Time Management - Marc Mancini
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84<br />
<strong>Time</strong> <strong>Management</strong><br />
is not the most critical day of the year), then maybe you<br />
should say no.<br />
How to Say No<br />
Psychologists have identified a four-step procedure that makes<br />
saying no safe, diplomatic, and effective:<br />
• Give a reason. To simply decline to do something seems<br />
arbitrary, lazy, or irresponsible. If you give a good, solid reason<br />
for your decision, it will show that you’re reasonable.<br />
• Be diplomatic. Saying no can hurt, upset, or even anger<br />
the person to whom you’re saying it. Tact is essential<br />
when turning down anything.<br />
Say No to Information Overload<br />
We live in an age of information overload. But you can<br />
control how you receive and process information by<br />
focusing on what you need and rejecting what you don’t. Here are a<br />
few tips:<br />
• When reading a report, read the executive summary first. Skim what<br />
follows only to sift out necessary details. If you can influence the<br />
people creating reports, insist that they have executive summaries.<br />
• Subscribe to publications that summarize facts, books, articles, etc. A<br />
few examples:<br />
Executive Book Summaries<br />
Wellness Letter (UC Berkeley)<br />
Kiplinger Washington Letter<br />
• Avoid real-time TV viewing. Tape TV shows and fast-forward past commercials.<br />
• Use the bookmark feature on your Internet browser to store information<br />
sites you use frequently.<br />
• Get a voice-mail system that limits messages to one minute and doesn’t<br />
record hang-ups. Whether or not you have a limiting feature on<br />
your equipment, warn callers in your outgoing message that they<br />
have 60 seconds to state their message. (Yes, they may call back and<br />
leave a continuation of their message, but the second attempt will<br />
be far more compact than the first.)