Synopsis – The Principles of Time Management

This is a one-page synopsis of the key principles of time management. We also provide a one-page QuickGuide for download (PDF version)

The Three Steps to Effective Time Management

The goal of time management is to find more time to spend on important tasks. There are three straightforward steps to achieve this

• Set goals.
• Assess your time and identify time-eating habits.
• Harvest more time from your day.

Follow one step, or make one improvement, at a time. Once you are comfortable with that change, you can go on to the next. If you try to change too much at once, you could get swamped.

Set goals

You use time management to find more time to spend on important tasks. The first hurdle is working out what your important tasks really are. That's where goal setting comes in.

Goals are the foundation of time management. They help you focus, prioritize and direct others. A good goal is often described as SMART, which stands for:

• Specific and written down.
• Measurable, so you can judge your progress.
• Achievable.
• Relevant and important to you, your team and your company.
• Time-limited with dates and milestones

There are 3 types of goal.

• Critical goals are goals that must be achieved, customer commitments, for example. Most of your time should be spent on critical goals.
• Supportive goals are goals you can live without for now, but would help you meet critical goals more effectively in the future. Better processes are an example of a supportive goal. Supportive goals are great to achieve, but only if your critical goals are secure.
• Wish goals would just make life better. A new office may be a wish goal.

So, what's the difference between a goal and a task?

• Tasks are jobs you can start and finish in one go, for example, writing an email or making a call.
• Goals are overall objectives, involving many tasks.

It is important to work out which of your goals are critical and which are not, because that helps you work out whether a task is important or not, and how much time your should spend on it.

Assess your time and identify time-eating habits

Once you know what your important tasks are, the next hurdle is how to focus on them. To do that, you need to work out how you are spending your time now and identify your time-eating habits and distractions.

The best way to work out where your time is going is to keep an activity log of everything you do every day. You can do this by hand, but it's boring and hard to keep up. Fortunately, you can use Qlockwork to keep an activity log without lifting a finger.

Once you have your log, you can look for time-eating habits. Here are some common ones, and suggestions for how to break them.

• Spending too much time on secondary and wish goals. At the start of each task, consider the goal you are working towards. If it isn't critical, are you giving the task too high a priority? Can you defer or drop it? Don't complete it to a higher standard than absolutely necessary.
• Stopping and starting on tasks, so you have to keep remembering where you are. This is more destuctive than you think, studies have shown that tasks can take 30% longer if you don't finish them in one go. To resolve this, when you pick a task up, don't put it down until it's finished.
• Letting email distract and drive you. Turn off email notifiers and review email at set times like first & last thing. Don't prioritize it – complete a critical task, then deal with daily emails.
• Attending time-wasting meetings. Only attend meetings with agendas and results. If a meeting doesn't meet your goals, wastes your time or doesn't produce results, drop it.
• Never saying "no" to more work. Do you always say yes to more work? Try offering to help rather than taking the whole job on.

Remember – for every task, think about its goal and ask yourself, is that goal critical?

To work out your own time-eating habits you can assess where your time is going, then look for patterns that can indicate indicate a particular habit.

Harvest more time from your day

The final step in time management is to find time you are currently getting low value from and use that time on higher value activities instead.

You need to identify low value time or tasks and spend less time on them, either by defering them, delegating them, dropping them entirely or completing them to a lower standard.

For this stage, you need to use your activity log.

Review your activities regularly and ask yourself:

• Are you doing tasks you could delegate?
• Are you doing someone else's tasks or duplicating work?
• Are you spending too much time on one task, to avoid another?
• Are you completing any tasks to an unnecessarily high standard?
• Are you spending time in ineffective meetings?
• Are you spending lots of time traveling?
• Are you spending lots of time reading emails?

If you are, great! These are all common practices you can change to free up time.