Boosting Productivity – Mark Ellwood & The TimeCorder

Mark Ellwood

[00:00:00] Mark Ellwood: That’s right. That’s what I do, and I present it really simply. Here’s a pie chart, here’s a bar chart. I’ve got detailed exhibits that go on for pages and pages, but they’re all summarized in those pictorial, uh, diagrams. And, and if you can do that with a picture or a pie chart or something that simplifies it for people.

[00:00:54] Ed Watters: Today, I’m speaking with Mark Ellwood. Mark is a [00:01:00] productivity consultant. His most recent book, The Poetic Path to Getting More Done and he’s got a website, getmoredone.com. Mark, could you please introduce yourself? Let people know just a little more about you, please.

[00:01:16] Mark Ellwood: Well, thanks, uh, for being here, Ed. Uh, I’m a productivity consultant, as you said. A little while back, I invented a small electronic device called Time Quarter. For those who are watching, it looks like this and it allows you to track how you spend your time working on different activities. So I lend that out to employees, they really enjoy using these to track their own time. I analyze the results and show organizations how their employees can get an extra hour per day to spend on their top priority activities.

[00:01:48] Ed Watters: Well, we all need a new device that gives us an hour a day more for each of us. That would be excellent, Mark. Uh, what, what [00:02:00] did you start doing this for, tracking time? What got you into that?

[00:02:09] Mark Ellwood: Well, you know, there’s a lot of specialists and experts out there who said, uh, You know, my life was really in shambles, I was struggling, I didn’t know anything. And that was the case for me. I was eleven years old. So, um, back when I was eleven, I started delivering newspapers. And maybe lots of your audience doesn’t know a bunch about that business, but we would go to a depot and, uh, seven or eight of us, and all the papers would get delivered there. And then we’d gather them up and then take them in our bags and deliver them to people’s houses or apartments. Well, on the weekend, the newspaper always came with a colored magazine insert. They were published separately and you had to put the inserts inside the newspapers to deliver them together. And so I watched these other [00:03:00] guys and then kind of struggle and put this piece here and open that up there. And I thought, This is classic time and motion stuff.

Well, not that I knew that term at the time, um, but I thought, How could I do this faster? So organizing the work, the magazines and the paper and the completed pile, was important to me to figure out how I could do that as fast as, as possible. Well, I learned lots of other things as a newspaper boy as well. So for instance, uh, lugging a lot around those big heavy bags, I thought, Let’s invest in technology. So I bought a wagon and it was much easier to take the papers around and deliver them on a wagon than by hand. You also get into what’s called operations research, how you organize tasks and how things happen. So imagine this, you’re dragging the wagon up one side of the street, but you gotta deliver papers to the other side of the street. So do you take one with you and then come back? Or do you take two or three? And so that was a fascinating [00:04:00] exercise for me to figure out what’s the fastest way with, I guess the shortest number of steps.

Another thing you could do is you could fold the papers up. You’ve seen kids in movies, tossing papers at people’s houses from bikes. So you can fold the papers up, it takes three seconds or four seconds, and then walk and throw the paper. Or there is a way to throw a newspaper underhand with the paper not folded and you can kind of toss it up and hopefully it would slide into somebody’s door. So, okay, so you’ve gotta make some calculations there. Do I fold the papers? Or just, do I save steps? Or do I throw them by hand? So all that was thinking about productivity. And then on my last paper route, I had about 130 customers and uh, I had to go and collect every week from them. You gotta knock on someone’s door on Tuesday night. Hi, it’s Mark from the paper, I’m collecting. And it occurred to me that was taking a lot of time. So I divided the root in [00:05:00] half, I went to half of the people on weeks one and three and half of them on weeks two and four. And instead of collecting for one week, I collected for two weeks at a time. And I could manage my cash flow and that worked fine.

So that was kind of batching tasks together. So all these different approaches, uh, got me thinking about productivity. There was one other, some of the people paid at the office, so to speak. So, um, everyone does that today, right? You pay electronically. Um, and I suppose in retrospect, I might’ve encouraged more customers to pay directly at the office. I wouldn’t have had to knock on their door. But by knocking on doors, you got better tips. So there’s a bit of a trade off there. Um, and so all these things were getting me to think about productivity. I mean, I didn’t, I didn’t consider myself an expert at the time. I was just trying to figure out how to deliver the papers quickly.

And so maybe that’s my origin story. Many years later, I’ll just continue, uh, briefly, uh, in [00:06:00] the corporate life, I was in a meeting and everybody was late. And, uh, I thought, Oh man, you know, we’re spending a lot of time here waiting for everybody to show up. Boy, if you add up your time, and his, and hers, and mine, and I just had this kind of aha moment that you could measure that and have a little device and a way you can measure meeting time, and waiting, and paperwork, and so on. So the aha went off of about developing the Time Quarter, which is kind of like a chess clock in reverse. You’ve got two clocks that tick down the time. Instead you’re ticking up the time, you’re adding it up. and instead of two, you’ve got twenty-five, or thirty, or whatever. So that was the aha moment for the Time Quarter device, uh, to continue my journey of trying to be more productive with the world.

[00:06:47] Ed Watters: Yeah. It, it’s interesting. I really like the idea of this Time Quarter device that you put together. Uh, the big question is, in, in today’s world, we [00:07:00] use a phone for everything and everyone wants to know why it’s not an app instead of the coder device that you hand out.

[00:07:12] Mark Ellwood: Yep. Well, I can tell you, I, I launched the device way before any of these smartphones or apps. I mean, originally 1989 with the previous version, and it turned out to be the world’s most popular product that everybody thought somebody else should buy. So I, I originally targeted for lawyers. And I went to them, they said, Eh, you know, not quite right for us. Maybe you should talk to accountants ’cause that’s gonna really work for their business. So we did a test, in fact, it was on national TV and people were trying the device and it turned out, they said, You know, independent consultants are really gonna like this. So I went to the independent consultants and they said,

Have you talked to the lawyers yet? So it was a big circle. So I pivoted and instead of, uh, trying to sell the [00:08:00] device, I lent it out and used it as a consulting tool. It’s much more profitable that way. But you asked about the app. Well, we did a project for the Ontario government here in Canada a while back. I teamed up with, um, PricewaterhouseCoopers and we would not have got anywhere close to winning that contract had we had a downloadable app. These are union people and they were really concerned about the anonymity of the studies, which we promise. And, um, asking them to take your personal phone and download Mark Ellwood’s app thing on it where he’s got access to your phone and all your data, that just wouldn’t have gone over.

So they really liked the idea that it was a separate device. In fact, the funniest story I tell is when we first presented to, it to them. Uh, we had already won the contract, PricewaterhouseCoopers and myself, but we presented to, to them and I just, you know, had to show them how it worked. And the union person said, You know, that little list of activities you’ve got there? [00:09:00] Could you make the font a little bit bigger? And I thought, Okay, fine. We’re good with that. So, uh, turns out that worked really well. Um, there’s other reasons besides privacy. Um, the Time Quarter’s always on, your phone is not always on. It’s giving you constant feedback, the batteries will last 200 hours.

Your phone has to get charged in seven or eight hours, and so you, you’ve gotta take it away and charge it and so on. Our device is always constantly giving you feedback, it’s measuring the stuff you’re doing on your phone, um, and it’s ergonomically simple. On your phone, you’d have to pull up the app and scroll through, and this and that, whatever. The Time Quarter device is just slightly less complicated to use than a doorbell. So, um, doorbell, you never, did, did it ring or not? But the Time Quarter gives you audio tactile and visual feedback. You can see that it’s on, that it’s ticking away. People really like it, and [00:10:00] mostly because we promise anonymity. And so when you get people involved, when you get them to help create this list of activities, when you tell them you’re gonna measure all this non-value added stuff that’s slowing them down, then they say, Oh, okay, good.

And promise anonymity. So I don’t use any individual’s names in any of our reports. In some of our recent studies, I didn’t even know who the people were at all. I just had to use code numbers. So, um, that’s what encourages them to get keen. And, you know, I work part-time as a, as a ski instructor on the weekends and they’re pushing hard for us to fill out our employee satisfaction surveys and they’re getting up to maybe 70 or 80%. And that’s a stretch ’cause they’re really pushing hard. This, we get a participation rate with the Time Quarter device of 94%. People really like using it ’cause it gives them feedback and they can see what’s going on. So that’s kind of unheard of for, [00:11:00] uh, you know, employee surveys. And so when you give them, you know, one of these to use, they like it, it’s fun, it’s simple, and that’s, that’s how it works.

[00:11:10] Ed Watters: So what type of activities do employers like to track to make sure their time is managed properly?

[00:11:22] Mark Ellwood: I think I’ve measured more than just about any, uh, any other person on the planet. Uh, I have a database of 3000 activities. Now some of them are kind of similar to each other, Uh, calling about a mortgage renewal, uh, calling about, uh, you know, uh, loan renewal, and so on. Any of those are sort of similar. Um, but the activities really are two major, you know, categories. One, what are the things you need to be doing in your job? What are your most important priorities? And two, what is everything else? Uh, the administrative tasks, uh, personal time, you know, dealing with complaints, whatever. [00:12:00] Uh, so we’re trying to see, how do we get people to focus on what’s important and what are those things. Some people call them time wasters, I don’t. Uh, they’re just necessary parts of the job, but they’re the less, uh, uh, important or the non-value added tasks.

[00:12:18] Ed Watters: Interesting. So how did the app come, err, it’s not an app. See, here I am modernizing you, Mark. How, how does this device get put together? Uh, it, it had to be a process to come up with this. Did you have a team of engineers help you with this? Or how did that come about?

[00:12:43] Mark Ellwood: Kind of, yes. I mean, I sometimes call myself an inventor, but you know, inventors tend to be a little outside of the norm, but I guess I invented it. So first, you know, I had this idea, I mean, again, it’s sort of chess clock in reverse. [00:13:00] Uh, and so, so that was sort of already an idea that was out there. Uh, but then I had to figure, okay, well how do I build this thing? So I found an engineer, an old buddy of mine who built the two prototypes for me, and then we had another engineer further modify those. I had an industrial designer, those are people who figure out, you know, what is this container look like? How does everything fit together? Had a graphic designer design, you know, what the graphics look like. But there’s also the user interface,

that was me. You know, I’d sit around with a pad at night thinking, Okay, you push this button, and then that happens. So it’s real simple, you just push one button and it begins tracking your time. But we needed a couple of other buttons if you needed to make a manual adjustment. Okay, what would this series of button pushes for that look like? Um, what if you wanted to scroll through and look at how you’re spending your time on all these different activities? So there are only, well, eight other sort of [00:14:00] function buttons, but I wanted to keep that to a, a minimum. It occurred to me, you know, I used to go to trade shows and watching people on computers and say, Look at our computer program, or an app, or whatever. And they go, Well, you simply push this and just add that.

And the words simply and just, were always worrisome to me. Because the person who developed this thing, you know, they, they eat, drink, and sleep with the thing and they know it inside out and they really know how to work it well. Whereas I thought, No, people haven’t used this device. You’ve gotta make it dead simple for them.

Turn it on, push one button and it’s tracking your time. Now there’s a list of activities that, that’s corresponding to those, uh, letters of the alphabet, so we give that to people as well. So I used to say, You could learn to use it in about five seconds. And then there’s doing some of the manual adjustments, it takes a little longer. But you’ve gotta make it simple. And so, you know, you look at Amazon and they’ve tried to, you know, get rid of all those sort of [00:15:00] impediments, they’ve done that well. But there’s a lot of products and services out there where you have to press a whole bunch of buttons and things.

Um, and I’ve seen people complaining about that recently with, uh, Bill Maher on his late night show, talked about a valet app. So he’s parking his car at a restaurant and he wants to go retrieve his car. Well, you gotta download the app, and create a password and an account number, and this and that. He goes, I just wanna get my car back. And we’ve seen that with many other types of apps that complicate things. Uh, sure you’re gathering data, sure it’s in a secure space and you can analyze that data, but it’s gotta be kept simple. And so with the Time Quarter device, I think we’ve got it, um, by experimenting a little bit, by doing some of those thought experiments. We kept the,

we kept it simple to use. And, and giving instant feedback and uncomplicated. When I, early on, when I tried to sell it to lawyers and that didn’t work, they said, Well, we need it to do this and we need it to do that. And I thought, If [00:16:00] you add up all of those features that they wanted, it’s gonna get way too complicated. Think about the stuff you use, you know, uh, Microsoft Office, there’s lots and lots of functions on there people don’t know how to use. And I suppose for the power users, that’s great, but you’ve gotta keep it simple. And Apple did that with their products by keeping the user interface simple.

[00:16:23] Ed Watters: Yeah, I like that a lot. So what’s the acceptance rate from the employees when they take on this, uh, study from the employer? What, how do they feel about it?

[00:16:38] Mark Ellwood: Yep. Well, that’s the number I mentioned early, 94%. So if we give out a hundred devices, yeah, 94 will come back with high quality detailed data. The other six, maybe somebody just didn’t start for some reason ’cause they were about to leave or quit, or maternity leave, or something. Um, sometimes in that six, uh, [00:17:00] you can make manual adjustments and people just make way too many manual adjustments or they do them incorrectly. And so I’ve got some algorithms to show me, uh, maybe I shouldn’t keep that data and just put it aside. But 94% is pretty amazing and people are tracking hundreds of activities over the course of two weeks when we normally do the studies. So, yeah, every time they come back, I’m surprised at how detailed people were with, with their, uh, tracking.

[00:17:27] Ed Watters: Some of the information that you’ve accumulated over the years is pretty interesting. The fact that women are better at time management than men is one of those facts. How did you come up with that fact and how much data did it take to compile to ultimately decide this is factual?

[00:17:59] Mark Ellwood: So I go [00:18:00] to, uh, conferences every year or so, the International Association of Time Use Research. These are a lot of academics and people working for government, uh, operations, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, uh, among others. And they do a lot of studies of, uh, time use. And so what we found out is, across a large number of typically Western countries, um, at home, uh, and domestically, women are more responsible for domestic chores than men. So that’s childcare, cooking, cleaning, uh, shopping, and a couple of others. And so I thought, Well, what does it look like in the workplace? And so those time studies don’t tend to get that granular as I do in the workplace. So I thought, Well, let’s see, uh, if there’s differences. So I have a database, ’cause I’ve been gathering all this data for, well, thirty-five years.

And I thought, Okay, uh, it’s 500,000 hours of data [00:19:00] from, you know, dozens and dozens of corporations and thousands of individuals who’ve done this. So all the way along, I knew my database was gonna be of some value. So I have a lot of different analysis that I’m able to look at. So I’m working for this client, but I can compare the results to that claim. So looking across the whole database, I first decided, well, let’s split it in two. Let’s have a men database and a women one. So I did that by names, Susan is a woman, Uh, you know, Samuel is a man. And I had to go through all the names and kind of sort them ’cause I had people’s names, we don’t give them back to the clients. Uh, but nonetheless, I had them. Where I didn’t have names, I just put that data aside. So I started to look at, what are the differences? And I concluded, as you mentioned, that women are better at managing their time than men. There were four major findings and we could go through those if you like, uh, one at a time to, to explain how I came up with that conclusion.

[00:19:59] Ed Watters: Sure [00:20:00] we’d love to hear that, Mark.

[00:20:02] Mark Ellwood: Well, let’s start, start with the first one. Um, first I discovered, uh, that women worked fewer hours per week than men. Now these are knowledge workers, they’re people like sales reps, and managers, and customer service reps, and construction supervisors and so on. Uh, but they’re largely working in offices, it’s not people on the retail. I’ve done a few retail studies, uh, or they’re not manufacturing jobs. Um, and, uh, I include personal time. Because if you go to the office, while you’re there at the office and whether you eat in the food court or the cafeteria, or at your desk, you know, you’re, you’re still there.

And similarly, for people working from home, we count personal time as well. So if you add all that up, it’s about forty-six hours per week. Uh, so personal plus, personal is only about three hours per week. So women are at forty-five hours, men are at forty-eight hours, [00:21:00] and that’s the total number of hours. And you say, Well, why is that? Well, guess who’s gotta get home to pick people up, uh, children up from daycare, and cook dinner, and so on. So that was the first of the findings. Um, the second one is a little more complex. Um, if you read time management books, they always talk about working on your most important activities. They don’t really define what those are.

Um, Stephen Covey talked about his, um, important, uh, urgent matrix, which is called the Eisenhower Matrix. It wasn’t really President Eisenhower, he was in fact, uh, quoting a university dean who had come up with that urgent important idea. And then Eisenhower continued it and Covey popularized it. So you wanna work on so-called quadrant two. Those are your, uh, important but not urgent activities compared to urgent. But important and so on, so important but not urgent. And so again, [00:22:00] Covey didn’t really define those. I thought, Well, maybe I can. Turns out before we do our time studies, we ask people, What are the most important things you need to do in your job?

I thought, Ah, that’s it. Okay, I’ll use that. So if you ask sales reps, they’ll tell you processing orders, and taking care of customers, and dealing with complaints. But the number one item is prospecting for new business. I thought, Okay. That’s the most important activity, not urgent, for sales reps. So I looked at about a dozen different jobs and mapped all those for those different jobs. And then thought, Okay. Well, how are they spending their time? If prospecting is what you’re saying you need to do as a sales rep or managing and coaching employees is what you say you should do as a manager, how is your time compared to that? So across the whole database, I looked at that. And found out, this is key, the average is only 20%. So for [00:23:00] top priority activities, people are only spending 20% of their time. That sounds like that, that Pareto number, 20/80 rule. It’s not, that’s a little bit different. It’s just coincidental that the number’s the same. Turns out for women, it’s 22% and men are only at 18%. So women are working fewer hours and within those hours they’re spending a higher percentage of their time on their top priority activities. And there you go.

[00:23:31] Ed Watters: That’s very interesting, Mark. So all of this data sifting is very complicated for so many people, they don’t even like to look at data. So when you’re compiling these reports for people, you’re the one that actually is sifting through and the client doesn’t necessarily have to get their hands dirty with all of the complicated data sets.[00:24:00]

[00:24:00] Mark Ellwood: That’s right, that’s what I do. And I present it really simply, here’s a pie chart, here’s a bar chart. I’ve got detailed exhibits that go on for pages and pages, but they’re all summarized in those pictorial, uh, diagrams. And, and if you can do that with a picture, or a pie chart, or something, that simplifies it for people. And so that’s my job is to use my different tools to analyze that. I’ve got three or four different analytical tools to, to look at all that data. Uh, you gotta keep it simple for people. I guess also, I don’t know where or when, but I got this idea that science is important, that data is important. And so if you look at a lot of popular speakers or trainers,

you know, they talk about, in my area, time management. But it could be leadership and communication skills, and they kind of say things that make some sense. Uh, and maybe that’s based on personal experience, or observations, or whatever. But if you can root it in real data, that to me [00:25:00] is the better way to go. Because, uh, it, there’s just a higher credibility layer there. It, it’s science rather than stuff that I made up. And again, you go on LinkedIn for instance, you hear people talking about all kinds of ideas. I think it has, not really true in terms of a, a, a, based on data. So that’s, that’s the way I like to approach the world.

[00:25:24] Ed Watters: So, so who should be using this type of technology to perfect their organizations?

[00:25:38] Mark Ellwood: Well, I, I say anyone should. Um, I’ve come to a kind of a new conclusion that kinda, uh, pulls the rug out of a lot of what I’ve been saying. But organizations have kind of gotten a free ride from their employees, certainly knowledge workers. Hourly paid workers, when someone works extra, you pay them extra. [00:26:00] Either just an extra hour or two or maybe

time and a half for overtime. So there’s a real cost there. But when you look at knowledge workers, your managers for instance, and maybe they’re sort of contracted to, for like forty-two hours per week, is sort of typical. Uh, and that includes lunch and whatnot. So, okay, you, we want you there from nine to five. And if you show up at noon, well, you’re gonna get a talking to. But come in between nine to five or the equivalent, eight to four. But if they stay longer, nobody says anything. They stay longer because they want to get promoted, because they enjoy the work, some people don’t wanna go home. Uh, and, and they really, you know, embrace that and that’s terrific. But corporations are getting a free ride from that. So, as I mentioned, the average is not forty hours per week,

it’s forty-six hours. And people are working longer than that. Managers, for instance, tend to be around forty-nine hours. So corporations are getting free labor from those, um, from, from those [00:27:00] knowledge workers. The problem is that free labor ends up turning into resentment, or bad morale, or stress, uh, or, you know, problems at home ’cause they’re not getting home on time. So there’s a huge cost to that in terms of turnover, and retention, and so on. But for the most part, corporations are saying, Well, this is great. Having said that, for those who realize that productivity is important, this is where this kicks in. So, all right, your people are working forty, or forty-five, or fifty hours per week, but they’re spending twenty hours on that non-value added work.

Wouldn’t you wanna reduce that so that your knowledge workers can spend their highest amount of time, whether it’s overtime or not, on their highest priority activities. So this is a diagnostic tool. Now it’s interesting, during Covid there were all kinds of employee monitoring, uh, software and apps and so on that came out and people didn’t like [00:28:00] that. Um, so they were tracking keystrokes or they were tracking websites you visited. You know, if somebody’s working on Word, are they writing a note to their friend, or their wedding invitation, or a thank you note? Or are they doing a report, uh, or doing something important that you want them to do? So, um, just tracking the type of program they’re using, uh, doesn’t give you all that many indications. Now for websites, okay,

if you go to an educational website, you’re using that. Whereas it’s of a shopping site, well, clearly that’s not what you’re supposed to be doing. But nonetheless, um, the employees found these systems kind of, uh, they were, they were intrusive, and they didn’t know what was going on, and it was kind of making employees wrong for, you know, working at home. I don’t care about that stuff. There will be some personal time and we measure that just to keep people in the rhythm of using the device. But if they’re shopping, or [00:29:00] calling their daycare, it really doesn’t matter to me ’cause it’s how much time you’re spending on those important activities. That’s what’s, counts the most. And we don’t use employee names. So, um, this whole world of measurement got kind of a bad rap with, uh, those covid measuring tools. And so I’m not in that world at all. I’m just doing quick two week studies that diagnose where that non-value added time is going. So, uh, lots of corporations could benefit from it, individuals could as well. The challenge is getting people over that hump of wanting to actually analyze where they are.

[00:29:37] Ed Watters: Yeah. And, and you know, even though a lot of people feel that’s intimidating, it can actually save you a lot of time and time is money. And money can do a lot of things. So it’s interesting what you’ve done, Mark. So your book, The Poetic [00:30:00] Path to Getting More Done, it’s poems, uh, poetry? Could you tell us about this?

[00:30:07] Mark Ellwood: Yes, I will. a while back I was, I was, uh, I, you know, tweets were quite short and I realized I could do a rhyming couplet in a tweet when the, the short of 140 characters existed. So, uh, I did some rhyming tweets and I thought, Well, let’s do a book about this cause I’ve written poetry for ages. Um, I haven’t sold many copies, I don’t know if Amazon even has it. But nonetheless, I, I quote those at, uh, workshops and I give out copies and so on. Because if you’re gonna read up, if you’re gonna learn about goal setting, uh, why not do it with, uh, a little bit of a, a poem rather than, uh, just somebody lecturing at you. So, uh, it’s, it’s not grabbed, uh, all over the world, but, uh, nonetheless, I’m proud of those poems. You mentioned, um, measuring a moment ago. And it seems to me that there are three areas of our lives where [00:31:00] there’s kind of an embarrassment factor that kicks in. And so one of them is finances. You mentioned time’s money, finances, right?

And you get people saying, Oh, I don’t know. I don’t wanna know where I spend all my money, uh, my credit card’s over and I’m paying this and that. And, and there’s this sort of embarrassment about finances. We know where we need to be, uh, but we’re not taking those steps to getting there. The second one is body image. Oh, I ate a whole, you know, bucket of ice cream last night. I’m overweight, or I’m not in shape, or whatever. And people know what they want to do to have a healthy life, but they’re not always taking those steps. You know, in both of those cases, measuring makes sense. For the finances, measure how you spend your money last week and you’re gonna learn some things about

how much you spend on coffee, for instance, every day. Um, and, and for body image, whether it’s weight, or, uh, how fast you can run half a marathon, or how many pushups you can [00:32:00] do, or it doesn’t matter, uh, but, but getting some measurements can help us diagnose where we wanna be. It can measure your heart rate, it can measure your oxygen intake. And so finally the third one is this one, time management. Oh, I waste my time. Oh, don’t tell me. I know I waste my time. Yeah, but you said you wanna spend more time with your family. You said you wanted to get a promotion, so why not measure what’s going on? So in each of those three areas, uh, and I’m not in the, in the weight loss business, but nonetheless, you know,

get some data, measure your own time. And whether you use, uh, Time Quarter or just a piece of paper, doesn’t matter. But get some data so you can say, Oh, that’s what’s going on. Here’s where I wanna be and here’s where I am and I can make the adjustments to get there. So, um, I, you know, I wish more people were doing this. Many of the time management books encourage you to do a, a diary study or write down your time use. But what they don’t do is they don’t talk about [00:33:00] where time is spent. I do, uh, because I’ve got that data and I can see where people need to be going and what their ideal profiles look like.

[00:33:09] Ed Watters: This is ultimately personal accountability. And making sure that you use your time properly and efficiently can actually make you feel so much better about yourself overall. So I, I really enjoy, you know, learning about these things. And once we start implementing time management and tools into our life to simplify, it, it does make a difference. Mark, it’s, it’s always great to talk about this stuff. Is there anything that we’ve missed that you think we should highlight today?

[00:33:51] Mark Ellwood: Well, uh, we haven’t talked about how to do better and I’ll give people one terrific tip. Uh, everyone knows that you should [00:34:00] be writing a daily to-do list. And if you don’t, try it. Write on a post-it note, or back of an envelope, or use an app, or whatever you wanna do, but create a to-do list. Here’s how I differ, uh, from others in that, I tell people, Start with a blank slate. You’ve got nothing to do today, no emails, no meetings, nothing. Or at least pretend as if you didn’t. And ask yourself, If I had nothing to do today, what would I do to affect my results a month from now? I’ll repeat that. If I had nothing to do today, what would I do to affect my results a month from now?

Well, that salespeople would make some sales calls, the manager would do some performance reviews, or introduce that, uh, get that new, uh, project moving. Uh, the engineer would be doing some design work and so on. Okay, those are things that affect your long-term goals and so those are your highest priority activities. And you should write down the things you can actually complete today. For a [00:35:00] manager who wants to hire a new employee, you can’t do all that in one day. But you can, you know, review the, the job description, or you can put it up on a website, or you can do some interviews. So, what can I complete today? And then at the end of the day, you can check those off and say, Yep,

got those done. So that, those are your highest priority activities, the things that affect your results a month from now. Put those first on your to-do list and then fill in all the other stuff. And make time for the priorities first. Maybe that’s early in the morning, maybe a block off time during the day between eleven and one o’clock, or something like that. Those are gonna be 20% of your time, we know that. So you’ve gotta make sure that that time is available to do those high priority tasks and let the other stuff fill in later. So start with those first. That’s my tip for how to organize yourself and do a to-do list when you’re overwhelmed by all these tasks that come your way.

[00:35:58] Ed Watters: Mark, you, you’ve [00:36:00] got people excited. You’re loaded with information. So could you tell people how to get ahold of you and how they can work with you?

[00:36:13] Mark Ellwood: As I said, uh, or you said, the simplest way is through my website, getmoredone.com. So it’s mark@getmoredone.com. Just remember, get more done. There’s a, there’s a, you know, contact page there. And, uh, lately I’ve been saying, If somebody wanted just a consultation, I’m not a coach as such, but if somebody wanted a quick coaching session, I’ll do that pro bono, uh, just to help people out. And then if you think you wanna use the Time Quarter device, I’m actually doing, sponsoring a study of female women executives who are managing large departments and so on. And they don’t pay for that because I wanna present that data at an upcoming conference.

So I’m looking for senior female executives. Someone else just wants a phone call, happy to share some tips with you in a quick [00:37:00] coaching session without turning on the meter and the, and the dollar sign and not trying to upsell you on anything else. I’m just passionate about doing this stuff and wanna help people, uh, where I can. And if somebody wants to hire me after that, then they can.

[00:37:14] Ed Watters: You can see that you’re passionate about what you do, Mark. And that’s always someone that you should be thrilled to get ahold of and work with. So I appreciate what you do and I surely appreciate you sharing it here today with us on the podcast.

[00:37:32] Mark Ellwood: Great speaking with you, Ed.

[00:37:37] Ed Watters: Thank you for joining us today. If you found this podcast enlightening, entertaining, educational in any way, please share, like, subscribe, and join us right back here next week for another great episode of the Dead America Podcast. I’m Ed Watters, your host, enjoy your [00:38:00] afternoon wherever you might be.