By CJ Powers
The key to a successful time management system is its ability to facilitate the accomplishment of your three big goals. While there are numerous duties within any given role, the big three will determine your success as a leader.
In the case of a Toastmasters Area Director, the three big goals for the year might include:
- Visit area clubs and report findings to the Division Director.
- Network with club officers and passionate club members to spark an interest in participating at the district level.
- Find and mentor your replacement.
CONTEXTUAL CALENDAR
To make sure these three big goals are accomplished, many leaders use a contextual calendar. A contextual calendar blocks out groupings of time-based on the goals, not appointments or meetings. In other words, blocking out an hour each week to network with club officers and passionate club members guarantees time is spent on the second goal each week.
The details of who you call and what you discuss can be determined at any point in the process, but blocking out the time to actively work on the second goal is critical to success. If time is not blocked out each week, then the networking dates and times will be put off or rescheduled to the point of you not being able to achieve that goal. The one exception is the agonizing crash-and-burn attempt at the last second that always produces shoddy results—demonstrating that you are not leadership material, yet.
Here is a sample contextual calendar:
CORE COMPETENCY MATRIX
Knowing your core strengths will help you make decisions and take care of any operational issue you may face in your efforts to complete your three big goals. The best way to determine your core strengths is to assess and find where your passion meets your proficiency.
When you are both passionate and proficient at a given task, you are ideally positioned to handle all related matters. However, should you be passionate, but not proficient in a given area, you are well-positioned to oversee some form of delegation. If you find yourself in a position that you are proficient, but you lack passion for the project, you are positioned to hand off the project to an expert that can take the ball and run with it—or you can work it a little bit every day.
EISENHOWER DECISION MATRIX
No one likes their time wasted, yet it happens all of the time in non-profit organizations in the name of fellowship or networking—giving a bad name to those real and needed networking moments. To make sure he didn’t waste any time, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the below matrix to decide what he should work on.
Since the table is self-explanatory, the only thing needing clarification is that each quadrant should be done within the perspective of your three big goals. In other words, if your goal is to visit clubs and report your findings to the Division Director, anything related to that achievement will most likely be determined as important. You then only have to figure out if it is urgent or not, which will trigger you doing it now or have you work it a little bit every day.
WEIGHTED DECISION MATRIX
When you find yourself with little time and multiple important things to do, forcing you to prioritize, the weighted decision matrix will help you organize the order of your projects in keeping with your goals.
The column labels you choose should represent the criteria that are important to the organization and your three big goals. Just under the column labels, you can place a value from 1-10 for each criterion to be used as a multiplier based on its significance in the decision-making process.
Write in each project you must consider. Then assign a high, medium, or low value representing the impact the criteria has on the project or how the project fulfills the criteria. Either form of measurement will work as long as you are consistent in your method choice between all projects.
The math is to be done next with H equaling 9, M = 3, and L = 1. If criteria #1 has a weighting of 8 and Project/Event A has an L value of 1, you’ll multiply 8 times 1 for a score of 8. If Project/Event C has a value of H or 9, you’ll multiply 9 times 8 for a score of 72.
The next step is calculating the numbers for Criteria #2, and then #3, etc. Once you have a score in each criteria box for each project, you then add the boxes from left to right for a total score. The higher the total score, the higher the priority of the project. The key is making sure your criteria are important and its weighting as close to accurate as possible.
Some criteria might consider resources, budget, deadline, leadership buy-in, etc. The four above tools should empower you to be effective, making great decisions as an Area Director—allowing you to achieve success with your three big goals.
© 2020 by CJ Powers