Time Management - More Than Just a Tidy Desk!
Time Management is important, because time is the foundation of everything you do (or don’t do!). Did you know that every time you decide to do something you are also simultaneously deciding to NOT do everything else in the world?
Another way to think of time is that it’s your life – all you get is time, not enough of it, and you don’t know how much more there is left. Though oddly enough, if you did know how much you had left, you’d do a lot more planning and be a lot more assertive, but because none of us know how long we’ve got we behave as if we’ll live forever, and we squander the days and years. But not any more, because you are about to read this article!
The essence of time management is to work out what’s important, and then spend as much time as you can on the important things. Most of us are quite bad at this. We don’t spend time thinking about what’s really important, and even when we have vague ideas about it, like maybe our family, we allow ourselves to be pulled of course by short-termism, crisis management, mistaking ‘urgent’ for ‘important’, procrastination, laziness, and other people’s priorities overcoming our own. Did you know that the average American father only spends 4 minutes per day with his children?
‘Importance’ is a personal choice; it’s to do with your values, and it depends on what you value. Maybe football is important to you, maybe it’s not. Maybe gardening is, or maybe music is. Nobody else can tell you what’s important to you. Some useful tests for importance are “Would you miss it? Will it matter in 5 years time? Does in contribute to your goals? Is it what you want to spend your time doing?”
The result of importance is NOT whether you do it - there are lots of unimportant things that have to be done, like buying food or putting antifreeze in your car – do they pass any of the tests mentioned above? No! The result of importance is how long you should spend on it. You should use as much of your time as you can on the things that really matter. The crime is to spend too little time on important things because all your time has been frittered away on unimportant things. And for this crime you pay the price later, and the price is regret.
Four types of task
In order to spend the maximum time on the important things you have to a) find a method for preventing our natural human tendency to put things off, and b) reduce the time spent on the other three types of task – crisis, hassle and ‘don’t do it’.
‘Crisis’ is probably not a huge amount of your day (well I hope not!) and is hard to reduce since you have to deal with crises when they arrive, but the key is to spend some time getting to the cause of the crisis and then work to prevent repeats. If you can’t prevent repeats then at least develop systems which allow you to react quickly and easily. For example the fire brigade try to minimise houses destroyed by fire by both prevention and by perfecting their ability to react.
‘Hassle’ is probably a much larger part of your day, and is the main area to hit. ‘Don’t do it’ is similar to hassle but less urgent. Hassle could include interruptions, badly run meetings, most e-mails, requests from colleagues boss and team, sorting out problems and correcting errors, or general ‘maintenance’ tasks and processes. There are five strategies you can use in order to reduce the time spent on all this small stuff. None of them are easy, but if you don’t choose any of them (or some mixture of them all) then you will end up taking the sixth choice: saying yes and then not doing it. This is a bad option!
The five strategies for reducing time spent on hassle
1 Saying no. This requires assertiveness, but then whose life is it? But is it selfish to say no? Maybe it is, a bit, but then who is going to look after your time and life if you don’t? And maybe the person to whom you are thinking of saying no is also being a bit selfish in putting you under pressure to do something you don’t want to do?
2. Negotiating. A bit more polite than saying no. You can negotiate to do it later, to spend less time on it, to only do part of it, to get help with it, or to only do it this one time. If you could gain an hour a week you’d save 50 hours a year – that’s more than a week extra you could have in your life each year!
3. Delegating it. May not be an option for you, but if you do have people who work for you then this is a big one. Delegate more! People prefer bosses who delegate too much rather than too little. Monitor and support, and the delegated task can’t go wrong. Train and empower, and they might even do it better than you!
4. Doing it less well. All you perfectionists out there won’t like this one, but for some tasks you know it makes sense. Don’t let perfectionism bog you down, so you spend all day fiddling with unimportant things and then have no time for the important things. Should you organise your CDs or play with your children? Should you perfect that report or plan next year’s strategy?
5. The final option, and there are no others, is to have more efficient systems. These may be computerised or they may just be lists on paper, or they may be things like keeping your car keys on a hook, or having two washing baskets (one for whites and one for coloureds) or making up a prepacked travel bag. Whatever your repeating tasks are, set up a system to either prevent the problem (e.g. laminated checklist, better information on intranet, clear responsibilities of team) or to make the task quicker (e.g. files organised on computer, automatic excel forms, organised desk).
Systems – more information
As well as systems for your main time wasters you will need the three essential parts of any organised life:
a) A master list of everything you have got to do, all written down in one place. It could be on a computer, on paper, in your diary, on the wall, on a whiteboard, it doesn’t matter, but it should contain all the big things which you are going to do, at time unknown. You might have two of these, one for home and one for work.
b) A daily jobs to do list. This could be a small bit of paper, or written in your diary, or perhaps using Outlook on your computer. These are the small tasks that you are going to do today. Maximum of 10 items, written as a daily habit either first thing or, better in my opinion, at the end of each day ready for the next one. Then you can sleep easy.
c) A diary, which is small, always with you, and contains home and work. Again it could be as a palm-type PDA or a paper diary, whatever works for you.
Write everything down in one of these three places.
If you promise anything to anyone, write it down on your lists. If anyone promises you anything, find out when they will do it, and write it down in your diary for follow-up.
The roots of time management
Underlying everything are the two qualities or skills which are unavoidable: self discipline and assertiveness. Every problem you have, for example every time waster, either comes from you (lack of self discipline) or from other people (lack of assertiveness). Somehow you have to conquer these two. But how?
The meaning of life
Well, it’s my belief that problems with insufficient self-discipline and assertiveness stem from not having clear goals. If you’ve got no objective in mind, why should you bother with being disciplined about your time, or being assertive in order to defend it? But if you have a clear objective that you are excited by, and determined to achieve, then you’ll have the necessary edge required to make it happen. Most people drift through life – no wonder their time management is not great, because why should it be? (Apart from a vague feeling of guilt).
Your goals in life need to cover both work and home, and they need to include things you like doing, and things you want to achieve. That is to say, things you want to do more of in the present, and things you need to do in the present in order to achieve the future objectives that you have. Just enjoying yourself without a sense of achievement won’t be enough in the long run, and achievement but at the price of not enjoying yourself is not what life is about either. Enjoy and Achieve: the game is to do both!
Many of us are unclear about what we want to achieve in life, and perhaps note even completely clear on what makes us happy. And those who do have a plan usually intend to achieve at work and to enjoy themselves outside of work. But I would suggest that the ultimate plan would be to enjoy both work and your time outside work, and to achieve worthwhile goals both at work and outside work.
A system for goals
So how would someone go about doing this? Well, the answer is to write down what you want to achieve at home and at work, and to write down what you enjoy doing at your work and outside your work. Write it down in detail, in any format that works for you. If you have clear goals written down, then you have made the first step toward getting them.
And in fact you have made more than the first step, because your subconscious will now work on achieving these things, without you even being aware that it is doing so. You will find that things happen, as if by chance, but it’s not chance at all. Autopilot has been set…
Summing up
So if you have clear goals you will be much more aware of what’s really important and what isn’t. You will become more self-disciplined and more assertive about your time, and your subconscious will make small correct decisions constantly and will make you more aware of the information you need in order to get you where you want to go in life.
But don’t forget that your systems are needed as well. If you have both goals and an efficient system for managing your day to day time then you will see great results. Goals without a system is will lead to disappointment. A system without goals is just sad!
This article was written by Chris Croft, who runs training courses for 10-120 people at a time all over the UK, see http://www.chriscrofttraining.co.uk as well as organising Certificate in Management and Diploma in Management programmes, where we come to you and teach you for a day a month see http://www.croftcentre.co.uk
