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Calendar in Chief: Schedule like the President
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Linda Griffin
Linda Griffin jumped into the corporate world right out of college. When she made the transition from techie to leader at IBM, she learned that traditional management training didn’t adequately prepare her for the daily challenges of inspiring, empowering and motivating team members. As a leadership and career coach, she now shares what she learned during her successful 30-year career. She helps first time managers, team leaders, and supervisors deal with the expected, the unexpected and the "you can’t make this stuff up" issues that leaders encounter. Linda has an MBA from the University of South Florida and completed training at Coach Training Alliance.
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Linda Griffin | AdminSecret
A recent Washington Post article Obama, Reaching outside the bubble reminded me of this quote by H. Jackson Brown:
“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”
After reading the article, I added President of the United States to the list.
The article wasn’t about time management, but was focused on the ways that President Obama is trying to stay in touch with people outside of his inner circle. What was most fascinating to me was how the president and his staff get so much done in a single day.
Business women have always been told that time management is important, and we probably agree with that. We know that we should be planning, setting goals, delegating, monitoring our time, scheduling, and prioritizing. But it all seems like too much work.
As working women, working moms, job seekers and the like — why should we care? We should care because time is a scarce resource.
No matter what kind of job you have or how much money you make, there are only 24 hours in a day. If there are goals that you want to achieve, you must choose where to spend your scarce resource of time.
If you spend all of your time being busy but not working on the things that will help you achieve your goals, you’ve wasted time rather than investing it. To paraphrase a quote from Karen Lamb, you will look back a year from now and wish you had started that project today.
The good news is that you can start today to invest your time on things that are important to you and save time by eliminating those that aren’t. Here are four things I learned from studying the way the President protects his time:
