I recently read the effective executive by author Peter Drucker when you think of an executive you might think of a senior manager in a fancy business suit sitting in a big corporate office but the title executive is not reserved for business leaders an executive is anyone who decides how to use their time to get the best results if you have any control over what you do with your time you are an executive but the big question is are you an effective executive an ineffective executive spends his or her time trying to do all the work that comes across his or her desk or inbox but the effective executive is selective the effective executive doesn't just do things well they do the right things and they do so by asking one question before doing any work what contribution can I make author Peter Drucker regarded as the best management thinker of the 20th century says to focus on contribution is to focus on effectiveness to contribute you must find a way to be useful to the people that you serve maybe that's the team you work with or maybe that's a customer segment you sell to or maybe that's an audience you make youtube videos for if I focus on ensuring that this video contributes to your success by giving you concrete ways to manage your time then making this video has been an effective use of my time if you're a computer programmer and you want to be effective it's not enough for you to write great code you must write code that makes a contribution to your team's final application at any moment you can look around and find dozens of ways to contribute to the people in your life but if you want to find your biggest contribution and thereby maximize your effectiveness you must focus on the to contribution commandments know thy strengths and know thy time in 2011 a group of Toyota engineers wanted to make a significant contribution at a soup kitchen in Harlem so instead of serving soup or donating money which were contributions other people were already making they decided to make a unique contribution by putting their strengths to work the engineers user Toyota process engineering expertise to overhaul the soup serving process they found gaps in the way the kitchen delivered sous implemented systems and trained the volunteers the result dinner wait time reduced from 90 minutes down to 18 minutes when you find a way to make your strengths productive you contribute at your highest level but what if you don't know what your strengths are Peter Drucker says the only way to discover your strengths is through feedback and analysis feedback analysis is like running a science experiment on your career the idea is to volunteer for new roles at work a school in your community or for any organization that interests you but before taking on any new role you hypothesize your performance you write down the list of responsibilities your new role has and rate how you expect to perform in each of those responsibilities on a scale of one to five then six to twelve months later go back to your expectations and find out if you perform better or worse than you thought you would if you volunteered for a management position were you better at creating plans and delegating tasks than you thought were you better at solving problems and making decisions under pressure than you thought or did you have far less patience than you thought and realize that to perform your best you probably need to work solo and execute work on your own Drucker says most people think they know what they're good at they're usually wrong and people who know what they're not good at are more often wrong than right seven years ago I volunteered to give speeches at a local Toastmasters but I didn't expect to be more than an average presenter but after a few months I was surprised at the rate in which I improved and I was surprised at my ability to write and deliver speeches that helmet audience's attention eventually I won a few competitions and discovered a strength I didn't know I had I've stuck with that strength invested more time into building that strength and that's why you're seeing this video on youtube today the more roles you volunteer for and more feedback analysis that you do in yourself the quicker you'll discover your key strengths strengths that allow you to have the greatest contribution possible but to have a great contribution you need time to put your strengths to work which brings us to the second contribution commandment know thy time when Drucker asked executives how they spent their time he always got an inspiring answer one Chairman told Drucker that his work was split evenly between important discussions with the CEO time with his best customers time organizing community functions all work he deemed a great contribution to his company but when trucker got the executive to create a time log and record his work activities in real time reality was less rosy the Chairman's time log revealed that nearly all the Chairman's work time was spent doing petty things like tracking new orders which wasn't necessary because that was someone else's job and they could manage it just fine without him our memory of time is flawed if we look back more than an hour we'll fool ourselves and believe that we're far more affected than we really are the only way to know thy time is to record how you use your time to start recording how you spend your time I recommend recording just three consecutive hours every workday if you think you work best between 9:00 a.m. and noon then set an alarm on your phone for 10:00 a.m. 11:00 a.m. and noon when the alarm goes off open a physical notebook near you or a note on a note-taking app on your phone and write down everything you can remember doing be as specific as possible and don't forget to include small distractions for example responded to a customer email about blank respondent to a text message from blank organize my blank files and wrote a draft for the blank report after running down your activities for each hour write down how many minutes approximately that you spent doing work that hour that you feel was a unique contribution work you think was useful and that leverages your strengths if you have the self-discipline to do this for 4 weeks then at the end of the month you'll get a time log statement much like a credit card statement when you review your time statement you'll see much to your surprise how many worthless things you spent your time on this is a point where the truly effective executive separates him or herself from most executives because the effective executive uses the time statement to make a stop doing list and an offload list the effective executive populates a stop doing list by looking at his or her time statement and asking which of these activities could I stop doing and no one would notice and which of these activities made far less contribution than I expected when an effective executive ask these questions she notices common distractions useless meetings and urgent problems were great opportunities that could have been ignored Drucker says I have yet to see an executive regardless of rank or station who could not consign something like a quarter of the demands on his time to the wastepaper basket without anybody's noticing their disappearance the stop doing list contains a list of things that the effective executive will start politely turning down and systematically avoiding after scanning the time statement to put things on the stop doing list the effective executive populates the offload list with activities on the time statement that could be done by someone else just as good if not better clinging running errands updating spreadsheets formatting documents or any work that doesn't require strong judgment or creativity typically finds its way on to the off load list the stop doing list and the off load list are two lists that the effective executive values more than the to-do list because the effective executive knows that if she doesn't have the awareness the courage and the self-discipline to stop doing things that don't contribute and give away work other people can do just as good if not better then she won't have the time to do what she does best to be an effective executive and have the greatest contribution possible you must choose to spend your time doing what you do best and stop doing or give away all the rest that was the core message at I got it from the effective executive by Peter Drucker this book is over 50 years old and the time management principles in this book are more important today than they've ever been I highly recommend it if you would like a one-page PDF summary of insights that I got it from this book just click the link below and I'll be happy to email it to you if you already subscribe to the free productivity game email newsletter this PDF is sitting in your inbox if you like this video please share it and as always thanks for watching and have yourself a productive week