My experiences with managing time and what I have learnt!

Image credit: Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Almost everyone will agree that if there is one thing that we don’t have enough of, it is time. The realisation that every moment lost will never come back makes it even more precious. Each moment holds the opportunity for us to get the most out of that moment and to use it in a way that it positively impacts the moments to follow. Every moment may seem insignificant by itself, but you bunch them together, and you have days, months and years. Undoubtedly, our future is created by how best we use the time we have today.

Time management is something that all of us have struggled with, and the fact that you are here and reading this means that it is most likely something vital for you as well. We all have devised our little time management hacks. Like you, a few things worked for me in my pursuit to manage my time better.

Here are some tips and tricks experienced over the years that helped me and some of the clients I have coached become better at managing time and becoming more productive, in no specific order:

• Don’t try and keep everything in your head. Put it on your To-Do list at the first opportunity you get.
• Design your To-Do lists to chunk your work by Urgency and Importance. Prioritising tasks based on importance and urgency help you not to lose sight of jobs that may have a more long-term effect. Look at your daily tasks and determine which are: Important and urgent (those that need to be done right away), Important but not urgent (those where you have the flexibility to decide when to do these, but you can’t ignore these; best to slot these in your calendar well ahead of time), Urgent but not important (delegate as much of it as possible; remember, to still slot the follow-ups for these), Not urgent and unimportant (those to be done only if you have time; always evaluate which of these can be eliminated).
• There are specific time slots when we are most productive during the day, and this is true for almost all of us though the slots may be different. It is best to reserve your most important tasks for that part of the day (remember, most important ones but not necessarily the most urgent ones!).
• Take advantage of the calendar functionality to its fullest; every email tool comes equipped with it. Use the recurring events functionality for all your critical annual events (birthdays, anniversaries, premia payments etc.) or monthly events (follow-up meetings, credit card payments). Where possible, use the same calendar for your personal and work commitments, else sync them to get an integrated view that allows you to have everything in one place.
• Learn to say No, to things you don’t want to participate in. Replace FOMO (fear of missing out) mentality with JOMO (joy of missing out), learning to enjoy what you are doing without worrying about what everyone else is doing.
• Hire someone to do all the tasks that can be done more efficiently and cost substantially lower than your per hour earning rate, especially those you don’t enjoy. This will help you be more productive as you can use the saved time more effectively elsewhere. You will be surprised how much time you spend doing mundane things that others can do at a relatively small cost.
• Block the time on your calendar that you need for yourself and for your most important tasks before anyone else blocks the same. Don’t allow others to control your calendar.
• Use the time-boxing technique, where you allocate time for each task based on what it will take to complete the task and then stay with the decided time, especially in meetings. This is efficient, both at an individual level and in a group/team setting, as it helps you get more productive with your meetings; it works as effectively, even your telephone calls. Staying mindful of the clock ticking keeps us, and the group focussed on the task at hand.
• When working by yourself, use techniques like Pomodoro, which helps you become more productive in smaller manageable time slots, say 25 minutes. Once you start using this technique, you will realise how much you can achieve in just 25 minutes.
• Use dead-hours (such as those lazy post-lunch hours) for engagements that compel you to remain active — meetings, client calls etc.
• Always look at your next day’s calendar a day before. Proactively, fill in the empty pockets with tasks from your To-Do lists which have still not been accommodated on the calendar and preferably block that time to work on your most important tasks.

If my clients have time management or personal productivity as a coaching goal, I usually get them to start with a time audit for a couple of weeks. Time audit had helped me a lot when I was struggling with managing my time. I still go back to this technique every few months, to weed out the inefficiencies that creep into my routine. Just keep a simple sheet handy with rows for 30-minute slots for each day, from the time you are up until you retire at night and columns for each day. Make the effort of recording the task you have done in each 30-minute slot and see what patterns emerge at the end of a couple of weeks. It is incredible to see what people discover about how they use their time when reviewing this sheet at the end of the two weeks.

Be mindful that whichever time management techniques you decide to use, use these consistently. The problem is that we are not consistent with the tools we deploy, and hence we never get the results we want.

Nobody is going to gift us a blob of time, and neither are we ever going to buy it off the shelf; we have to do it the old fashioned way, find it minute by minute.

Here is, wishing all of us an even more productive and fulfilling 2022!