Before the shot clock was modified and installed in the basketball game, teams used a four-corner offense to significantly slow down the game. The offense was developed and popularized by North Carolina head coach Dean Smith in the early 1960s. You may be thinking, “What does this basketball strategy have to do with me and time management?” The answer is simple.
To be effective in controlling your choices, which ultimately enables you to make better decisions, you must become an “effective worker.” To become an “efficient worker,” you must understand and implement the concept of slowing down to speeding up. Slowing down to accelerate allows you to do the right things, for the right reasons, at the right time. To summarize, an “effective worker” is a results worker versus an activity worker. This slowdown to speed up strategy is the opposite of what most people think of when they think of time management. In most cases, time management translates into better time management so that you can get more done in the time available.
The challenge to this logic is that you cannot manage time. Everyone gets 86,400 seconds every day. Once those seconds are gone, you don’t get any of them back. Therefore, time is an irreplaceable asset. With a bank account, if you spend $ 100, you can return $ 200 to the bank to replace the first $ 100 and have $ 100 for the future. Unfortunately, when your 86,400 seconds are up, you can’t replace or get them back. The solution to trying to manage an irreplaceable asset like time is to become efficient. Becoming cash means you know how to slow down the clock to make better decisions in the moment. The result, as in basketball, is that you will only take one shot with the highest probability of scoring. By making a better decision in the moment, one can become more effective.
We call this strategy one of many best practice processes. The payback for individuals, teams, and organizations of these best-practice processes occurs when you apply them to toolboxes such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, or any CRM software program in an effort to create organizational coherence around planning. and the organization. Let’s take a top-down view of what the offense from the four corners of time management included. The first corner of this strategy is called Do It Now. The second corner is titled Decide When. The third corner is titled Delegate and the fourth corner is titled Delete / Dump.
– Do it now
– Decide when (activation date)
– Delegate it
– Delete Dump it
The remaining part of this article will review how to apply a tactic within the four corners strategy that carries the most value for people and teams. The four-corner tactic with the highest value is Decide When. To understand the Tactic Deciding when in the four-corner strategy, one has to think in terms of a 90-degree drawing of two lines on a piece of paper.
On the vertical axis are all 50 to be done or what I call feasible details. Each feasible detail represents an X on the vertical axis line. On the horizontal axis line, write seven names of the week from Sunday to Saturday. Now, instead of building a vertical list of what to do on the vertical axis line, you will slow down at the time of the election and ask yourself these questions: what is this workable detail and when should I do it and where do I keep it? I need it.For example, at the time of election on Friday morning, I realize that this is a memo that I must respond to and write to Steve on Tuesday. Therefore, I move this feasible detail to Tuesday’s list. Next, I ask where I want to store the information until it is needed again. Since it’s an email, I can insert it into the notes section of Steve’s contact record or insert a hyperlink into the notes section.
The net effect is that I now have a horizontal list of when to do versus a vertical list of what to do. Now think about the power of using this best practice date activation process in a toolbox like Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, or any CRM software program. One may get the feeling that just using one of the four corner tactics, such as deciding when, will allow you to make better decisions in the moment, slowing down to accelerate. At the same time, it gives you the opportunity to quickly retrieve information from the future through the horizontal list of when to do. This impact becomes even greater when the best practice process of prioritizing the to do list based on importance, highest values, and urgency is applied. Look for more tactics from the four corners of best practice in future articles.
