Start with Your Audience’s Mood

Have you ever not been in the mood for somebody's sunshiny ways?   Their lack of sympathy pushes you away.  Instead, they should match your mood, at least at first.  A little sympathy can go a long way.  In Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion, Jay Heinrichs writes about using sympathy to build rapport.

Share Your Listener’s Mood
Start with your audience's mood.  Use rhetorical sympathy to show concern.  Heinrichs writes:

Sympathize – align yourself with your listener’s pathos.  You don’t have to share the mood; when you face an angry man, it doesn’t help to mirror that anger.  Instead, rhetorical sympathy shows its concern, proving, as George H. W. Bush put it, “I care.”  So when you face that angry man, look stern and concerned; do not shout, “Whoa, decaf!” When a little girl looks sad, sympathy means looking sad, too; it does not mean chirping, “Cheer up!”

Change Your Emotions as You Make Your Point
After you start with your audience's mood, you can lead them to a new emotion.  Heinrichs writes:

This reaction to the audience’s feeling can serve as a baseline, letting them see your own emotions change as you make your point.  Cicero hinted that the great orator transforms himself into an emotional role model, showing the audience how it should feel.

Key Take Aways
Here's my key take aways:

• Start with your audience's mood.
• Sympathy can help build rapport.
• Use rhetorical sympathy to show concern.
• You can lead your audience to a new emotion, if you first start with their mood.

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Know Thy Time

What are the keys to effective time management?  How do successful people manage their time?  They log and analyze their time.  They use deadlines.  They know that time is the scarcest resource.  They master their own time management to improve their contribution and effectiveness.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials), Peter F. Drucker writes that you should "know thy time."

Log and Analyze Your Time
Drucker writes that effective people perpetually work on their time management:

And all effective people work on their time management perpetually.  They not only keep a continuing log and analyze it periodically; they set themselves deadlines for the important activities, based on their judgment of their discretionary time. 

Urgent and Unpleasant Lists
Drucker shares an example about using lists with deadlines for urgent and unpleasant tasks:

One highly effective man I know keeps two such lists – one of the urgent and one of the unpleasant things that have to be done – each with a deadline.  When he finds his deadlines slipping, he knows his time is again getting away from him.

Time is the Scarcest Resource
Drucker writes that time is the scarcest resource, but it's also easy to analyze and improve:

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.  The analysis of one’s time, moreover, is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.

Everyone Can Follow “Know Thy Time”
Drucker writes that the path to contribution and effectiveness is knowing how you spend your time:

“Know thyself,” the old prescription for wisdom, is almost impossibly difficult for mortal men.  But everyone can follow the injunction “Know thy time” if he or she wants to, and be well on the road toward contribution and effectiveness.

Key Take Aways
Here's my key take aways:

• Time is the scarcest resource.  You can't make more time.  You have what you got.   Make the most of it.
• Log and analyze your time.  A key to managing your time effectively is knowing where it goes.
• Consider keeping lists of deadlines for urgent and unpleasant tasks.  If you find your deadlines keep slipping, then you need to improve how you're managing time.
• Effective people perpetually work on their time management.  Effective people make it a habit to work at improving their time management.

My Related Posts

• Know Where Your Time Goes
• Consolidate Your Discretionary Time
• Can Effectiveness Be Learned?

Know Where Your Time Goes

To effectively manage your time, you first need to know where it goes.  Don't rely on your memory.  The problem is you'll think you spend time where you should spend your time.  Your memory will fool you.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials), Peter F. Drucker writes about logging your time rather than relying on memory.

Don’t Rely on Your Memory to Know How Much Time You Spend
Drucker writes don't rely on your memory to know where your time goes:

Man is ill-equipped to manage his time.  Even in total darkness, most people retain their sense of space.  But even with the lights on, a few hours in a sealed room render most people incapable of estimating how much time has elapsed.  They are as likely to underrate grossly the time spent in the room as to overrate it grossly.  If we rely on our memory, therefore, we do not know how much time has been spent.

Record Your Time and Test Your Memory
Drucker suggests logging your time and testing your memory:

I sometimes ask executives who pride themselves on their memory to put down their guesses as to how they spend their own time.  Then I lock these guesses away for a few weeks or months.  In the meantime, the executives run an actual time record on themselves.  There is never much resemblance between the way these people thought they used their time and their actual records.

You Think You Spend Time Where You Should Spend Your Time
According to Drucker, we fool ourselves on where we actually spend our time:

One company chairman was absolutely certain that he divided his time roughly into three parts.  One third he thought he was spending with his senior men.  One-third he thought he spent with his important customers.  And one-third he thought was devoted to community activities.  The actual record of his activities over six weeks brought out clearly that he spent almost no time in any of these areas.  There were the tasks on which he knew he should spend time – and therefore memory, obligingly as usual, told him that they were the tasks on which he actually spent most of his hours as a kind of dispatcher, keeping track of orders from customers he personally knew, and bothering the plant with telephone calls about them.  Most of those orders were going through all right anyhow and his intervention could only delay them.  But when his secretary first came in with the time record, he did not believe her.  It took two or three more time logs to convince him that the record, rather than his memory, had to be trusted when it came to the use of time.

Key Take Aways
Here's my key take aways:

• To manage your time, you need to know where it goes.  In order to manage your time effectively, you first need to know where your time actually goes.
• Keep a time record.  The only way to know where you spend your time is to log it.
• Your memory is wrong.  Your memory tells you you spend your time where you think you should spend your time. 

My Related Posts

• Consolidate Your Discretionary Time
• Can Effectiveness Be Learned?