A coaching client asked me recently how she could “create more time” for her personal and professional interests. While we all have the same twenty-four hours in a day, the way we use that time varies wildly. Here are four great tips for getting more out of the time you have!

1. Clearly define what your priorities are for each day. Writing them out increases the chances exponentially that the most important things will get done.
2. Understand what your compelling purpose is for achieving a specific result. Doing this simple association turns a “nice to have” into a “Non Negotiable” result. If a result or action doesn’t have a compelling purpose attached to it, that result or action cannot be a priority for you.
3. Get proactive. The average American worker spends three to four hours a day on email. At the risk of driving readers away from my own email announcements, limit your email. I answer personal business email in three fifteen-minute time chunks per day. Quitting all-day email must be like quitting heroin, but you must do it to create more time for yourself.
4. Find partners and make them a part of your team. I love my bookkeeper Chris because she updates my financial reports every other month. In the past, I’d spend three to four hours every month updating QuickBooks myself. That took me away from my job as the creativity specialist and visionary for my company. Updating my financial ledger was mindless, painless, and the exact opposite of what I do to serve clients and stay in business!

Try these out for thirty days and see what happens to your business. We all spend far too much time being reactive in life, whether it’s personally or professionally. The key to time management is to take control where you can. This trains your mind and body to be more judicious with your time, and more focused on the activities that create wealth and fulfillment.

Mike Faber is an award-winning sales professional, business leader, and television personality. He’s also a speaker and certified professional coach who has taught thousands of business leaders to communicate passionately and effectively. Mike brings the lessons of a 30-year career in sales, management, and broadcasting to audiences in a style that combines humor, candor, and lessons that can be applied to all walks of life.

Efficiency expert K.J. McCorry, author of Organize Your Work Day In No Time, thinks that the world could be a better place if we’d all cut back on our consumption of paper. With the help of technology, that long-awaited goal might even be manageable.

Today’s employees are inundated with data, finding it more and more difficult to manage this overwhelming amount of data and yet be effective and efficient at their jobs. One of the keys to gaining efficiencies in data management and increasing productivity is to reduce the paper pileup.

Disadvantages of Paper

Although some workers still need, desire, and perhaps even love paper, it comes with some disadvantages:

• It takes up a lot of physical space. In fact, paper costs on average $314 per filing cabinet solely for the real estate it consumes.
• It has limitations, being accessible in only one place, and difficult to move in large quantities.
• It doesn’t offer easy ways to alter or edit its contents, without printing the entire document again.

Frankly, paper doesn’t provide users with advantages other than a physical form.

By contrast, electronic data has much more flexibility:

• It can be filed easily in many folders, instead of just one physical file.
• It can be searched by keyword.
• It can be cut, pasted, and moved easily.
• It allows for better collaboration among employees, who can share, edit, and develop documents together.
• Electronic data also allows employees to work where and when they’re most productive. In this electronic age, workers have the opportunity to work from home or another location that might offer a more suitable and less interruptible environment.

Starting the paperless momentum offers an organization four primary advantages:

• It improves knowledge and data management.
• It increases data efficiencies.
• It improves worker productivity.
• It prepares the organization for the increasing mobile workforce trend.

Improving Knowledge and Data Management

In this new knowledge economy, intellectual property and information are just as important as the manpower that produced them. Longevity of knowledge is achieved through successful organization of documentation. Information that workers produce can get lost with the passage of time and/or people leaving an organization to go to another job. Paper files have buried nuggets of information that tend to be more useful to the person who created the file than to the organization. Instead of sorting through paper documents, most workers prefer to search electronic hard drives for past knowledge and historical data. Improving knowledge and data management within a company means having data readily accessible and available to workers in an instant.

Even in this digital age, paper is still abundant as a primary data source. Much of corporate memory still resides on paper. But a single piece of paper usually can be used by only one person at a time, making it difficult for others to use the information on that paper. The ability to access, edit, and distribute documents at any location and time can increase knowledge and allow information to be used more effectively. Workers already spend too much time looking for missing information stored on paper. Deloitte & Touche reported in the early 1990s that U.S. managers spent an average of three hours a week looking for paper that had been misfiled, mislabeled, or lost. The act of becoming paperless can help with finding and retrieving information instantaneously, ensuring that an organization uses its personnel effectively and makes information available immediately.

Increasing Data Efficiencies

In some cases, paper can be an effective tool and medium, but more and more businesses are finding that reducing paper increases efficiency in the office. Managing paper is very time-consuming, as workers are inundated with more and more paper. Once a printout to hardcopy is made, that paper must be handled and managed—processes that could include sorting, organizing, copying, filing, purging and eventually discarding. These labor costs are often more expensive than the paper itself. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the average organization spends about $20 in labor to file each paper document, approximately $120 in labor searching for each misfiled document, and $220 in re-creation of a document. In addition, when paper is the primary source of data and information, we have to spend additional time and money purging outdated information—at some point, all data becomes obsolete. By contrast, electronic information is easy and cost-effective to file, access, search, and purge.

Improving Worker Productivity

Large quantities of paper on work surfaces create a feeling of being overwhelmed, which tends to paralyze workers, causing procrastination and avoidance of important tasks and activities. Getting rid of the paper clutter helps individual workers to focus better, improving their productivity. Working in a clutter-free workspace leads to deeper concentration.

Reducing the paper pileup also gives workers the option to work in other environments. Most workers are located in the “active-communication” zone every day. This zone is usually at a person’s desk, where the computer and phone are located. In this area, workers check email, manage day-to-day tasks, and conduct central communications via email and phone. It’s a busy environment where employees are accustomed to multitasking and providing immediate response. This location is often in an office-wide “open” setting, conducive to employee interruption. Although this is a necessary and primary zone for most workers, it isn’t the best zone or environment to accomplish certain tasks (such as reading, writing, development, and strategic thinking) that require more thoughtful attention, concentration, and less external distraction. Being paperless gives workers the flexibility to work in other “zones” to increase their effectiveness.

Another way to increase worker productivity is to create more automated processes, replacing paper-intensive procedures. Before going to an automated paperless system, it’s important that you understand completely how paper inhibits or improves a particular work process. Often, a worker’s attachment to paper, as well as lack of trust in equipment such as computers, inhibits processes from becoming more automated. However, inefficient work practices can often be blamed on out-of-date and obsolete paper processes. As they move toward paperless processes, companies often find these processes to be an improvement over traditional paper-based processes, because searches, retrieval, editing, communication, and archiving can be done more efficiently and quickly.

Preparing for the Mobile Workforce Trend

According to the most recent IDC Worldwide Mobile Worker Population Forecast, close to 75% of the U.S. workforce will be mobile by the end of 2011. This increase is due to the fact that organizations have multiple locations, office space is costly, and workers are seeking companies that offer flexible work environments. Such flexible work environments can improve productivity; some studies suggest a 40% increase in productivity for teleworkers. This improvement is due in large part to savings in commute time, fewer interruptions and distractions, and more concentrated work time.

Companies need to prepare for this mobile workforce trend by eliminating the paper barrier and increasing accessibility with electronic data management systems. It’s difficult for a worker to be mobile while lugging filing cabinets from one space to another. The volume of paper is usually the biggest obstacle and challenge for most remote workers. Encouraging a paperless office creates easy access for remote and teleworkers to come and go from the office.

It’s also important from a team collaboration viewpoint. Work teams are constantly formed between various departments and divisions, often located in multiple offices around the U.S. or worldwide. As an office becomes more paperless, managing data within project teams becomes much easier.

Summary

In today’s knowledge-based economy, relying on crucial data and information on paper is an outdated strategy, and can be a tremendous detriment to an organization, regardless of size. It’s important for businesses to understand the use of paper in their own office before undertaking radical paperless-office changes. Even a preliminary investigation of paper use will often show immediate opportunities for reduction. Possible approaches to these paper reductions vary in labor intensity and IT investment; some are simple, some can be larger initiatives. Each business must understand the role of paper in its operations, as well as how reducing paper and using electronic data systems can not only reduce paper but improve efficiencies, reduce personnel time costs, and increase worker effectiveness.

Since 1996, K.J. McCorry has been president of her own consulting and training company specializing in efficiency, productivity, and office organization for individuals, corporations, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. She is the author of Organize Your Work Day In No Time and is currently working on her second book, The Paperless Office (scheduled for publication in 2009).

Time is such an elusive topic and even more difficult to capture, to conform to your bidding. You know the familiar recant: here today and gone tomorrow. This can also be said about your favorite time management strategies, tools, and books conveniently hidden in corners of your office, again having fallen victim to here today and gone tomorrow. In fact, when people are polled about their favorite time management tools and practices, we received a surprising response — many have returned to using the traditional paper and pencil list. Why? The reason: the current time management tools are complex, confusing, and consume too much time to learn! Too much time to learn, but isn’t the science of time management supposed to save us time?

Could it be that we have incorrectly defined the problem all these years and time is not the issue? This is akin to placing a ladder on a wall to climb and finding out after reaching the top of the ladder that we are in the wrong place. Our current time practices attempt to squeeze more things to do into smaller compartments of time with the hope we might feel some satisfaction at reducing our master task list at the end of the day. And, this task list is a monster, gobbling more of our time to manage, prioritize, and control, leaving us feeling out of control and uttering miserably, “I am so far behind.” Out of breath yet?

Time zaps our energy. Just look at how we talk about not having enough and what it does to our capacity to produce and perform, using familiar phrases such as: I am running behind, I can’t catch my breath, and I am exhausted. Time is an unruly animal that evades our capture and drains our most precious internal resource — our energy. What is a time manager to do with such a cagey and wise foe?

Power up! Not by the traditional means of more strategies, tools, and self-help books. Power Up is the “New Science of Stamina.” The Harvard Business Review, October 2007 (”Managing Your Energy…Not Your Time: A New Science of Stamina”), mentioned a new vantage point for managing time but fell short in its recommended solutions, relying upon familiar time practices: prioritizing, cognitive reframe/self talk, nutrition, and exercise. The article hinted at a different solution — energy management — and provided an energy assessment, but missed when it reverted to solutions mediated by mental gymnastics to reclaim your energy; e.g., storytelling, altering mental/behaviors and patterns.

These solutions share a common point of practice, which is intervening through thinking differently. This is a good starting point, but what if you can’t get the motivation, drive, or energy to achieve that “right thinking” or attitude? How do you proceed to get yourself into that space to take action and execute your favorite time-management practice? Some best practices recommended to leap the gap and achieve right thinking and execute right action are: practice, and apply concentration and self-discipline with all the drive, passion, and energy you can muster. And someday — soon we hope — you will be rewarded with the prize: the new skill or mental habit fitting nicely in your life. Why do so many people fail to grasp the prize?

Practice and concentration are often equated with self-discipline and perseverance. Self-discipline — that ugly word that reminds me of the endless push-ups that we had to do in high school gym class or studying for finals in high school. Most of us never made friends with our self-discipline. Our current solutions are to hold our breath, repeat affirmations, and meditate in hopes that we can deliver on the next round of performance demands asked of us. Meanwhile, we’re fearful the house of cards that we have erected could topple at the next requested performance. Forcing yourself to get somewhere never got you anywhere except fatigued and sore mental and physical muscles. Why do you think you can convince yourself to get up and have the juice to execute?

To think differently demands perseverance, self-discipline, and energy. Zap — your energy reserves are depleted in even thinking about the effort to just begin. Anybody tired? The effort to apply mental practices, concentration, and cognitive reframe is not the starting point on the journey to resilient performance. Does a train climbing a hill begin the ascent without fuel to meet the change in elevation? Of course not, nor should we start the ascent of building resilient performance at the level of our thoughts. Just as the train needs fuel, we need energy to propel and accelerate our performance. Why not choose a different starting point? Begin with igniting your energy.

Energy is the elixir in life. Energy knows no boundaries, does not play favorites, or suffer judgments of anyone or anything. It is neutral and unassuming, and yet exquisitely pulsating with life. It is a space without a designated place and easily accessible to you. It is teeming with intuition, creativity, power, spirit, and life force that provide the impetus to align your thoughts to your actions. It is a natural starting point to ignite your energy engine.

This is the exact place you want to be as “right thinking,” “right attitudes,” and “right timing” are a natural consequence of embracing your energy. Effort and force are subsumed by an ease of skill, execution, and engagement in the midst of frenzied meetings and schedules. Your energy supplies the capacity, momentum, and focused direction to translate your ideas to right action with the right people at the preferred moment. This energy is an untapped reservoir of internal resources that exists now within you! An internal resource, your Intuitive Intelligence, is an added competitive edge that allows you to see around corners, penetrate seemingly unsolvable problems, and communicate between the lines.

So what does this all have to do with management of your time? Your energy gives you a new starting place from which to solve your problems and challenges. The idea/action gap is minimized as ease of thought and action lead to the natural consequence of achieving the right result in the preferred moment.

During one of our seminars, a Vice President of a utility firm concluded, “It is really not about managing my time, it is how I manage my energy that affects my people and my schedule.” Leaders are realizing that there is something more to managing their time. It might be, if you peered around the next corner and possibly find that your energy and intuitive intelligence are the reservoirs for exemplary performance in life and business.

Lisa Niederman, MA, is the founder and CEO of Performance Velocity LLC. She has been an executive in the healthcare industry for more than 25 years. Her career grew to provide assessment, consultation, and coaching to top-level executives, management, and project teams in local and national markets.

The “Aging of America” and the growing percentage of our population 65 and older, is a trend of undeniable consequence. While advances in medical knowledge and technology have increased our longevity, our culture’s historical view of old age and elders remains.

Many studies debunk myths including the common belief that genetics are destiny, and physical and mental deterioration are coded into our genes. In fact, the studies say, “the influence of genetics shrinks with the years, while lifestyle choices become increasingly important in shaping the quality of later life.” Among the most important lifestyle changes they recommend are engaging in activities and cultivating new friends. According to a recent study on successful aging, longevity, and vitality by the MacArthur Foundation, only 30 percent is genetic. The other 70 percent is attributable to disease avoidance, exercise of mind and body, and staying involved in life.

Current data demonstrates that older brains actually become more adaptive. One theory is that the brain is much more flexible than previously thought and rewires its functioning in order to compensate for losses in other areas. Brains can continue to adapt, evolve, and even grow new neurons and pathways in people age 70 and beyond. Those who engage in regular cognitive activities (such as attending educational seminars, discussion groups, or learning a new language) have higher levels of brain functioning and lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and other forms of cognitive impairment. Overall, the ability to index and manage information and extract meaning increases with age. Scientists believe this may be the result of more complex brain pathways built up over the years of collecting information.

In a village in the Ecuadorian Andes, where people have exceptionally long life spans, some elders exaggerate their age to gain greater respect. In India, men and women look forward to old age as a time to detach from the obligations of work and family life to seek knowledge of the inner self. The Japanese, who regard old age as a source of prestige, celebrate a national holiday called “Honor the Aged Day.” Native Americans think of their elders as wisdom keepers whose contemplative skills help safeguard tribal survival. Historically, it was well known that older people contributed and enriched their societies. Yet in our society, by contrast, older people are often exiled from the world of economic productivity and cut off from their historical role as elders of the tribe.

Take a new and bold approach. Substitute society’s attitudes, labels, stories and myths about aging with new concepts. Think for yourself and be responsible for the direction of your own life. Successful aging is founded on respect for intelligence, courage, imagination, creativity, desire, humor, energy, and aspirations. We can come to believe that life, activity, power, and vitality do not decrease with the passage of years. Life, with all its color and tone, is new each day. No matter what your age, there are life changes you can make right now that will provide you with a longer, healthier, richer, more vital life.

Rosa Mazone has been an acclaimed speaker, consultant, and educator since 1975. She is powerful and proficient in facilitating individuals and groups as they create insights and commit to self-discovery and empowerment.