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| Photo by Nicolai Berntsen |
If you are like 99% of the professional population, you have more things to do than time to do it in. And you probably have looked at several books, courses, online or other about time management. Most of them have some really great ideas. I do encourage you to always read and learn about topics and find systems that work for you (what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for you).
There
are however two issues with the more traditional look on time
management:
- we all only have 24 hours in a day: even someone like Sir Richard Branson, who is the founder of at least a dozen $1B companies, only has 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- doing more is not equal to being more productive: busy is a very trendy word, when we are asked how we are doing, 'very busy' has become like a badge of honour.
Hence I would propose to use the term priority management. In this article I want to explain the basic principles of priority management, which you an implement in your own way and in Your Life Inc.“Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximising the time we have.”-- John C Maxwell, best-selling author, speaker, & consultant on Leadership.
An important basic principle used for priority management is the Pareto Principle which applies to both people and tasks: "roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes."
With a little effort, you can find what 20% of the work is having the deepest impact and what things you are able to stop doing.
If you are compiling your schedule first thing in the morning, you could consider to start with a short (5-10 min) reflection or meditation time, that helps settle and sharpen the mind.
1. Collect a list of all your tasks
List everything you could possibly consider getting done in a
day. Don’t worry about the order, or the number of items up front.
Make sure you think about things in different areas of your life.
For
example, time to: read, think, leisure, enjoy, do a hobby, …
Many people consider some of these activities as a 'waste of time'.
This is far from the truth, reading expands your
knowledge, relaxing allows the mind to come up with new
and fascinating ideas.
We
are often so busy that the mind does not have the space to come up
with new, innovative ideas. We live in a time where innovation and
originality is both considered highly important and seemingly more
difficult to accomplish. Being innovative doesn't happen when we are
busy, running for one point to another or focussed on a
specific task.
Who
hasn't had a great idea under the shower or just prior to falling
asleep?
Writing
things down, also helps you to lower your mental load. This lets you
focus on what’s really important in that moment. A study by Francoise Boch (Stendhal University) and Annie Piolat (University of Provence) found that, "Notes allow interim pieces of information to be 'stabilised' for use at a later stage, thereby easing the load on the working memory"
The
study also points out there are two main reasons for note-taking: to
record information and to aid reflection.
Using
an app, Evernote for example, can add structure and allow you to
share, save and re-use the notes, which will save you a lot of
headaches and missed opportunities because you forgot or couldn’t
focus as well in the moment. This can help organise the information
for use later when you need it again and are able to actually take
action on it.
You
should also check whether there aren't any interdependencies between
different tasks. If you discover any, write them on your unordered
list.
For a lot of people, summing up all they need to do (sometimes not even writing them down) is where creating their (in)famous 'to do' list stops. There is a bit more to it however. Let's have a look.
2. Urgent vs. Important
The
next step is to see if you have any tasks that need immediate
attention. We’re talking about work that, if not completed by the
end of the day or in the next several hours, will have serious
negative consequences (missed client deadline; missed publication or
release deadlines, etc.). Check to see if there are any high-priority
dependencies that rely on you finishing up a piece of work now.
What exactly is important to us, depends on our goals (see my article on SMARTER
goal setting) and our values in life. Having clearly defined goals is
critical to doing priority management in the right way. The
importance connected to a task is focused on the results of said
task. It might not always be very visible or fun to do, but the
results will move us further towards our goals.
Stephen
R. Covey, in his famous book 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People', saw priority management as the 3rd Habit, called 'Putting First Things First'. In a nutshell, he pointed out that you need to live Habits 1 & 2
first in order to be able to be efficient in priority management:
- Habit 1 - 'Be Proactive' : Urgent things make us react, whereas important tasks require us to be proactive.
- Habit 2 - 'Begin with the End in Mind': Be clear on your goals (the end result) and prioritise things that are in line with getting you closer to those goals.
The
above matrix, is obviously a simplification, as the axes of
importance and urgency are more of a continuum. But put this way we
get 4 quadrants:
- Quadrant 1: these tasks need to be done, but they are often more like fires that need to be put out (crisis management). You want to avoid as much as possible to have fires to put out, but reality is that unforeseen circumstance will force you into some firefighting once in a while. People who find themselves in this quadrant risk stress and even burn-outs. These people tend to spend most of their time in this quadrant and spend a bit of time in quadrant 4 (time-wasters) as a mean of escape.
- Quadrant 2: This is where you want to be most of the time: working on highly important (impactful) tasks, that drive your goals (and have a high value, see next section). This is the home of vision, discipline and balance.
- Quadrant 3: These are the tasks that look/are very urgent but actually are not important or not important to you. We all get lured into doing things for others that have an urgency for them. Helping people out is really a noble cause, but many people will do that before they attend to their own important tasks (if that is you, you might ask yourself the question: “what am I getting out of this?”). Help yourself first, so you can help others out of a position of stability and security. It's like how in case of an emergency in a plane you will first put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. Even you own children because if you help them first and by then fall unconscious you will not be able to help them or yourself anymore. So in other words, do it later, if it's still necessary then.
- Quadrant 4: these are time-wasters. The less said, the better, don't put any of your precious time in these. In case you want to get a fresh perspective on how precious your time is, see next section or read the book “Life in Half a Second” by Matthew Michalewicz.
“Time is free, but its priceless
You can't own it, but you can use it
You can't keep it, but you can spend it
Once you've lost it, you can never get it back.”
-- Harvey
MacKay
3. What is your time worth?
Next,
look at your important work and identify what carries the highest
value to your business (Your Life Inc or other business). As a
general practice, you want to recognise exactly which types of tasks
have top priority over the others.
Perry Marshall, in a great article on how to apply the 80/20 rule to your daily life, refers to tasks by the actual monetary value they represent. For argument sake, let's say you earn $100,000 per year and work 50 hours per week for 50 weeks. That means your hourly value is $40/hour. Associating an real tangible value to your time will change the way you look at how you spend the time.
Perry Marshall, in a great article on how to apply the 80/20 rule to your daily life, refers to tasks by the actual monetary value they represent. For argument sake, let's say you earn $100,000 per year and work 50 hours per week for 50 weeks. That means your hourly value is $40/hour. Associating an real tangible value to your time will change the way you look at how you spend the time.
Photo
by Vladimir
Solomyani
on
Unsplash
Are
you spending a lot of your time on $10/hour tasks, where you could be
focusing on $100 or $1000/hour tasks? Whether you are building your
own company or working for a company, there are certain core tasks
that truly will make a difference at the end of the day. And there
are many tasks that require a lot of time but ultimately do not add a
lot of value (manual excel sheets, updating documents, administration
tasks, …). Learn to delegate those tasks that are consuming a lot
of your time, do not add value and probably can be done faster by
someone else. Entrepreneurs especially feel they need to do
everything themselves, especially when they are just starting out.
4. Order tasks by estimated effort
If
you have two or more tasks that seem to tie from a priority point of
view, estimate
the effort they will take to complete,
and start on whichever one you think will take the most effort to
complete. Productivity experts suggest the tactic of starting the
lengthier task first. Mark Twain is often credited for saying: “Eat
a life frog the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will
happen to you the rest of the day”
But,
if you feel like you can’t focus on your meatier projects before
you finish up the shorter task, then go with your gut and do that. It
can be motivating to check a smaller task off the list before diving
into deeper waters.
5. Be flexible and adaptable
Uncertainty
and change are a given. Know that your priorities will change, and
often when you least expect them to. But—and here’s the trick—you
also want to stay focused on the tasks you’re committed to
completing.
If
for example an urgent and important task unexpectedly pops up (in
other words a crisis), you probably have to reassess you priority
schedule and make the necessary time for this urgent task. It might
help to check whether this crisis could have been predicted or
prevented for the future.
6. Prune the list
You
probably can’t get to everything on your list, as I pointed out in
the beginning, we only have 24 hours in which to also sleep, eat,
.... After you prioritise your tasks and look at your estimates, cut
the remaining tasks from your list, and focus on the priorities that
you know you must and can complete for the day. Tasks that remain on
your list which you know you cannot complete, are like dead weight,
they are a burden for the mind and a constant reminder of things that
will not get done that day.
Cleaning
up the list can take different forms:
- cut from the list all together: while analysing you might have realised this is a real quadrant 4 task and you simply won't spend time on it.
- Reschedule: tasks that you still need to do, but due to for example a lower urgency (or dependencies that you discovered), you schedule them to do another day.
- delegate: lower value tasks (see the section on the value of your time) or tasks that will take you a really long time (we all have our strengths and weaknesses) are better being delegated to someone else, so you can focus on your high value tasks.
Then
take a deep breath, dive in and be ready for anything.
This is part of a series of articles designed to get more out of life.
Bookmark my blog in order to not miss out : https://yourlifeceo.blogspot.com/
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