Welcome to the Manager Tools podcast for Monday, May 15, 2006.

Hi, this is Michael Lozan, and on behalf of myself and Mark Horsman, welcome to Manager Tools.

This week's cast is about every manager's most precious and perishful resource, time.

It marches on mercilessly every day, only more slowly on those days before vacation and more quickly on Sunday.

Most managers do a terrible job of using their time effectively. In other words, most of us are terribly inefficient.

This cast will teach you the basics of how to become effective at using your time, which

will make you both more efficient and effective.

So finally, Mike, after nearly a year, we've made some time for a cast about time management

No we haven't made time more

You're constantly beat me up about my vocabulary and language around time and as you always say

We can't make time and we're certainly uh although our high Ds we're certainly not God here

Okay, I agree uh so since we're certainly, although our high Ds, we're certainly not God here. Okay, I agree.

So, since we're going to be sensitive about time, since it's a perishable commodity,

let's get right to our recommended approach for being efficient for executives.

Excellent.

Okay.

So there's some basics about time, man.

Let's talk about the basics, and we can get into a little bit more detail. Yeah. As I mentioned in my blog a while back, I get paid to go in and work with executives, and when I do, the first thing I do is ask about their schedule. I say, look, I want to see your calendar. And usually an assistant prints it out, and I analyze it. And at the same time, I'm asking the executive executive about what their priorities are and then I try to match up their stated priorities with their

calendar and you know even executives to make $250,000 a year Mike and they always match up right

not so much they rarely agree and I understand why I've been there and I understand that

and really there's a part of me that feels bad about this in a way because I feel like I'm getting paid very well to harvest some pretty low-hanging fruit. It doesn't take rocket science. It doesn't take a lot of intellect to do this to just start there and say, hey, I think you could, you know, if in fact you say these are your priorities, if they really are, then let's just make sure you spend time on your priorities.

And if after three or four months, you get better results by spending time in your priorities,

...