In this chapter you’ll realise just how much your time is really worth, you’ll uncover your Brill Bits, find out how to delegate up to your boss, discover the deceptive power of a simple word and learn how it can transform the way you ask for help.

Value your time

Have you ever valued your time? I mean really valued your time? That’s not necessarily your hourly rate of pay, it can be your desired rate or the value you add to your organisation. Here are a couple of ways to do it.

My ultimate value (an entrepreneurial method)

Think about how much you’d like to earn next year.

Divide it by the number of working days (it will probably be around 220).

Divide this by 8 being the number of working hours in the average day.

Now multiply this number by 2. This is because only a half of your hours are top income producing (or mission critical). The list below gives you an idea of your hourly value:

So if you value yourself at a salary of £30,000 then you are worth over £34 an hour (that’s almost a penny a second!). Does that help you to prioritise your time?

If you frequently find yourself doing tasks that seem to be massively below your ultimate value then question why you are doing them.

The value I create (big picture thinking)

Imagine doing this exercise based on the value you bring to the organisation. I appreciate you may not be able to do this in your job, but if you can, give it a go!

Take the entire annual income of your organisation.

Estimate how much you contribute to this. Then use that figure for your calculation.

Divide your number by 220 (the working days) and then again by 8 (the working hours). Multiply by 2 (to take into account non-productive time) and you are left with the monetary value you create.

Here are a couple of examples.

A sales person who brings in 20 per cent of the sales for an organisation with a £500,000 turnover:

£500,000 × 20% = £100,000

£100,000 / 220 / 8 = £56.82

£56.82 × 2 = £113.64 per hour!

A company accountant who contributes 5 per cent to an operation which turns over £750,000:

£750,000 × 5% = £37,500

£37,500 / 220 / 8 = £21.31

£21.31 × 2 = £42.62 per hour!

When you calculate your time as an hourly monetary value, you consider your time in a different way.

Brill Bits

I’m very lucky in that I work with lots of different organisations all over the world. Everywhere I go I am amazed by the amount of time people waste trying to do tasks which they have neither the skill nor the desire to do. It’s a global problem.

Imagine if you could focus on only the best bits of your job – now wouldn’t that be nice? Here’s the good news – you can!

Look at the diagram. Imagine the outer circle as the boundary that contains all the activity you have to complete in a week.

Inside this circle there three sections – Bearable, Better and Brill.

They are a mix of some tasks which you perform fairly well, but you could enjoy them more or do them better. There are others which could be described as just bearable (or unbearable if you don’t believe in positive thinking). Then there are a few which you are really good at, you enjoy and you can do them better than anyone else. They’re your ‘Brill Bits’.

What do you notice about the circles? Imagine the area of the circles could be represented as hours.

A 40-hour week might look like this.

If I had a magic wand I’d simply turn the whole week into Brill Bits, you’d like that – but I don’t. Instead I’ll show you how to gain an extra few hours by making a mighty dent in the Better and Bearable sections.

Step one is to chop your weekly work tasks up into the three categories: Bearable, Better and Brill Bits. If you’ve done a Time Tracker this will be easy.

Next take a look at everything in your Brill Bits category and ask if there is any more you can do in your work in this area. Remember, these are the bits you love to do! Could you take work from someone else? Could your boss give you more? Stay with me on this one, I know this book is about finding an extra hour (and you will), but you may need some bargaining chips along the way.

Now take everything in your Better list and ask yourself if you want to get better at it. So, for example, if you have, ‘Creating PowerPoint presentations’ in your Better list, ask yourself, ‘Do I want to become better at this, or is this an activity I would like to ditch?’

I challenge you to find just a few things from this list that you want to be better at and make it a must to get some training, do some reading or get some help to make you better in this area.

Finally the Bearable list. Not only is this a list of tasks you don’t enjoy doing, I dare bet it takes up a disproportionate amount of your time. It’s time to take some brave steps and find a way to banish the Bearable.

The first question to ask with each item on this list is, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Next ask, ‘What would happen if I didn’t do this?’ It may be that some of the tasks you have in your Bearable list are obsolete, are duplicates of another’s work or they have been superseded. If so, ditch them now.

Next consider the impact if you were to stop doing those things. It may be that a conversation with your boss about why you have to do certain tasks is all that is needed for them to consider removing that responsibility.

Anything that’s left over, do whatever you can to delegate them.

Delegation may feel like a challenge for you, either you don’t have anyone to delegate to, you don’t feel confident delegating or you’ve just never considered it. If that’s what you’re thinking then the next few pages are going to be gold dust.

Dazzling delegation

Learning how to delegate will save you more time than almost any other activity in this book so I’m going to spend a little extra time on it.

And before you think you have no one to delegate to and skip this bit, stop and read on, there’s a surprise for you.

The three ways to delegate

Delegate down

The traditional method and perfect if you have some people down there to delegate to. If you don’t, hang in there. It’s not all over for you – just skip to the next heading for a pleasant surprise.

The main challenge with delegating down is the vicious circle. You want to delegate but there’s no one who can do what you do. You don’t have the time to show someone what you do and the way you want things done. In the past when you have delegated they made such a hash of things that you had to fix it and you might just as well have done the job yourself. That all takes time – time which you don’t have! Arrggggh!

Sound familiar? I can empathise. It used to be me until one day it all changed due to a chance meeting with a stranger on a train. We were chatting about managing people and I began to woefully explain my problem of people not doing things how I would do them. After a couple of minutes of politely listening to my garble the stranger stopped me and said, ‘Michael, your staff will let you down, your kids will let you down, your friends will let you down.’

Just as I was about to comment he said the magic words that no one wants to hear. ‘Deal with it’, and then added the kicker, ‘because you let them down too and they’re not bleating on about it.’

Wow, now that was direct coaching!

The more I thought about it the more it got to me. The responsibility was all mine. The time spent training, the quality of the instruction and the help and support given along the way. And after all that it still won’t be done exactly the way I would do it – but I’d need to deal with it.

Delegation, like any other tool in business, works best when you take it out of the box and use it. You won’t be perfect on day one, but you’ll get better. The better you get the more time you’ll save, the more time you save the more you can invest in empowering your people, the more you empower your people the easier it is to delegate and the vicious circle becomes a virtuous circle.

Delegate across

So you don’t have anyone to delegate down to? How about across? You could be sitting next to someone who would be more than happy to take something off your plate. And in around 60 seconds you’ll find out how.

One of the key secrets to delegating (especially delegating across) is to ensure you have three key pieces of the puzzle lined up and ready for action:

• The Task. Making sure that it’s something that the person who you want to take it on would like to do.
• The Ask. How you make your request.
• The Timing. The best time to ask. Just after they’ve had a five-minute tirade about ‘how much they have to do and how little time they have to do it in’ may not be the best moment.

Let’s break them down.

THE TASK

This must be something the person you want to delegate across to is good at and likes to do, so find out from them what they like. If you aren’t sure, ask. People love to talk about themselves, and from a simple, ‘What are you enjoying about work right now?’ you’ll get some answers fairly quickly.

Also, ensure you have something you can take from them. Just make sure that what you’re taking from them won’t take more time than the task you’re losing. Seems obvious but I’ve seen it happen.

THE ASK

There’s one word and one phrase I’d like you to use when it comes to asking. It isn’t selected for how it sounds or by luck. It’s because the word and phrase have been shown to increase positive response rates dramatically.

The phrase is ‘I need your help’ and the word is ‘because’.

‘I need your help’ sounds evident but I’m amazed at how many people don’t use it. All you need to do is, as you ask someone to help you, start with the words ‘I need your help’. It’s as though the brain has a ‘need to help others’ program running in the background which instantly activates.

And if you think that’s strange then how about getting an even more powerful result with that one word ‘because’:

In 1978 Professor Ellen Langer carried out a ground-breaking piece of research which demonstrated the power of the word ‘because’.

Just as a person was about to do some photocopying one of her research team would interrupt and ask them if they could do some copying first. They used a selection of ways to ask.

‘Excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the Xerox machine?’ was the first request.

‘Excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?’ was the second method.

Sixty per cent of people allowed the researcher to go before them when asked using the first method and an amazing 94 per cent agreed using the second.

At this point you may be thinking that the reason they allowed a person to push in was that they said they were ‘in a rush’. Not so.

The third method of asking was, ‘Excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?’ And still an incredible 93 per cent agreed!

Her research (and many other studies which followed) demonstrated that the differentiator was the power of the word ‘because’. The same outcome was found for written requests. I would, however, suggest you ask people for help face to face whenever possible.

THE TIMING

As well as being the most important rule in comedy it’s also key to making this work. You may be better off waiting a couple of days rather than jumping in with both feet and hoping the person you’ve asked will be happy to help. This is one of those occasions where hope is not a strategy.

Please test out these ideas tomorrow, because they will work and you’ll find you are able to delegate across easily.

Now, on to the final way to delegate and I need your help to really make this stick.

Delegate up!

This is where you get to give your boss something. Sounds impossible? Not when you know how. As with the previous method you need to have something to give in exchange. And by incorporating the language and ideas from ‘Delegate across’ it will work like a dream.

Put yourself in your boss’s shoes and think how you would react if a valued member of your team said to you, ‘I’ve been looking at how to more effectively spend my time at work and I believe I’ve found a way to be more productive, but I need your help. I would like to do more xyz because I am very good at it. To give me the time to do this I’d like to do less of abc, because I don’t believe I am as effective in that area.’

If you have a good boss you’ll think ‘Wow’ and they’ll do something about it. If you have a poor boss they may focus on the negative. Decide what type of boss you have before using this.

Under no circumstances pop your head round your boss’s door and say, ‘Hey, guv, any chance I could dump some of my work on you? I’m feeling a bit maxed at the moment and thought you’d like to deal with it.’

Responsibility comes with this type of delegation and you may not want to take on the additional obligations that delegation brings.

Success shouldn’t be measured by how many people you are able to delegate to, nor should it be measured by the amount of money you have. True success is about happiness. Those who find true happiness have found success.

So while you are considering how to delegate, ask yourself this important question: ‘Will delegating this really make me happier?’ Who knows, you may save yourself a whole lot of time with just an honest answer to that question.

Meetings

The larger the organisation the more time seems to be taken up with meetings. Meetings are a necessary evil for most people but the amount of time they waste is a sin.

I’m on a mission to minimise the time you spend in non-productive meetings. And if you feel like you have meeting overkill, I’m going to be filling your arsenal with some meeting-mashing tools that are GUARANTEED to find you at least a couple of hours a week.

West Wing Meetings

When I wrote my first book How to Be Brilliant, my publisher asked me to include a chapter on Brilliant Teams. For years I’d been using a simple tool in my organisation called West Wing Meetings to speed up mundane meetings and get things done. I wrote about them over a couple of pages in the book and couldn’t have anticipated the response. Readers either loved them or hated them (not many in the middle).

Here’s the idea (let me know what you think).

The 45-minute meeting

Do you know why most meetings last for one hour? It’s because they are scheduled for one hour. They start on the hour and run until the next. Here’s a ‘what if’ for you to consider. What if you scheduled all of your ‘one hour’ meetings for 45 minutes instead? That’s it – simple.

And to make sure they last just 45 minutes, schedule them to start at a quarter past the hour.

This simple piece of advice has saved thousands of hours for organisations and individuals we have worked with over the years.

And it works because you often don’t need an hour for a meeting. You need 45 minutes. Or could you do it in less time?

Meeting Harold Evans

On 5 October 1995 I was in New York. I was due to meet with Harold Evans (now Sir Harold), the publisher. I remember the date as it was the day the verdict was announced on the OJ Simpson trial.

I knew he was a very busy man (look him up and you’ll see), so I was prepared for a brief meeting. His charming PA met me from the lift and took me to a small waiting area. I could hear him in his office saying to a caller, ‘Look – you’re busy, I’m busy, we’re all busy. But do we have a deal or not?’ A second or two later he congratulated the caller and waved me in. As I walked past his PA she leant forward and whispered to me, ‘You’ve got 17 minutes.’

So there I was in a stunning corner office of a New York skyscraper with one of the most powerful publishers in the world with a mental clock ticking. I had practised my opening line and after a quick hello spurted it out.

So I’ve potentially interrupted a massive international book deal. I have 17 minutes (actually around 15 and a half now) with one of the most influential men in America. As you can imagine, I was feeling a little tense. But then it got better (or worse depending on your take).

At this point I’ve achieved my two major objectives in less than 60 seconds. I must have at least 14 of my precious 17 minutes left and I haven’t anything left in the tank!

So I simply said, ‘No, I don’t think so’, until a moment of genius occurred. Now this book is about saving time for you and I’ve no idea whether you care about how I extended the meeting and got more than I could ever have dreamed of, so I’ll put the rest of this story in the bonus materials available online at www.saveanhour.co.uk.

What I want you to consider is the way Harold Evans controlled that meeting. Exactly – time is money. His time was worth a fortune and he understood that meetings were about outcomes, not sitting around listening to the sound of your own voice and of those around you.

I’m not suggesting you should have all your meetings in the Harold Evans style but you can learn a lot from it.

Leading meetings

The leader of a meeting (the chair) holds the key to time. I’ve been to some meetings where, after 3.5 hours, you’re still on Item 2 of the agenda (Item 1 was apologies), and I’ve been to others where 6 items of business have been sorted in 30 minutes.

If you get the chance to, then lead the meeting yourself. Here’s how to do it, get the job done and save time:

1. Start on time. Why waste other people’s time waiting for latecomers?
2. Don’t start with the tea and coffee order. If it’s already there get someone to pour; if it’s not, make it a treat for finishing early.
3. Set a very clear time goal. I’ve yet to meet a person who wouldn’t want a meeting leader to say, ‘I think we can go through this agenda in 45 minutes. Let’s crack on.’
4. Be very clear with the people who do love the sound of their own voice. Let them know that you’d like them to summarise and quickly. You may not jump to the top of their Christmas card list but you’ll be a hero to the rest of the group.
5. Push decision making. Summarise yourself using phrases like, ‘Would I be correct in saying that the opinion of the room is that we . . .’ or ‘Can we agree that . . .’
6. If you can’t make a decision there and then be prepared to ‘park’ an item and move on.
7. Be prepared and happy to finish early. Just because there’s a time in the diary doesn’t mean it has to take that long.
8. Make it fun. Play music as people arrive, create energy, wake people and go for it!

Email

It should be the most amazing, productive time-saving tool at work but instead it can eat up time faster than queuing at the post office on pension day. There are whole books on how to manage email – though goodness knows what they find to write in them. I’m going to take a simple approach.

So what’s wrong with email?

The top five problems with email are:

1. Interruptions.
2. CC and BCC.
3. Chains.
4. Volume and spam.
5. Replacing verbal communication.

Let’s take them one at a time.

1 Interruptions

You wouldn’t allow someone to keep popping their head round the door, saying the first line of what they want to say, then just standing there waiting for you to stop what you are doing and invite them to continue. And yet that’s exactly what you do with emails if you use that little pop-up box which appears when a new email arrives.

Solution – Switch it off. Only check your emails three or four times a day.

2 CC and BCC

From the old days when carbon was slotted between sheets of paper as we typed so we had an extra copy. At that time it was a real faff to type like that, now a CC is just a click away.

Many CCs are sent not by people who think you need the information but by people who lack confidence and want to cover their backs.

Solution – Send notes straight back to people who unnecessarily CC you into emails asking them if your inclusion is really necessary.

3 Chains

There are two types of chains. The first is the ridiculous ‘Please pass this on to 10 people in the next hour and you will have good luck, don’t and you’re cursed’ type, and the second type is the one in which you end up playing email tennis instead of communicating properly, simply because no one knows how to end the conversation! Worse still when you end up CC’d on these.

Solution – First one is easy: risk the curse and delete the superstitious nonsense. For the second, go for closure. Be the one who takes this situation by the horns and promptly delegate it to someone else! And if you’re unable to delegate then set yourself a personal challenge – to get it done.

4 Volume and spam

Here’s a classic cry for help. Today I received 380 emails. Over 300 were junk offering once-in-a-lifetime loan offers and all manner of enhancement pills. Of the other 80 only 6 were really important and another 10 or so were of interest. The rest? Goodness knows how I ended up with them.

Solution – Invest in a brilliant spam filter. If you don’t control your system ask IT for help. Unsubscribe from everything other than the very best information. Create a file for anything you are unsure of and throw stuff in there to be looked at later. Then deal with what’s left in batches.

5 Replacing verbal communication

Email should be a replacement for letters but instead it has become a replacement for verbal communication. People send emails rather than picking up the phone ALL the time AND IT DRIVES ME NUTS. Perhaps it’s just habit, a lack of confidence or an evolutionary step to becoming mute. What I do know is it wastes HOURS.

Solution – Pick up the phone. Use email as a fallback not a substitute. Who knows, you might actually like talking to people and get more done too.

The PC

Does your computer desktop replicate your real desktop? With so many documents saved there it looks like an explosion of icons? Do you find yourself saying, ‘I know I have this document somewhere?’ before spending the next 20 minutes racking your brain for what you may have called it, running random searches and eventually finding an old version which needs a stack of rework?

Here are a few simple ideas you can do to make life easier and save precious time:

• Treat virtual paper like real paper. If you don’t need it bin it, if you need it file it.
• Make it a habit to save every address into your database. This is a habit that can save you hours as technology becomes better at recognising phone numbers, email addresses and other important pieces of contact information.
• Embrace the time-saving aspects of your PC or Mac by getting trained. I enjoy using the video-making software on my Mac and I thought I was pretty good. That was until I had a training session at the Apple store. I’d liken the experience to meeting a joiner who says, ‘That is one way to use your hammer, but see if you turn it round and hit the nail with the metal end it may work even better.’ I cut the time it took to complete a project by half and my video making improved too.
• Use your calendar, programme reminders and set alarms. Do this effectively and you’ll never miss a birthday, deadline or important call again.
• Learn how to link technology. You should only need to enter an appointment once and it will instantly appear on your home PC, phone and any other devices you use.
• Learn how to use macros. These clever little devices are simply a way to record a set of keystrokes (instructions) you may carry out on a regular basis in a computer program. Rather than carry out all of the instructions, you record the actions then play them back with just a couple of keystrokes or a swish of your mouse!
• Add more power. Invest in the fastest computer you can afford – you won’t regret it. Loads of RAM, a whizzy hard drive and super fast processor can save you valuable minutes every hour and boat-loads of frustration.
• Get superfast broadband. Again, invest in the fastest broadband you can afford. The time you spend waiting for downloads can be better spent rather than staring at a ‘progress bar’.
• Add an extra monitor. If you have the room and you use a computer extensively with several different programs running, invest in a second monitor. The bigger the better! Depending on your job, you can increase your productivity by up to 30 per cent!
• Know how to search. By learning how to use search engines properly you can find information more quickly. To find out how to do this, search ‘how to search Google’; you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of the time-saving tricks they have to offer.

The telephone

And while we’re talking about it, here are a few ideas to save you precious minutes on the phone.

I love the phone. It’s fast, personal and gives you an opportunity to interact. It’s a million times better than email. Having said that, there are a few things to consider when saving time on the phone and getting the most out of it.

Save numbers

If someone calls you on your mobile, and there’s even the remotest chance that you may want to speak to them again, save their number in your phone’s memory.

This will save many minutes of ‘looking up numbers’ time in the future, it will give you confidence that you have numbers at your fingertips and it allows you to screen calls rather than getting that glazed look when 11 numbers rather than a name appear.

Pre-frame the call

Keep calls brief by pre-framing the conversation. Get past the ‘how are you’, ‘lovely day’, ‘where are you’ stuff as quickly as you can before making it clear exactly what you want to get from the conversation. Finish off with, ‘Well, I’m happy we covered everything, thanks for that’ and then move on to goodbye.

Stand

Stand when you’re on the phone. You’ll spend less time on the call and you’ll add a bit of oomph!

Always leave a message

How many people do you know who dial a number, hear a voicemail message then hang up? This is one of the craziest time wasters ever. First you wasted your time making the call. Then you have to remember to call back. If you get voicemail again the whole thing continues.

When you hear voicemail leave a message! Here’s how to do it:

• Say who you are. Don’t assume they know who you are.
• Leave a quick and clear message saying why you called. If you simply say, ‘Call me back’ you’ll be low on the priority list of the person you called and you’ll end up having to call them again.
• If you can only take a return call at a certain time then say this in a positive way, i.e. ‘A brilliant time to catch me would be any time after 3pm today or before 10 in the morning’, rather than, ‘I’m in meetings until 3 today and again after 10 tomorrow . . .’
• Say your name (yes, again) and number slowly and then repeat your number and leave a final thank you.

Job done. Next!

I shudder to think how much time is wasted every year across the country in the workplace. Just a few simple tools can revolutionise the way you work and help you save that vital hour every day.

Some are tough but many are so simple you may find yourself looking for something a little more challenging. So that’s why I created . . .