Archive for the ‘Time Management’ tag
Mind the Gaps: Get a Little Ahead Each Day
Be deliberately efficient or deliberately Zen. Never be arbitrarily inefficient.
I tweeted a version of that a few days ago and it pretty succinctly sums up my approach to "time management". In essence, it’s saying do what you do and be 100% there… and do so in a way that isn’t randomly wasting precious time in the present moment due to sloppy planning or weak preparation.
How much downtime did you have today if you counted up the minutes? 10 minutes, 60 minutes, more?
If your house is in order you can use every minute to your advantage, whatever that means to you at that time. You aren’t passing up the opportunity to use that time just because you don’t know what’s next or what you need to do – you can just seamlessly move from one thing to the next at a deliberate pace doing high-quality work or enjoying needed downtime.
Ultimately this approach goes back to having the right system for knowing what the open threads are in your life. Getting Things Done by David Allen is one such system, hugely popular and very common sensical and intuitive, but there are others. Assuming you’re already on your way to productivity black belt status and at any given moment can identify what you need in the moment, one of the best things you can do to act on this data is to start living in the gaps.
Gaps are those small 5-30 minute "in betweens" throughout the day that offer you some level of personal sanctity. They’re part of your daily rituals – your commute, an afternoon walk, a 20-minute wait in the doctor’s office, time between meetings, the 30 minutes your spouse or partner is watching the kids, and so on. They’re time periods in which you could choose to be productive or time you could use to disconnect and recharge. Ultimately it’s up to you how you use it.
5 More Ways to Protect That Time!
This post is a follow-up to Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff. Can you tell I care about this topic?
I work with lots of people who are booked all day long, 8am-6pm, every single day of the week. Most of these people complain that they have no time to do any “real” work since they’re “sooooooo busy” all the time. Yet sitting in a meeting with a laptop open only half paying attention isn’t real work, and most people know that 🙂
Still, they let their time get abused left and right and don’t realize that they’re ultimately in control of the situation. Heck, they may not even identify it as a problem to begin with. They’re busy right? Who has time to think about producing, creating, or <ugh> leading anyway?!
When you break it down, time is the purest and most ultimate resource we have for action. We don’t own many things completely and totally, but time is one of the things that we get to choose how to spend. And as we’ve discussed on this blog in the past, your life is the sum of what you choose to focus on – so spend it wisely, because you aren’t going to get it back. How you spend your time is going to impact your life in ways greater than your money, relationships, or job alone ever could.
It’s easy to look at a situation like being booked all week and think it’s unavoidable. If you’re in a role with a decent amount of responsibility, it’s also easy to assume that responsibility has to equate to meeting attendance and being “busy” all the time. But of course, it doesn’t… and never will.
Having responsibility for something important means that you’re a decision-maker of some sort. The best decisions are made based on experience, instinct, and data. And there are ways to gain practical experience, hone your native instinct, and collect and synthesize data outside of meetings. In fact, you could make an argument that the more time you spend in useless meetings, the less opportunity you have to gain that experience or practice your craft.
Always Late? Stop Living in Time Denial
The predominant cause of chronic lateness is a basic inability to determine – or admit – how long something takes to complete. Of course this probably isn’t a scientific fact (yet). So for now, just take my word for it.
Similar to how some people can’t navigate their way out of their own driveway (myself included), some of us just weren’t born with an ability to gauge elapsed or remaining time. We consistently think we have more time than we actually do, downplaying the reality of the situation: that whatever time we have remaining, even though we think it’s enough, isn’t even close.
We forget about the little things, we assume the best of every situation, and we get caught up in a "right here, right now" mentality instead of making a clean break from the present and moving onto what’s next.
It’s called time denial. And you’re living in it.
Time denial isn’t just specific to chronic latecomers, most everyone falls prey to this mentality at one point or another. Yup, even you my friend. So stop judging the dude in the next cubicle.
You know the drill… You’re right in the middle of something that has your complete attention, all the while your next commitment is creeping up on you. You glance at the clock, trying to squeeze in another few minutes to finish that email – or frag that alien with your rocket launcher – thinking that no matter what, you have time because it "only takes" 15 minutes to get to the office.
By the time you pull away from your current activity, grab your coat, and run to your car, you’re already down to 14 minutes… and you need to get gas. And of course, traffic has started building up. Before you know it, you’re not 5 minutes late, you’re 25 minutes late!
Avoidable? Certainly. Acceptable? Most certainly not. Maybe you can get away with it the first time… if you’re a nice person. But great things weren’t achieved showing up 25 minutes late. Trust isn’t built by letting people down, making them wait for you and your bad habits. Real artists of life don’t show up late all the time.
Real artists of life have integrity.
Look, time management is only as good as your relationships. If you’re a master at managing your task list but people don’t want to work with you, or don’t trust you to show up when they expect you to, it doesn’t matter how many to-dos you’re checking off each day. Commitments are the most important thing in business, and are pretty high on the list of "personal life" as well.
If you find yourself showing up late all the time, you simply need to get a fix on it.
Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff
Happy Monday! If you value your time – and who doesn’t – you need to be be protecting it at all costs. It’s far too easy to spend hours each day doing things that don’t end up resulting in personal or professional gain. You pick your head up at the end of the workday just to realize that out of all the things you got done, none of them were particularly meaningful.
This happens to everyone… at least once!
The key to good time management is to protect your time from the unimportant in order to focus on the important. It’s really that simple. But in practice, it can be difficult. Because it sometimes means being a jerk. Or at least coming across like one to people who enjoy time-wasting activities because it’s the only way they know how to work.
We have a word at Microsoft we use when our time is wasted: randomize. I was randomized by him. Please don’t randomize me. This meeting is going to be randomizing, we can do this over email. What a randomization! I’m not exactly sure where it came from – likely from the comparison of wasting time to a random number generator – but the basic idea is that if something is randomizing, it’s to be avoided at all costs. I suppose it’s nicer than saying “you’re wasting my precious time”, especially for people who don’t know what the word means in context.
Don’t be randomized!
The single biggest time-waster in the corporate world is the all-too-prevalent meeting. Most meetings are 50 minutes of people hearing themselves speak and 10 minutes of useful dialog or conversation. You may not be able to avoid them completely, but you can sure as hell try. More important stuff happens outside of meetings than in them.
As you may have read in My Day: The Way I Work, Rest, and Play, my workday can easily be filled from 9-6 if I’m not careful. This certainly isn’t unique to my situation; it applies to lots of people. Many people end up using evenings and weekends to “catch up” instead of for much-needed downtime. Not fun.
Worse, they’ve convinced themselves that their job is to go to meetings. I don’t know anyone whose job is just to attend meetings – or just read email for that matter – no matter what role they’re in… and for those who think it’s their job, my guess is that they’re filled with guilt because their contributions are severely limited. They’re not actually doing anything. Also not fun.
No matter what you do, you want to maximize your contribution. You want to spend more time creating and producing than consuming. You want great output. You want to be someone who pushes the boulder another foot up the hill each and every day. You don’t want to run in-place like the people around you! Unless you’re a full-time hole puncher with 30 years of experience, you have something unique and significant to contribute. Useless meetings take away from that. If they’re not wasting your time directly, they’re still breaking up valuable opportunities to find flow in your work. Meetings aren’t where you’ll make your mark.
