The Four Corners Offense of Time Management
Before the shot clock was modified and installed in the game of basketball, teams would employ a four corner offense to significantly slow down the game. The offense was developed and popularized by veteran 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 become effective in controlling your choices, which ultimately allows you to make better decisions, you must become an “effective worker.” To become an “effective worker,” he must understand and deploy the concept of slowing down to speed up. Slowing down to speed up allows you to do the right things, for the right reasons, at the right time. To summarize, an “effective worker” is a result worker versus an activity worker. This slow-down-to-speed-up strategy is the opposite of what most people think of when they think of time management. For most, time management translates into better time management so that one can get more done in the time available.
The challenge with 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 commodity. 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 run out, you can’t replace them or get them back. The solution to trying to manage an irreplaceable asset like time is to become effective. Becoming effective means you know how to slow down the clock to make better decisions in the moment. The result, like in basketball, is that you will only take one shot with the highest probability of scoring. By making a better choice 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 comes when you apply them to toolboxes like Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, or any CRM software program in an effort to create organizational coherence around to planning and organization. Let’s take a top-down look at what the four corners offense of time management includes. 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 called Delete/Dump.
– Do it now
– Decide When (Activate date)
– Delegate it
– Delete Dump it
The remainder of this article will review how to apply a tactic within the four corners strategy that has the most value for individuals and teams. The four corners tactic with the highest value is titled Decide When. To understand the Decide When tactic in the four corners strategy, one has to think in terms of a 90 degree drawing of two lines on a sheet of paper.
On the vertical axis are the 50 things to do or what I call doable details. Each possible detail represents an X on the vertical axis line. On the line of the horizontal axis seven names of the week are written from Sunday to Saturday. Now instead of creating a vertical list of what to do on the vertical axis line, you will slow down at choice time and ask yourself these questions: what is this doable detail and when do I do it and where do I keep it until I need. For example, at election time on Friday morning, I realize it’s a memo I need to respond to and write to Steve on Tuesday. Therefore, I am moving this doable 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 might get the feeling that simply using one of the four corner tactics, like deciding when, will allow you to make better decisions in the moment, by slowing down to speed up. 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 task list based on importance, highest values, and urgency is applied. Look for more four corners tactics best practices in future articles.
