ALT-1 Time Management
There once was an empty jar. Someone filled it with water and there was no room left for anything else. Well, that’s getting the time-management fairy-tale a bit backwards. The point is that if you take an empty jar and fill it with the large stones, the important things in your life, then you can still fit in the less meaningful pebbles, sand and water around them, but if you put in all the water, or let’s say the fiddly bits of admin and unnecessary displacement activities first then you might find you have no time to create that all-singing PowerPoint presentation, write that report, create a vision for the next two years or boost your team’s morale and productivity (because you won’t have any yourself!) A more poetic version of this inspiring time-management tale can be foundhere.
The real message is simply that your most important tasks must be allowed to take precedence over everything else. But then, we knew that already. If the most important tasks are not getting done then we need to examine why. There are a few questions it may help to bear in mind:
What are your important tasks? It is worth asking yourself this question frequently, preferably first thing every day, so the first piece of paper you see on your desk will not dictate what you spend your morning on. You probably know which tasks have deadlines looming or which tasks and projects you most value and feel attached to. If you are not sure, take five minutes to find out and write these down. Why are you delaying action on them? You need to be honest with yourself here, are you procrastinating (out of fear, perfectionism or guilt perhaps) or are you simply focused on other less important tasks. The two may go hand in hand since less important tasks can act as very useful displacement activities, while seemingly also ‘necessary’. Of course you do need to write those e-mails at some point, but do you need to spend so much time on them…first thing in the morning when you would have most energy for what you really want to do? If you know that procrastination is a large factor in not getting around to the important tasks there are innumerable books and articles that will help to get your started on tackling this issue.Hereis a very good one from MindTools that includes a procrastination self-test.
Focus is key. Often what seems to be an issue of time can be largely an issue of focus. Regularly reminding your brain what the big stones are will prompt you to get around to them more often. List them on a post-it and stick it above your desk. Keep your desk clear apart from the one project you are working on at any given time – the more of your full attention you can give it, the less time it will take. If you can, avoid working on more than two important tasks in a day. You can waste an awful lot of time switching between projects, looking for files, trying to remember conversations from meetings and getting your brain switched onto that task. If you only do this once or maximum twice a day you will save a lot of time and also reduce stress.
Interruptions are also a huge source of scattered focus, whether it is the pinging of an e-mail arriving, a phone call, a knock at the door, a half-hour meeting, or a sudden urge to Google something….if you have to keep switching between your project task and these other distractions you will never get the depth of focus you need to get any productive work done. Make an appointment with yourself. Perhaps it will only be for an hour, maybe you will have the luxury of two, maybe you can find a whole morning or a whole day. For that period of time you will be unavailable for meetings with anyone else, your phone will be off the hook, your mobile switched off, the internet disconnected, the office door locked and you will get down to your important task. If you really feel you need to look things up online while you are working, instead write down the search terms on a piece of paper and leave the searching until after your appointment has finished. You will avoid losing hours in the labyrinth of cyberspace and with hindsight might see that the things you wanted to look up were not so important after all.
Try also, if you can, to schedule most of your meetings for one or two days only during the week. That way you can have time in sociable ‘people’ mode and time in focused ‘task’ mode without having to switch too much between them during the course of the day. Instead of being irritated by interruptions when you are ‘on task’ and feeling guilty about the work you ‘should be doing’ when you are talking, you may end up both more sociable and more focused. If you are in an open plan environment at work, you may find it more tricky to make appointments with yourself, but perhaps you can come in an hour earlier, leave an hour later or better still take over an empty board room (or cafeteria!) for an hour or two.
Once you have identified your important tasks, dealt with your procrastination and set up regular appointments with yourself for each of them, all the other paper-shuffling, e-mail inbox clearing, invoice issuing and account balancing can fit in around these solid blocks of time. For further inspiration you can check out David Allen’s excellent book on time-management and productivity, “Getting Things Done”.
If you are still struggling, perhaps you simply have more tasks to complete than are humanly possible. No job should be so overwhelming that you have no time in the week to do absolutely nothing and reduce mental stimulation to a minimum, otherwise you will be increasingly unfocused in the time that you do have available and risk making yourself ill in the long term. Even ten minutes a day in a quiet room with your eyes shut is better than nothing - so what if your brain jumps around like a grasshopper on speed, let it leap – it is just trying to process all the inputs thrown at it during the week and you are finally giving it the time to do just that. The increased focus this repays may save you hours of time and unnecessary obsessing.
If you have tried everything (really tried!) and you are still weighed down by a paper mountain it might be time to talk to your boss or have a good talk with yourself about restructuring your job or career. Otherwise you may find life rushing past you in a blur of e-mails no one will remember in ten years time.
