Back to the Future! The Essential Guide to Time Management
Our culture is obsessed with time. Films like The Terminator, Ground Hog Day and Back to the Future explore our desire to control time. Most of us would jump at the chance to use Hermione Granger’s Time-Turner necklace and be in two places at the same time. How much more we could achieve!
Unfortunately we can’t control time, but we can control our relationship with time. There are some very practical things that we can do to manage our priorities and our stress. Successful time management isn’t sexy, but it is a discipline, and a discipline that can be learned.
The key to successful time management is the 4 Ps; planning, protecting, prioritising and pushing back. Time management is about conditioning your environment rather than allowing your environment to condition you.
Planning and Protecting time
The first step is to assess how you are currently spending your time. Keep a time log for a week. Record how much time you spend on emails, in meetings, doing things that don’t add value. When do you work at your best? What and who are your “time bandits” – people and tasks that waste your time? You can only make changes to your time management when you know how you are truly spending it. You are most time efficient the day before your holiday, when you plan and prioritise what you do. You can be this efficient every day.
The next step is to be clear about what you want to achieve. Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People asks us to think about our life goals – when we look back from our death bed did we achieve what we set out to do? This might be a step too far for many of us but the issue remains that it is difficult to plan and prioritise if we aren’t clear about what the end result should be.
When you are clear about what you want to achieve then write your goals down, rather than keeping them in your head. Your goals will allow you to plan and prioritise and to set actions for the time available.
Next, create a schedule with time slots for how you want your week to look. Create a schedule template that you can complete each week. Insert into your schedule the activities that you need to do every week; meetings, reports, planning, project work, budgets etc.
Don’t fill every time slot, you should plan about 5 ½ hours in a 7 hour working day. The rest is a buffer zone. Once you have your schedule protect your time and question those who try to take it up with other priorities. Stick to your schedule, being flexible for emergencies and unexpected events, and you will feel less stressed. Create templates for reports, meetings etc so that you can just insert the relevant information.
Ideas on emails
Emails can become time bandits if we’re not careful. Allocate slots for your emails in your time schedule. Ideally you should be answering emails 3 times a day. Set up your email system to file and sort emails into categories. Go through your emails systematically and decide with each one whether you should delete it, do it now (if it will take less than two minutes), delegate it (if you can) or defer it for later when you can schedule it into a block of time. Turn off your email “ping” and the pop up box, and turn it off when you’re not using it!
The same is true for telephone calls. Put them into blocks of time and have a clear objective for each one. Ask sales people to delete your details from their database. Use voicemail when you need time to concentrate, and leave a message saying when you are free to take calls.
Meetings can take up a huge amount of time. Some of us even have meetings about meetings! Ensure you have a clear agenda, circulated beforehand, with times allocated against each point (so you can keep track of time during the meeting) and the name of who will lead on that point. Don’t have AOB at the end of your agenda, it invites additional chit chat. If there is AOB get it scheduled into the agenda. Have clear action points at the end of the meeting.
Prioritising and Pushing Back
When you’re clear about your goals you can begin to prioritise against those. Take a look at your “to do list” and use the Urgent/Important criteria. Things that are urgent are to do with time, so place them in time order with the most urgent to do first. Important means how important something is in terms of meeting your overall goals. Some tasks may seem to be important but don’t support your overall goals. Why are you doing these? Push back if you can.
Look down your list and give each item a 1 – 10 rating in order of what you will tackle first. Deal with them in that order. Begin to assess how much time things take so that you plan appropriately. Do one thing at a time. Multi-tasking isn’t good for stress and doesn’t work!
When you get interrupted question the interrupter. What is the deadline? Many people say urgent when they mean by the end of the day. Time management is as much conditioning others as it is being disciplined with ourselves. Decide whether the interruption will take less than two minutes and, if it will, deal with it there and then. Otherwise, ask the other person to come back when you are less busy and schedule a time for them.
Successful time management takes practice and discipline. We can’t do everything so we need to plan, prioritise what’s important to us, protect our time and push back with others who want our time. Without the option of a Time-Turner necklace it helps us control our time in a 24/7 world.
