First, peter drucker's Effective Managers and other related works.
Drucker is known as the master among the masters. He is not only the founder of modern management, but also the founder of target management. Drucker's ideas such as "time is a scarce resource", "doing only one thing at a time" and "giving priority to important things" have great influence on the construction of my time management concept.
Drucker put forward three steps to manage time effectively in his classic book Effective Manager: recording time, managing time and arranging time uniformly.
To be an excellent manager, whether managing personal affairs or managing a company team, we must clearly realize that time is the most special and scarce resource, and the supply of time is completely inelastic. No matter how much you need it, the supply will never increase. Therefore, in a limited time, if we want to achieve our goals and harvest results, we can only do important things that provide key performance.
So what is important to us? Drucker believes that to achieve fruitful results, managers must consciously develop five habits:
(1) You must know how to use your time effectively;
(2) Pay attention to the contribution to the outside world;
(3) We should not only be good at using our own strengths, but also know how to use the strengths of superiors, colleagues and subordinates;
(4) When you know how to concentrate on some important areas;
(5) Be good at making effective decisions.
The above five habits are the basis for us to achieve fruitful results. ?
"Five main habits" is the main school of leadership trait theory.
Drucker pointed out that there are different types of effective managers and different types of ineffective managers. Therefore, it is difficult to distinguish effective managers from ineffective managers in terms of type, personality and intelligence. Efficiency is an acquired habit. Since it is a habit, you can learn, and you can only get it through learning. He believes that an excellent manager must have the following five main habits.
So how can we find something really specific and important? In the program Reflection on the Past, we talked about Drucker's another book, Drucker on Asia, which mentioned that "feedback analysis" can effectively help us find our own strengths and weaknesses. Feedback analysis means: before you do an important thing or a key decision, you should write down your expected results. After 9 ~ 12 months, you can put the actual results. In this way, you can quickly understand which parts of yourself are doing well, which parts need to learn and which habits need to be changed.
Feedback analysis is actually a part of "management by objectives" to some extent, and as the founder of management by objectives, Drucker put forward the "smart principle of management by objectives" in his other book "The Practice of Management", that is, he believed that no matter how to set the team's work goals or employees' performance goals, the following five principles must be followed, that is, the goals must be specific, measurable and achievable, and consistent with other goals. To achieve the goal, these five principles are indispensable!
Drucker is a master among masters. Many of his management theories are classic and profound, and many of his works are worth reading and rereading. You can always learn something new when reviewing.
The second book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
Dr. Steven Covey, who was named as a "mentor of human potential" by Time magazine, put forward seven habits of highly effective people in his world famous book "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People": initiative, beginning to end, priority, win-win thinking, self-awareness, comprehensive efficiency improvement and constant renewal.
These seven habits have benefited me a lot. What I can't forget is that when I first saw the picture of "an old lady or a beautiful girl", my heart trembled. Some people saw a rickety old lady and some people saw a beautifully dressed girl. The picture didn't change, and everyone didn't get it wrong, just because everyone's mood and thoughts were different, and the image they saw was different. Most people who see beautiful girls are "active", so taking the initiative determines that we can see more beauty in life, which is why it can become the first habit that high-performance people must have.
The theory of "circle of influence" and "circle of concern" put forward by this surgical dimension also has a profound influence on me. Why do modern people often feel anxious? It is because many of us don't distinguish the contents of our "circle of influence" and "attention circle"! Circle of influence is the range that a person or an enterprise can influence. For example, an individual can always keep smiling, and the company can insist on holding weekly inspection meetings.
The attention circle is the range that a person or enterprise can't control the result, but is willing to pay attention to. For example, the salesman can pay attention to the performance of the sales champion in the company, or the agent can pay attention to the new advertisement and new promotion plan of the manufacturer. If you mistakenly divide the content of your attention circle into your own circle of influence, you will easily fall into anxiety.
In the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey also put forward the "Four Quadrant Rule of Time Management" for the first time: that is, we can divide things into two dimensions and four categories: important emergency, important non-emergency, unimportant emergency and unimportant non-emergency.
He advocates that we should only do important and non-urgent things, but in real life we are not. Most people tend to do unimportant things first, because it is easy to finish, and they will certainly do urgent things first, whether important or not, because we will be pushed away by other relevant personnel for urgent things.
It is a process of continuous cultivation and progress from completing urgent things first, to completing important urgent things, and finally to completing important non-urgent things.
The third book, David Allen's "Completion"
Done is a series of three books, which is called "GTD Time Management Trilogy". In this set of books, the author David Allen put forward many novel time management viewpoints and systems, and several of them have had a profound impact on me, such as:
1. By establishing a matrix based on perspective and mastery, people can be divided into four categories:
1) "Captain and Commander" with high visual angle and absolute control over the overall situation;
2) "micro-managers/executors" who lack perspective but are good at control;
3) A "visionary/dreamer" with a highly correct perspective but poor control;
4) "victims/responders" who have no global vision and lack global control.
What kind of person are you? You can take the exam in his official website. Interested friends can try it.
2. The principle of "bottom-up" management by objectives, that is, planning your own actions and goals from the current situation. In the book, David Allen tells a vivid story about the airport tower. To put it simply, only by arranging the planes that we can control at present and the planes that are about to land in order on the runway can we spare the energy to control further affairs.
3. Empty the brain with the extension of the outer brain. Because the natural nature of the brain determines that it is a CPU rather than a hard disk, and storing memories is not the brain's strong point, so we should use good tools to drive things out of the brain and never forget them again.
4. Manage your time in the process. For example, the systematic methods to control the situation are: assembly-clear meaning-organization-deep thinking-participation/action and so on.
5. Besides the schedule, how to deal with things that have no fixed deadline but need to be completed as soon as possible? To solve this problem, David Allen put forward the principle of "situation classification", which has made great contributions to the world. He classifies things according to the situation so that we can refer to, choose and take action quickly:
1) in the company: you can have meetings and communicate with colleagues, etc.
2) beside the computer: you can send and receive emails, write various work reports and so on;
3) Going out: you can visit customers and purchase materials;
4) Authorization and entrustment: query the processing progress and track the processing results.
… ...
The fourth book, pomodoro technique by Francisco Cirillo.
In pomodoro technique, Francisco Cirillo divides time into three categories: rigorous time, leisure time and choice time.
In strict time, such as at work, he asked us to "concentrate" on our work, and our concentration can be improved through training. "The training of concentration" is a great time management inspiration given to me by Francisco Cirillo in pomodoro technique. If you want to improve your work efficiency and have time and energy to do what you want, you must have the ability to concentrate for a long time.
So what should I do to improve my concentration? Francisco Cirillo proposed to use the "tomato clock" to measure time, and set the time according to his actual situation, and then improve his concentration through periodic training.
In the time when I need to do rigorous work, I can record all the things I need to do, then choose priorities, arrange the order, and then start doing only one thing at a time. Concentration and rest alternate.
He suggested putting a tomato for 25 minutes and then resting for 5 minutes. After eating tomatoes for 4 minutes in a row, you can reward yourself with a big rest, such as a rest 15-30 minutes. A 25-minute tomato time is inseparable, and there is no half or one and a half tomato time. The length of 25 minutes can be adjusted, and it is best to keep it unchanged for two weeks. Most people, after adjustment, will still go back to 25 minutes.
The improvement of concentration is a process, and it is difficult to enter the state of concentration at first. Through the five steps of tomato introduction, recording interruption, estimating time, making tomatoes more effective and making an efficient schedule, the effect of completing a tomato time on improving one's concentration is very remarkable.
I believe that after you have completed 100 tomato hours, you can quickly enter a state of self-concentration and your work efficiency will be greatly improved. I am the real beneficiary myself.
In my ten time management classes, there is a special program that tells the story of pomodoro technique and provides tables and background music to help you train.
The fifth book, born Tracy, eats frogs.
Eating Frogs was written by Born Tracy. I had a special program that was disassembled in detail before, but it was also an enlightening book I explored in the field of time management.
Then friends who don't know the specific content of this theory can go back to the program where I explain this book and watch Eat Frog, which contains a detailed explanation of me and its story, its inspiration, and my introduction and summary.
Whether in the former West Germany, Britain, the United States, Japan or Brazil, managers do exactly the same thing, but their ways of doing these things may be quite different. Japan's economy is leading the world, while India's economy is relatively backward. This difference can be largely explained by the fact that Japanese managers can transplant foreign management concepts into their own cultural soil and make them thrive.
Therefore, a basic challenge for managers in China is to find out what can be the basic components of management from their own traditions, history and culture. Some classic works of the above five western masters have given me a lot of profound influence and enlightenment on time management in the past ten years.
But after all, I am standing on the land of Chinese culture, and the wisdom of the East makes me understand it more thoroughly. I am very grateful to my predecessors for paving the way, which allows me to avoid detours, save time for exploration, improve the efficiency of research, and live the life I want, and I still have spare capacity to help more people live the life they want. Finally, I wish all the online students who listen to and learn my album, and wish them: I am the master of my time and live my dream life as soon as possible.