One of the lost arts of the corporate world in the past 20 years is how to work with an administrative assistant. While we won’t argue that a great deal of the “leaning out” of corporations has been a good thing, working with admins effectively is one of the painful legacies of the cutbacks.

Of the executives who are assigned admins, our experience is that very few know how to use them well. There are many ways that the fantastic opportunity an admin offers are squandered. But in virtually all cases, the fundamental failure of managers who execute this responsibility is that they fail to delegate enough to the admin.

We start a series of casts on administrative assistants this week. In our first installment, we discuss the basics principles that will guide your thinking.

These casts will either help you do things right when you get to the point where you’re assigned an admin. Or, if you have an admin now, these casts will help you re-invent the relationship, making it what you always thought it should be.

After you’ve listened, you’ll want your admin to hear it.

Today, we cover the second in a two-part series of podcasts on Time Management. If you’re new to the show or you didn’t listen to last week’s podcast, it’s probably worth while going back and listening to the previous show first. Otherwise, you’ll be joining the conversation half-way through and we all know how comfortable that feels.

We recommend 4 1/2 steps to analyzing your use of time

1. Roughly Assess Your Time - absolutely *no* materials other than pen and paper allowed!
2. Capture Your Priorities
3. Do a Rough Analysis
   (part b, only for the truly commited) - Do a “Drucker” Analysis
4. Put Your Number One Priority on Your Calendar

That’s it! We walked through steps 1 and 2 last week, today we cover the remainder.

Time management is a fallacy, we like to say. Time doesn’t need you to “manage” it - it’s been getting along just fine without you for billions of years. We can’t manage time. But what we CAN manage is what we do with that time. And yet, the overwhelming evidence is that managers do NOT “manage what they do with that time.” There’s a shocking CHASM between our behavior in this area and our knowledge of what to do. In fact, Mark recently blogged on how busy everyone says they are, which irritates him. He looks at their calendars, and there’s no EVIDENCE that they’re busy. There are vast swaths of unscheduled time!

Peter Drucker, in the first prescriptive chapter of his seminal work, the Effective Executive, says it best (of course): “The output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource. In the process we call “accomplishment”, this is time … Of the other major resources, money is actually quite plentiful … People … one can hire. But one cannot rent, hire, buy or otherwise obtain more time.”

So, the question is, how can managers start to become more efficient about using the time that each of us has at our disposal? In fact, that’s a great way to state it: STOP disposing of your time! It’s not only your most precious resource, it’s also your most perishable!

This cast will get you started doing just that.

If you’re a manager, don’t think for a moment that someone else is managing your career. Those days are long gone. YOU are managing your career. What you do - not only in job skills, but also in what we call “Transition Skills” - will be the primary determinant of your career success. You’re not going to have the richest, most rewarding series of roles and opportunities by allowing someone in HR to know enough about you to get you where you need to be. And succession planning won’t save you either.

And one of the most important of the Transition Skills is Building And Maintaining Your Network. Most people are terrible at it. We know this because they have no network.

Now, notice that we did NOT say that the skill was “networking”. That term conjures up schmoozing, and cocktail parties, and too many people don’t like it. So, we’re not suggesting you do that.

We’re suggesting you Build and Maintain Your Network. It only takes THREE SIMPLE SKILLS, and we’ll walk through them.

Oh, yeah … and there’s a blooper in the show. Did you catch it?

I would like to apologize for not having your podcast ready on Monday (today). We never really intended to have a particular day that casts were available, but we’ve received so much feedback about everyone enjoying our casts to mitigate your (Monday) commutes, we’ve grown to like this “time slot”, if you will.

This failure is completely mine, and as it turns out, I’m very comfortable with it (even while fully accepting that I failed).

This past weekend, I had to take my 10-year old son Drake to the Emergency Room following a week of “not feeling so great.” I expected a diagnosis of strep throat, and so was quite surprised late Friday night when the doctor said an immediate CT scan was required and emergency surgery in San Antonio - 80 miles away - was a significant possibility.

As it turned out, the CT scan suggested the emergency tonsillectomy was not required, and we escaped the ER at 3:30 am Saturday. Drake recuperated all weekend.

The tasks I owed Mike went uncompleted.

Drake is FINE, and appreciates in absentia your forbearance of his father’s failure.

Nevertheless, our apologies, and commitment to resume weekly periodicity.

Mark

We’ve received several questions by email and on the website regarding how to handle input about your team from other people in your organization. This cast, on what to do with “feedback” from others, seems perfectly timed. We knew we’d get questions like these - they’re pretty normal. But we sure didn’t expect to have this good of timing!

While there will always be those who share information with you that isn’t necessarily intended to truly help your organization, we believe the vast majority is well intended. And yet, so often it is delivered clumsily, and/or is unactionable. This cast will help you RECEIVE it well, and then help you action it.

You can’t expect others to give you readily packaged feedback, but you don’t dare just pass on what they say. How do you do that?

Have a listen.