This video is an excerpt from a live training session with Chrissy Scivicque, Career Coach & Corporate Trainer. The full video (“Exploring Time Management Tools and Tech”) is available in the Career Success Library.
The article below summarizes the video content.
We have to invest our time, energy and attention into using tools and technology to support our time management. And ultimately, we want that to help us to be more productive.
There is a very well-known time management expert named Brian Tracy, who is famous for saying that one minute spent planning can save you 10 minutes in execution. That’s the goal, right? That’s fantastic!
If I spend one minute planning, I save 10 minutes in execution. That’s a great return on investment. But what can often happen with our various tools and technology is that we are putting so much time, energy, and attention into using those tools that the return starts to diminish.
We start off with one minutes saves us 10 on the back end. But the more time we put into our tools and technology, the amount of savings starts to go down. So, if I’m spending 20 or 30 minutes with my tools and my technology, then I’m maybe not saving 10 minutes per minute; I’m actually now only saving seven or eight minutes and it starts to go down. That’s what we call diminishing returns.
We can ultimately get to a place of negative returns, where the more time we spend dealing with our time management tools and technology, the less productive we actually become. That is negative returns.
We have to be very conscious of how we are using these tools so that we do not hit diminishing returns, and so we certainly don’t hit negative returns. We want to make sure that when we are investing our time, energy, and attention into our tools and technology for time management that is yielding a positive, helpful productivity outcome for us.