Hi, my name is john Dario and my company is the retail management formula. I've built a career on helping managers become more effective in their roles. For over 30 years, I've taught managers how to be better at communicating, at hiring, at training, at coaching at following up, and it every other management behavior you can possibly think of. And through it all, one thing has always been true. None of those skills matter a bit. If a manager doesn't have good control over her or his time, time management is quite possibly the most fundamental, the most important skill a retail leader can possess.

So if you're having trouble keeping your head above water, or you've recently been raised to a new level of responsibility, and you're finding that new level of responsibility, the challenging or You're just looking for that one skill that will give you the edge to go from being an OK manager to being a truly great manager. This is the workshop for you. Get ready to experience 20 minutes that could possibly change your professional life. Don't get me wrong, not everything is going to be solved just by watching this video, there'll be work for you to do to apply the concepts in this video. after the fact, you'll have some work to do to put all of this into place in your real world. But once you get your time management system in place, results will come to you instantly.

So welcome to the time management workshop for retail managers. This is the time management workshop for retail managers. This workshop will help you become a more effective manager by providing concepts and tools that will enable you take better control over your time. How often do you feel like this Too much do not enough time to do it all, and frantic pressure to get it all done or like this running just to put out another fire. Wouldn't it feel great to be in control of your time instead of time controlling you. We all have the same amount of time in a day.

Sure, you can choose to work 10 hours or 12 hours or even 15 hours a day. But there's a limit. There's actually only 24 hours in a day and and more to the point. You can't maintain a 15 hour per day pace at work for very long and still be an engaged leader. But good time management can make all the difference in the world. It can be the difference between achieving consistent and inconsistent results or the difference between having productive and unproductive days.

Or be the difference between great leadership and mediocre leadership. It can be the difference between peaceful days and stressful days at work. And it can be the difference between feeling successful or feeling like a failure when you're at work. If you want to feel better in your role as a manager, start by taking the steps necessary to become better at managing your time. This workshop can absolutely change your life as a manager. Let's start with a little demonstration that will lay out the key concept that will be at the foundation of our workshop.

We're going to do a little time management demonstration. This demonstration is based on the teachings of Stephen Covey, and his best selling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In his book covey teaches us about the big rocks, those things that are most important for us to accomplish in our work day or in our life in general. Typically, this demonstration is done with actual rocks. I decided for this demo to make it a little bit easier on myself and going outside and digging up rocks. I chose to use some items that I Just have sitting around the house.

For those of you who are parents of boys, you'll appreciate the the things I was able to find easily and the things that will be used in this demonstration. The first thing we've got is a clear plastic cup. Of course this isn't completely clear it's got the the the information for my boys favorite baseball team on the front. But this clear plastic cup represents the time we have in our day to get things done. The second item I was able to find is is some plastic off balls. These golf balls represent cubbies, big rocks, these are the things that are most critical for us to achieve or get done in our day or in our life.

The third thing I was able to find was a bowl of Legos. The Legos represent those items that maybe aren't as important as the big rocks but they're they're urgent items and they and they do require our attention at some point. And the final item I have is is a little cup of sand. The sand represents All those other things that come up during the day that require our attention or our polar attention away. So we're going to see how much of this we can fit into our day. We're going to start by taking all those, all those pesky things that that come up during the day and, and we're going to put that into our day and, and then gonna take the Legos, those those other urgent, urgent items that that come up and, and you can see our day starting to get a little full.

Now let's try and put our our seven golf balls, our seven big rocks in here and it's a it's not such a good story we we can't fit all of these really important things into our day. Hmm. Well, let's let's take a little bit of a different approach. Let's clear out our day. And let's start over. I have my empty cup.

I've got my same cup sand. I've got a ball with the same number of Legos. And I've got the same seven golf balls or big rocks. So, let's start a little differently. Let's this time, put our seven big rocks in first. Okay, now they all seem to fit right?

What's next put in our Legos or the, the urgent things that come up that that aren't necessarily as important as our as our big rocks. And then finally, let's put in all this other stuff, all these other items that come to come up during the day and, and, Hmm, well, what do we find? We find that we can actually fit it all into our day. Just by organizing it a little bit differently. We're going to talk about this in more detail in Our next section. So what's the big lesson from that little time management demonstration?

When we allow the smaller, less important things to take top priority, and how we spent time in our day, we couldn't fit in the really important things. But when we prioritize the larger, more important items, we somehow were also able to fit the smaller things into the open spaces around their day. And more importantly, we were able to get all the big, important things done. That's the key and the foundation of our workshop. We must build our time around the most important priorities, and then we must work the other stuff around those priorities. Okay, so the next step is for us to determine just what tasks are the most important priorities for us to build around.

Managers take on three different kinds of tasks. We have individual tasks, administrative tasks, and managerial tasks. individual tasks are those things that can really be done by anybody on the team. Some examples of individual tasks are helping customers, replenishing merchandise, ringing the cash register, and doing vert visual displays, any retail banking or financial services environment, it would include tasks such as opening accounts, taking deposits, and restocking brochures. administrative tasks are those things which must be done to keep the business moving and should be done by managers, at least some of the time, though they don't involve supervising other people. Some examples of administrative tasks include reading email, preparing daily bank deposit, submitting maintenance order requests, checking in shipments, and completing staff work schedules.

In the retail banking world. Some administrative tasks include balancing ATMs and performing audit or compliance functions. Managerial tasks or tasks that involve managing supervising Or directing others. Examples of managerial tasks include delegating tasks or projects following up on employee performance, interviewing and hiring, training and communicating with the team. So, which of these categories of tasks are the big rocks for you as a manager, which are the pebbles in and which are the sand? Well, you should consider three things.

First, only managers can do the managerial items. Second, the team needs somebody to do the manager managerial tasks in order to achieve maximum levels of performance and therefore, managers cannot sacrifice on the managerial items. So, the answer should be clear, managerial items are the big rocks or the golf balls and in our case, administrative tasks are the pebbles or the Legos in In our demonstration, and individual tasks are the sand that fits in around everything else. So now we'll move on to talk about how we actually identify what falls into each category and how we make this happen for ourselves. The key to building our time around the big priorities, meaning around the managerial tasks is for us to plan and schedule. The wisdom of planning was expressed by good old Abe Lincoln when he famously said, Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening my axe there are four steps that we need to take in order to establish our plan and our schedule.

First, we list all the tasks that we have to do and their frequency. Second, we determine the amount of time and the best time to complete each task. Third, we group tasks together into routines wherever possible. And fourth, we turn it all into a schedule. We're going to Talk about these each in detail. Let's start with step one list all tasks you must do and their frequency.

This is about brainstorming. Try to think of everything no matter how small include things you do every day, things you do every week and things you do every month. include things you do randomly, not just the regular, recurring items. There's no need at this point to organize them. Just pull out a blank piece of paper and jot down as many things as you can think of. For each item that you list indicate whether the item is a daily, weekly or a monthly task.

It may be best to do this step with a couple of peers in order to make sure that you capture as many items as possible. The step could take quite a while, give it the time it needs because you want your list to be as complete as possible. The items have populated on the screen here are examples of the type of items that should be recorded. For the sake of moving on with this presentation. I only list a small sample your actual list will have many many more items. Next, you'll take your brainstorm list and sorted into a three by three grid.

I show here a blank piece of paper that's been separated into three columns and three rows. Depending on how large your brainstorm list is, you may be better off using three separate pieces of paper or even nine separate pieces of paper. In any event, the columns are labeled daily, weekly, and monthly. The rows are labeled managerial, administrative, and individual. transfer all items from your brainstorm list into the appropriate box on the three by three grid. This step requires a good assessment of each task to determine which row it properly fits in.

To do this, you'll need to remember the definitions of the three types of tasks. Yes, there may be some gray area. In other words, there may be some items for which it's hard to determine whether they are administrative or individual tasks. That's okay. Just be sure you probably properly identify the managerial tasks, since those are the real big rocks. You'll see here that I have have indeed transferred all 11 items from our sample list into the appropriate box.

The next step in step two in our planning process is to determine the amount of time needed for each task and the best time for each task to be executed. You'll see that I've entered that information into our three by three grid here in red text. If there are specific times such as 8am, list those times if not use general statements such as early morning. Once you have time estimates and the best times to execute, determine for each task, you're ready to move on to Step three. Step three is to group the tasks together into routines wherever possible. There's a couple of good reasons to do this.

First, it will be easier to schedule one routine that includes several tasks than it will be to schedule those individual tasks separately. Second, will also be easier to execute one routine because over time the routine will become a habit. One habit is easier to remember than a series of separate tasks. Here's an example of how some of our listed items could be turned into routines. First in the purple text, I have taken the managerial and administrative tasks that are best performed in the early morning, and I've turned them into a single am management routine. Now instead of the four separate tasks we originally had listed, we have 1am routine that has four items and will be completed every morning.

This can easily be turned into a checklist that will remind us of the exact things we need to do every morning as part of our am management routine. I've done the same thing for weekly sales coaching. This has also become a routine which captures multiple tasks. So in this quick example, I've reduced seven separate tasks down into two routines. The fourth step is to turn our routines and our remaining tasks into an actual schedule. In line with the key lesson from our big rocks demonstration, we build in our managerial tasks and routines first.

So you see here that I've plugged into the schedule are a management routine. The weekly sales coaching routine and the all important responsibility of manager on duty, as well as the leftover managerial task of writing the monthly staff schedule. By setting up the schedule in this way of effectively blocked off the periods from 8am to 9am, and from 11am to 1pm every day, if we follow the schedule, it will prevent us from getting sidetracked during those times with some other task that is less important than our managerial function. Note that there will likely be days where there are multiple managers working and managerial routines can be split between the managers. For example, one manager might take the aim management routine, while another takes the manager on duty responsibility. In other words, the system works best when all managers are using it and the schedules are integrated.

Next, you must layer in other less important tasks. In this case, I've entered time into the schedule for the individual task of covering staff breaks to provide service to customers. This is a consideration for smaller locations, where the staffing level requires managers to serve in that role at some point during most days. The difference is that by using our proactive time management system, the managers time and an individual contributor role is built around the managers, managerial functions, ensuring that the managerial functions don't fall through the cracks. The final piece of our schedule is to build in firefighting time. The red blocks of time are kept free of other expectations so that they can serve as dedicated time to deal with the unexpected things that come up each day.

Things that might come up include special request from headquarters. One off problems that need to be resolved, are unique staff issues that must be handled. Okay, I know what you're thinking you're thinking, you don't know how it works around here. things pop up all the time and I can't control when they when they all pop up. Of course you can't the firefighting time is not meant to be a prediction of when the fires will pop up. So how do you use the fire fighting time?

First, try to stick to your schedule. If you can delegate the handling of a fire that has popped up too, so for example, if the pop up involves a special customer request, ask another member of the team to handle it. That way you can stay on your schedule. Another option is to postpone handling of the item that has popped up. If it's a phone call with a non emergency request for research on some topic, write it down and handle it during your scheduled firefighting time. Again, that allows you to stay on schedule.

If you have no choice and must handle the pop up item immediately, and by yourself then do so but use the firefighting time that you blocked off for later in the day to adjust your schedule for the day. For example, move the managerial routine that you're in the middle of to the firefighting block of time. It may not be perfect in terms of timing, but at least your managerial responsibilities won't fall completely overboard. By having your day structured with a schedule like the one we've discussed. You'll Being greater control of your time. No, you still won't be able to predict everything that you'll need to do every minute.

And you won't be able to stick to the schedule 100% of the time, maybe not even 80% of the time. But when you do need to stray from the schedule, you'll always be keenly aware of what you missed when your plans got changed. And that will allow you to more easily get back to whatever it is that you did, miss. So that brings us to the end of our time management workshop. It will take practice and discipline to make this work. So don't expect it to be effortless, but the effort will be worth it.

I want to leave you with three final bits of wisdom that will summarize what we covered in this workshop. First, your success as a manager starts with how you manage your time. No matter how strong a leader you are, how good a coach you are, how good of a team you have, you and your team will never reach your full potential if you don't do a good job of managing your time. Second, you must always start by building your schedule around the managerial responsibilities. Your team can't manage itself. Otherwise there would be No need for you and your position.

The managerial tasks that you perform are vital to the team's success. And as our big rocks demonstration showed, you risk not fitting in the managerial tasks if you allow your schedule to be prioritized with the smaller, less important individual tasks. And finally, your plan must always be a living document that you constantly revisit and adapt as needed. Conditions are constantly changing, new expectations emerge and new tasks become necessary. your schedule must reflect the reality of today, not yesterday. So keep the list of your tasks fresh and keep updating your schedule is things change.

I'm certain that you'll find more happiness and greater success when you use the concepts in this workshop to take control over your time. For more retail management lessons, check out my books available on Amazon Kindle, or audible. Book number one, the retail management formula a navigational guide to consistently Retail Management or my second book, The retail leadership profile, a guide to hiring, developing and becoming top retail talent. Visit the retail management formula.com on line are on Facebook