties, and events that overwhelm people every day, time has become a far more valuable commodity. To treat your use of time in terms of financial value and return makes emi- nent (and measurable) sense. After all, people spendtime, don’t they?
As an example of how this system works, the imaginary tasks listed below represent a spectrum of “value” that extends from having a “high payoff” to a “low payoff.” The yield may not always be financial, because there are many other kinds of value to consider here: emotional, social, practical, pleasurable, and so on. Think about how you’d view each: high payoff, medium payoff, or low payoff:
• Get $200 from an ATM—you’re down to $20.
• Write a complaint letter to a hotel chain.
• Organize your home office area.
• Pay bills that are due.
• Return a call from a charity you don’t want to give to.
• Shop for a new refrigerator.
• Listen to your spouse excitedly tell you about something that really doesn’t interest you.
• Talk a neighbor into co-building a fence between your properties.
• Go grocery shopping for the family dinner.
• Return three phone calls from friends.
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WIIFM “What’s in it for me?” A familiar term in both management and sales,WIIFM is the element that always motivates a purchase or a conceptual “buy-in,” and it’s essential to motivating almost anyone to do anything.
When motivating yourself to change behavior, you should always find a way to clearly express the WIIFM. Writing it down is the very best method of being certain that you’ve identified the benefit(s) you’ll receive from making the change. Without an acknowledged benefit—a fully expressed WIIFM—it’s almost impossible to alter your behavior.
This applies, too, to those you may manage. From the start, convey the WIIFM of any assignment and you won’t waste time later explain- ing why something should be done.
• Read a magazine article about Hawaii. You’re thinking of vacationing there.
• Go to an evening seminar on personal financial planning.
You’re not signed up yet.
• Listen to your teenage daughter complain about not get- ting along with her friends.
• Return a call from someone you don’t know. (You don’t know what it’s about, either.)
It wasn’t easy to prioritize this imaginary list, was it? This brings home the fact that your emotional reactions and the con- text of each action affect your decision.
As we said, however, schedulingneeds to be logical. While you may think at first that grocery shopping is a higher priority than going to the ATM, if you need the cash to purchase the groceries the ATM becomes the higher priority. If completing one task depends upon first finishing another task, the latter task takes on a greater priority—even if, from a seemingly objective viewpoint, it’s minor. And just because you’ll enjoy reading a magazine article on Hawaii doesn’t mean that you should do it first.
This imaginary list of personal tasks can translate just as easily into work-related ones. Sometimes the “payoff” is obvi- ous. At other times, the WIIFM may not be so evident. To return to a previous example, you may at first perceive no benefit to you from volunteering to chair a committee to improve employ- ee-employer relations at your firm, but the solutions that
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Uh-Oh
A magazine ran a “Dilbert Quotes” contest a few years ago, soliciting real-life examples of Dilbert-type manage-
ment.The winning example was from a Microsoft employee who cited a memo that outlined the following procedure:
1. Beginning tomorrow, individual security cards will be required to enter the building.
2. Next Wednesday, employees will have their pictures taken.
3. Security cards will be issued two weeks later.
emerge from that committee might have an effect on you per- sonally, should problems arise between you and your superiors.
It’s surprising how often people can be neat and orderly in their business life but rumpled and disorganized in their person- al life. Sometimes it can’t be helped—family members can alter your behavior in ways that business colleagues cannot. Still, the payoff system seems especially good at illustrating how the principles of business conduct can furnish strategies to improve your personal life and vice versa.
One last payoff thought: how much do you make, in dollars and cents, per hour? From now on, when you find yourself truly wasting time—or letting someone else squander your time—
think of that hourly figure and how the value of your time is slip- ping away. Both you and your company benefit from the most efficient use of your time. And you can measure that value in actual monetary terms. In fact, your raise may depend upon it.
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“Not-to-Do” Lists
Author Michael LeBoeuf offers a fascinating idea that may serve to free the spirit as well as some much-needed time. His idea: create a “not-to-do” list, which he believes should include the fol- lowing kinds of items:
• All low-priority items, unless you’ve successfully completed all your high-priority items.
• Anything you could reasonably delegate to someone else.
• Demands on your time from others that are either thoughtless or inappropriate.
• Any errand that, if ignored, will have minimal consequences.
• Anything you might have done for someone else that the person should be doing for himself or herself.
There’s a kind of exhilaration in setting down on paper a list of things you’re not going to do.You can mentally tote up the minutes you’re going to save by not doing them.The sense of freedom that this little exercise engenders can work wonders on the subconscious and can even lower your level of stress.