You've reflected on your four Ps and have got everything on one page. Now, how can you make the most effective use of your time? In this part of the course, we'll review some strategies and tactics for time maximization. I prefer that term over time management. Bear in mind that for all of these strategies, keeping your life on one-page progress worksheet close will help you make choices based on your priorities. If you haven't completed a version of this yet or need to refresh your memory, please take a moment now to review that lesson, but before beginning here. To the four Ps you've worked on, I want to offer you another P to consider. Its perseverance. It's hard to get a time maximization strategy up and running if it's not built on a strong foundation of a well-thought through life on one page. But once you've created it for the first time, then the second and third, you'll find the foundational work that underpins maximizing your time easier and easier. Another important bit of advice is to select tools that already work for you to bring your four Ps to life outside the worksheet on this course. There are so many options out there. So if you haven't figured out what productivity tools work best for you, keep searching. You can take hints from the tools you already like to use for other purposes. For example, if you are a PowerPoint person, you might use PowerPoint to organize your time management strategy, if you know, Excel and other spreadsheets, use Excel and so on. Once you have your rocks clear and you know what you want your future to look like, try to find ways for you to see this plan in your daily life. Can your online folders for your files on your hard drive, Dropbox, Google Drive be arranged according to your rocks? Be sure to include your life on one page progress worksheet here as well. Where can your life on one page appears so you can see it often and easily? I have it on my notepad right next to where I write down my daily tasks there to nudge each and every day towards building a long-term future. Some of you may have found one of the many online productivity tools and project management software helpful. If so, can you structure those tools to be in line with what you've created for your rocks? As a reflection, what software and systems will you use to manifest your life on one page in your daily life? Where can you plant the seeds of your connected leadership thinking so that the hard work you've done to reflect on your purpose, priorities, potential feed through to the real progress on a week-to-week basis? We're going to be looking tactically how you use your calendar to drive your highest and best use of time. But it's also worth considering and managing your energy to match the tasks at hand too. There is a powerful article from Loehr and Schwartz from Harvard Business Review about doing just that, managing your energy, not just your time, being conscious about the type and quality of the energy you have in the present and as you plan your week. Reviewing their pyramid, it's good to consider first how much energy we have, the base quantity. Did we get enough sleep? Then, how are we feeling? Our emotional energy, our quality. Sitting on top of that is our cognitive energy, our ability to focus, and at the top, our spiritual energy, our life force. These energies feed off each other and interrelate. We should consider them all and where they might be at different points in the week. Can you match your tasks to your energy? You might manage your calendar so you're not utilizing all of your energy in one area of work or life during the day to the detriment of your other priorities. As an example, if you need to have a difficult conversation with a team member and you tend to be more positive and energetic in the morning, you can structure your day so that you've got the quality of energy needed to be positive and productive in that exchange. On the flip side, you could schedule discretionary, less demanding tasks when you know your energy will be lower. We've discussed rocks and major priorities at length, but what do we do with the pebbles or the less important tasks we need to accomplish? The issue with pebbles is that they're typically somebody else's rock trying to get in your jar. They think is important, so they're putting it in and it may or may not be an important part of your life. So how do you manage these pebbles when they're part of a dynamic system of other people's priorities? Unfortunately, it's socially unacceptable in most teams and organizations to respond to requests with a how is never, is never good for you? That's still one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons. But more seriously, we want to avoid getting caught on the other end of, in a few weeks. In a few weeks is a mythical place where someone is able to deal with lesser priority items. If you are tempted to delay someone wanting your time with this phrase, instead of asking someone to come back to you at an ambiguous time in the future, give them a date and a time no matter how far ahead or if you're genuinely not the right person to help them, suggests they contact someone else. Of course, the reverse also applies; if you're trying to get into somebody else's calendar and they see come back in a few weeks, can you clarify with them. Do you mean someone else can help me better or does the last weekend, July work for you to reconvene? I can make myself available then and I'm ready with my calendar. Another way to manage pebbles is to consciously switch from e-mail to calendar as the dominant tool to drive your use of time. E-mail is essentially someone else's priorities. Almost by definition, if you manage your time based on your inbox, you're managing your time based on other people's priorities. The inbox zero goal is not something that I think everyone needs to aspire to, for instance. But those that feel they need it and are good at maintaining it, hats off to you. For those that feel guilty though for never achieving a seemingly always distinct goal, please don't worry and switch your focus. Consider having your calendar as your dominant app. Include time, meetings with yourself for your own work. See Cal Newport's writing on deep work for much more on this and even include scheduling time to answer e-mails and avoid answering e-mails maybe outside of those hours. Please take a moment now to reflect and make some notes. How did the pebbles in work and life effect you? What structures and practices can you put into place to make enough time and proactive time for the rocks, managing pebbles appropriately for your productivity and your sanity? We've covered how to manage rocks and pebbles. Now we can move on with a little bit of time left for managing sand. The low priority, low-impact tasks, they can still take up space in our jars if we manage time well, or at its worst can detrimental leaf fill up your jar and week before you've spent enough time on the rocks. What leads you to unconsciously fritter away time on sand? For many, technology often hijacks our attention. News alerts on our phone can be considered sand for a lot of us, it is worth re-framing the seemingly innocent alerts on your phone or computer. A media companies rock is advertising dollars, so their priority is to pour as much sand in your jar as they can. That's the reason that one piece of clickbait attracts you, leads to 10 articles read and a half-hour consumed before you realize. They are experts at this because they have to be, that's their business. For you, those news articles were way less important than the quality time spent on your priorities. With a few tweaks though, you can convert your technology from attention hijackers to attention enablers. If alerts are distracting, you turn off notifications and even disconnect Wi-Fi if the task does not require it. If you have an important time-sensitive task, try a dead battery sprint, take your laptop without your charger to another part of the office, house or down to the cafe. You've now gotten that amount of battery time to do that important task. There are also apps that can help you keep time, such as a Pomodoro kitchen timer like app in the top corner. You can set the timer for as long as you want to focus on a task. Imagine the double effect if the top right corner of your screen stops notifying you of distractions and now actively keeps you on task. Think about your screens as well and how you might configure them to work for you and your priorities, not against you. Are the apps on the front page of your phone helping move your rocks forward or are they more like sand in your jar? Are apps that create the sand a few scrolls away, or better yet, not on your phone at all? Then finally, know your weaknesses and create your own carrots and sticks. Don't interrupt your work because you suddenly need a coffee and you love coffee. Either make it beforehand or reward yourself afterwards, but don't get caught by distraction that you know you are vulnerable to. To summarize this approach to tasks in your day, I adapted a two-by-two matrix from a recent medium article which could be used for framing for holding yourself accountable and not filling your jar with sand. But let's all try to stay out of the red boxes, working hard on things that don't matter, getting cut off in pebbles and sand, or working not hard enough on things that matter. That's going to disappoint you and others. If you like, take a moment and think about your life and the risks you run in spending time in the red zones. How can you make changes to spend more time in the green?