Erin

What would you guess is the biggest enemy of a leader? Wasted time? Indecisiveness? Short-sightedness? Go ahead, try it. List the enemies that fight your ability to lead and live the way you want to in your ideal vision.

Now, what will you do to take away its power?

For Charlene Begley, the President and CEO Enterprise Solutions of General Electric,
the biggest enemy is wasted time. Listen to how she tackles time, wrestles it to the ground, pins it down tight and takes control.

Especially in these tough times, I’m huge on being very focused and setting clear priorities. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything. So I pick the three to five things that really matter, and I’m really disciplined about spending time on those things. I can’t do everything, so I have to make tough choices.

I literally sit down with the calendar and say, what do I really care about now? I care about our new products being launched on time. So I make that the priority. I create the time for the business teams to me on a regular basis with status. That’s where I spend my time.

I pick the things that matter to me and put them on my calendar. I never say I wasted the day, because I carefully plan my calendar. Time is my biggest enemy. I have three kids. Life is crazy. There’s never enough time in the day. So I manage my calendar. I mange the time I spend, and I set operating mechanisms to be sure I’m spending time with the things that really matter: employees, customers, my team, the key initiatives.

I am obsessed with my calendar. I take the time. I could tell you right now what I am going to do [six months from now]. It’s actually a little frightening, but it works! I have the whole year planned out. I still have to be flexible, but that includes putting on the calendar the things that matter to my kids. The school plays, the sporting events. I plan really carefully so I’m home when the things that really matter are happening, I’m there. And if I’m not, I plan the special occasions to make up for lost time.

Listening to Charlene, you can really get a sense of her diligence. Whether your biggest enemy is time, procrastination, busy-ness, a tight budget, a dysfunctional team, or any of the other terrors with which leaders grapple, how can you be equally aggressive in making sure you overcome it?

Did you enjoy this profile? You may be interested in the eCourse, Getting an Edge: 21 Ways World Class Leaders Share Their Secrets for Leading and Living Well. Each of 21 profiles just like this one comes in a separate email – once a day for 21 days. Click here to sign up for the course.

Overwhelmed? Can’t get ahead? Feel like you’re slipping further and further behind and that you may never catch up? I know the feeling, and fortunately, I have a great remedy.

It’s called Project 123, and it arose from a time I was redecorating my house.

My friend and decorator, Lesley Means of Simply Organized arrived one afternoon to help me redo a room. One room. We sat in that room, the living room, and talked about ideas. Before we knew what was happening, we had moved to another room (more ideas) and another (more ideas) and another (still more). In an hour we had whipped ourselves into a fervor of bathroom remodels and office reorganization and new paint on every wall. When she left, I closed the door, turned around, and thought, “What just happened? And where will we ever start?” It felt so overwhelming, I just walked away and left it all behind.

The next day, Lesley emailed me her project proposal. It said in big letters, PROJECT ONE: The Living Room.

Oh, yes. Project One.

The living room was my original motivation for calling Lesley. She remembered when I had forgotten. There was one priority. A place to start. Later, we could move to Project Two (the TV room) and Project Three (the home office). The way she crystallized our plans into a logical order, they all made sense again, and we tackled them one at a time.

When you get overwhelmed by all of the complex and multiplying tasks competing for your time, it can help to sit back and identify Project One, Two, and Three. George Leonard of Mastery captures the essence of this strategy well. He writes, “Ultimately, liberation comes through the acceptance of limits. You can’t do everything, but you can do one thing, and then another, and then another.”

You can use this strategy to choose one focus area or one action item to tackle along the way to your vision. Keep sight of which project you’ll grant top priority, and give it the best of your time. Then you can turn to the rest.

Exercise
Jot down a quick list of all of the projects you have going right now: Now number them in priority order. How would it change your efficiency if you could think of these as “Projects 1, 2, 3,” etc. and complete one at a time?

The ideas in this article are drawn from The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership and the accompanying eBook called The Extension. The eBook is designed to give you simple, engaging personal leadership exercises and activities to help you be a better leader, and lead a better life. Get your copy today! Click here for a Preview and to Order.

As a culture, we once had a reasonable relationship with time. Think about your parents and grandparents reflecting on their childhood; so often they reminisce that “life was slower then.”

Then we got on the fast track. The implication was that those who were going to “win” were the ones who were moving fast. “Faster” equaled more efficient, more productive, and therefore more successful. We practiced new techniques with our planners and PDAs to get more done in a day. “Fast” became synonymous with “better” – an association we have been paying for ever since.

Now we’ve moved from the fast track to warp speed. We keep trying to somehow fast-forward ourselves to do more and more, faster and faster all at once and all the time. In some cases the pace becomes absurd as we try to do more of what we’ve always done faster than is humanly possible. But there’s a limit to our capacity. Even if you see yourself as a Porsche in the fast lane of life, Porsches can only go so fast. At some point you’re going to crash. In order to avoid breaking down, we need to stop trying to go faster and faster and cross into a new way of thinking altogether. We don’t need to go faster from Point A to Point B. What we need is a portal. A trap door. A shortcut.

Physicists call it a wormhole – a way to link distant points in space that would otherwise take years, decades, or centuries to travel even at the speed of light. To get the image of a wormhole, imagine a worm traveling over the skin of an apple. To get to the opposite side, the worm can traveling the entire distance around (the long way), or he could take a shortcut by burrowing through its center (the short way). To date, wormholes are more science fiction than science, but the image can help us rethink what’s possible with time.

Maximizing Time is one of the ideas I share with leaders in the book, The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership. To learn more, go to www.TheInnerEdge.com. You’ll find an overview of the book, endorsements by such thought leaders as Marshall Goldsmith and Stephen Covey, and more!

You, too, can become a time traveler, slipping through time using shortcuts that lead almost instantly to a new way of life. To do that, you’ve got to shift your thinking. It’s time to get off the “fast track” and learn to find the shortcuts.