Time Management
Observations
Time management is so important because time is a resource we can never have back. Actually, time does not need to be managed, it continues very well without us. We can only manage ourselves, our priorities.
We usually have more work than time to complete it, which means, that every day we choose what not to do, and usually it’s the things that will get us less in trouble.
This is actually better than having too little to do, as it means we’re not working on our full potential.
Humans are deadline driven. There are many examples for it. For instance, a team that was legally required to respond to specific requests within 30 days, postponed it to the very last day in over 90% of the cases (it takes less than one hour per request). Another one is when having three weeks to fill performance review, it’s almost always done on the last 2–3 days.
Stock-Sandford Corollary: If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.
Have you ever been in a 45 minutes meeting, in which the goal was achieved within 30 minutes, and the meeting continued nonetheless?
Have you ever worked on a task and finished ahead of time, and then you spent time polishing it over and over until the last moment?
Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Note that the opposite of this law is also true — if you shrink the time to accomplish something, you’ll do it within the shorter time limit.
Multitasking is biologically impossible. Yes, you can walk and listen to a podcast simultaneously — multitasking refers to cognitive tasks. One cannot write and listen at the same time, or read and calculate at the same time. We can only switch between tasks, and this has its own price as can be seen in simple demonstrations here and here.
How to manage ourselves
Let’s take advantage of the observations in order to manage our priorities.
Eisenhower Matrix
We sort tasks based on the level of their urgency and importance.
Urgent and important: near future clear deadline and consequences for not executing, “big bomb, short fuse” — Do now.
Not urgent and important: no deadline and can help achieve goals, “big bomb, long fuse” — Schedule.
Urgent and not important: near future clear deadline and doesn’t require much skill, a.k.a “busy work” — Delegate it, find someone to execute.
Not urgent and not important: no deadline, not helping to achieve goals, a.k.a “distraction” — Don’t do.
Getting Things Done
The book suggests how to organize work and life tasks in great detail. The following is what I found gave me the highest ROI:
- A single system for all tasks, that you maintain and trust. Not various lists of work streams, rather a single place.
You can definitely use additional ones temporarily and then transfer into the main one. - Write down on the moment every task you’d need to insert into this system.
You will not remember later on everything you thought you would, as the brain is not built for such things. Trying to remember is causing stress.
Prefer to use pen and paper to take these notes because the brain memorizes better when writing, not typing, and others will not suspect you’re doing email. At designated times, transfer to the main system. - Go through this system at least once per day. Revise the list and prioritize in a lower frequency.
- The 2 minutes rule: if it takes 2 minutes, do it now.
- Schedule on the calendar when to work on tasks longer than 2 minutes.
Calendar — a beautiful friendship
Put every task on the calendar. Not only meetings with others, really all activities you have. Make sure it reflects reality. This is a great way to make sure things don’t fall between the cracks.
For example, when receiving an email with a task that would take an hour, schedule this on the calendar and move on to the next email. When the time to execute this task arrives, you can decide whether you execute it at that time or reschedule in case there are more urgent things. Rescheduling needs to be done on the moment, otherwise there is a big risk you will forget to do it later.
Block daily time on the calendar for deep work. That means scheduling a meeting with yourself, and if possible, already put the specific task to be done. You can add a “[Do not overbook]” on the title, so that others know they cannot ignore it, if you have such culture. The best time for this is when you have the highest concentration (for most people it’s between 9:00 and 11:00 in the morning) and less collisions with other activities.
These blocks should be long enough to achieve progress, and not too long in order to allow interactions. Experiment with 30-90 minutes blocks. It’s advisable to notify your team members and stakeholders about that, and they’ll learn to respect it. You’d still need to remain flexible in case really urgent things come up form time to time.
If you have the discipline to keep the calendar as close to reality as possible, after a few weeks, check whether your time is spent how you wish it was. For example, if hiring is the most important topic, and you have one hour for it every week, it’s either not so important, or need to spend more time on it.
Reflecting on the calendar can also show you whether others take your time too much and you need more rigor protecting it.
It also visualizes the big “time eaters”, and then it’s up to you to deal with them: delegate, postpone, reduce, stop doing, etc.
Having back-to-back meetings? First thing to try is “speedy meetings”, i.e., reduce meeting time from 30 minutes to 25, or from 60 to 50. This allows for short breaks, moving around and being on time for the next meeting. It’s not a buffer time for previous meetings. Meetings need to end on time exactly as they start on time.
Color coding can be helpful for time analysis and shorter context switch.
I use blue for individual deep work (focus time), purple for team meetings, yellow for 1:1s, red for special or important events, green for break.
Another thing to try is to schedule similar meetings close to each other, e.g. 1:1s or specific team meetings, in order to reduce context switching.
Keeping private items (not work related) on the calendar is technically possible by either having them there publicly in case they are not confidential, marking them as “private”, so the content is not visible, or by using another calendar and displaying them together.
Keeping “slack time”, or “holes” in the calendar allows for taking breaks, relaxing (yes, doing nothing), dealing with urgent things that come up, preparing for meetings or capturing information and other activities. Of course, these can also be scheduled activities on the calendar if they are planned.
Each end of the day, review the calendar for tomorrow and make sure you’re prepared or have enough time to prepare or make changes. Each end of week, review the calendar for the next week.
In case you are practicing “what do I want to achieve today?”, it is great to plan this in advance and make sure there is time for the activities and they are specific enough. In case they are not planned, make time on that day by moving meetings that you can move to other time slots.
Automatic scheduling software such as Calendly allows people to book time slots on your calendar, which is efficient as it doesn’t require manual coordination. The problem is that is signals that everything else on the calendar is more important than meeting them, which is not effective for relationship building.
Another exercise is to assign “energy colors” to all activities on the calendar (again, assuming they are all on the calendar). Use ‘green’ for activities that give you energy, ‘yellow’ for ones that do not give or take so much, and ‘red’ for ones that take energy. It visualizes how much of the week is “positive” and “negative”. Then go over the red and yellow ones and think whether you can do something about them — stop, shorten, delegate, etc.
You can replace the word “energy” with any other criterion.
I have created a calendar etiquette, which makes it easy for everyone to collaborate, especially as we are remote:
- Set the working hours on the calendar
- Schedule big breaks and planned absences
- RSVP to meetings and keep the up to date
- Share the calendar for transparency (no trust-breaking “busy” calendars)
- Decline meetings when out of office (vacation, sickness, etc.)
- Set agenda for each event
- Start and finish on time. Always. Don’t punish people who came on time by waiting for ones who are late
- Make events editable by others so they can be easily modified by others
- Speedy meetings
Distractions a.k.a addictions
Check emails 2–3 times per day. Schedule this on the calendar.
A common time-waster is to read an email and mark it unread in order to deal with it later. The more efficient approach is to either do the task on the moment if it’s 2 minutes or less, or to schedule on the calendar with all the relevant information.
Email is usually expected to be responded within 24 hours and is not used for urgent things (no one notifies about fire in the building via email).
Similarly, organization chat, such as Slack, can be checked every hour or two. Continuously checking it on every free moment (or worse, during meetings) without discipline causes stress and constant noise.
You can also experiment with removing notifications about messages or configured the email client to pull emails on predetermined times. This helps with reducing stress and respecting the time slots of checking emails.
Let others know about your communication preferences and set expectations, namely about email and Slack frequency. Many prefer to use Slack, but as the receiver, you cannot see the priorities, and are required to read each message fully in order to decide what to do with it, which consumes more time. With email, you can see the subject and quickly prioritize. You can aslo use cues in the subject, such as “FYA” (for your action), “FYI” (for your information, no action required), “EOM” (end of message, there is only email subject, no body), etc.
When we say “yes” to requests, we commit.
Say “no” to random requests that are not in line with the goals — we love to help and unblock others, but it risks our planned work and increases our stress when it’s out of the focus area we had decided upon. For example, if we dedicate the quarter to working on security, and we get a request to work on improving sales, it’s not in line. If there is a team Slack channel to post requests, and you receive private requests, insist that they are posted publicly and handled within SLAs.
We do not want to be efficient over effective or ruin relationships, so another way is to ask the person with the new request, that can be your boss, what not to do instead. Note the usage of ‘and’ instead of ‘but’:
“I am happy to work on this task, and it means I have to drop other things. What should I stop doing?” Or end with “Can I do it next week?”
Remain focused. Whether you are using OKRs, MBO or any other goal setting framework, keep working on the most important things, a.k.a the priority. This helps filtering out tasks that are not contributing to the decided upon goals (and still need to consider whether “starving” the non-priorities is the right thing to do).
When setting goals and/or committing to tasks, we want to be ambitious, and still not overpromise and under-deliver. We want to keep things realistic. At the same time, we want to communicate clearly to others and not have “maybe” if we don’t really intend to work on things.
Avoid multitasking, which we saw only lengthens the time to completion.
Break big tasks into smaller ones in order to make steady progress. Moreover, psychologically, big tasks are scary and hard to achieve and encourage procrastination.
For example, instead of a task to create an onboarding document, break it down to creating technical onboarding, workplace policy onboarding, team onboarding, tools onboarding, etc.
Cut down on voluntary work. By voluntary work I mean tasks you’ve taken upon on top of your job. Whether you’re organizing meetups, help cleaning the office kitchen, watering the plants, being in charge of the library — see whether they can be delegated or dropped altogether.
Leverage
There are activities in which we invest time and we get much more of it back, as the performance of others will increase — they will be able to do more, be more independent, work on the right things and work on things the right way. Examples:
- Thorough onboarding and other types of documentation
- 1:1s in order to build trust, understand intrinsic motivation, align and realign on goals and priorities
- Giving positive and negative feedback
- Teaching, coaching, mentoring
- Delegating
Having target dates for tasks makes things easier. Those can be agreed upon together. When the task is “Create interview questions for junior developer”, then changing it to “Create interview questions for junior developer by January 20th at 17:00 CET” is much clearer, and allows for precise feedback in case of failure.
If you’ve been managing for a while, you’re probably familiar with the wasteful need to chase others asking whether they are finished with their task.
An effective way to eliminate it is to attach notifying finishing to the task. For example, instead of “Create draft for Q1 strategy presentation by January 20th at 17:00 CET”, have “Share with me the draft for Q1 strategy presentation by January 20th at 17:00 CET”.
Meetings
Meetings are an important tool to align, collaborate and get stuff done. Yet some meetings have low ROI and you need to consider whether to attend.
Meetings have a price. There’s even an app for it.
The joke is that you need approval from your boss, her boss and Finance department to purchase a $12 book, but you can easily schedule an hour long meeting with 6 participants paid over $100 per hour each.
Think — is the meeting really necessary? Would a shared document we work asynchronously on suffice? Could this meeting be an email or some other report sent to participants?
Does the meeting have a clear purpose and an agenda? Is it about decision making, sharing knowledge, collecting information or aligning?
Is it clear what the topics are and the time each takes? If not, approach the organizer and ask for the relevant information in order to decide whether you should join.
Some meetings can be shortened with some pre-work. For example, in an “OKR check-in” meeting, we can collect all the numbers and facts before the meeting instead of doing it together wasting a lot of time. Similarly, prepare and read required material before meetings.
You may have meetings with clearly low value, learning or participation, and still have some kind of status attached to them, e.g. “group leadership”, or “executive check in”. If this is really the case, and it’s serving only your ego and wouldn’t cause political damage, ask whether you can stop participating.
This is also true for other participants — maybe not all should be there, or maybe not every meeting, and they could rotate the participation.
Consider reducing frequency. Experiment with changing a weekly meeting to once every two weeks. (But not 1:1s with direct reports!)
Protect the time in which you’re most productive for individual (deep) work by moving or asking to move meetings to other times.
If you’re most focused early in the morning, move meetings to the afternoon as much as possible.
You’re probably familiar with the “Let’s wait a few more minutes for more people to join”. When there are already 50 people on time and each waits 3 minutes, it’s a loss of 150 minutes, and a punishment for those being on time.
Always start and finish on time. Don’t wait for late people, ever. People will learn that your meetings start on time.
When someone joins late, do not move the focus to them, scold or repeat information for them. You can do it after the meeting if necessary.
Lead by example. If you’re late, do not make others repeat things for you.
Same for finishing on time — your colleagues may have other planned duties or need breaks. Do not act as if time doesn’t exist and assume they can simply be late for their next activities. This is highly disrespectful to them.
Unto others
Respect others’ time as well. If you’re the highest authority and think that you can show up late due to role power or to signal how busy you are, note that others see it as a surprising inability to manage your time.
Be on time and finish on time.
We don’t live in vacuum — when you finish a task, someone else is doing something with the deliverable, so notify when you finish, the earlier the better. If you cannot meet a deadline, notify as early as possible.
Tools
- Pen and paper
- Calendar
- Pomodoro for forcing breaks (e.g. Pomofocus)
- Todo apps (e.g. todoist)
- Reminders (phone, calendar)
- Automatic scheduling (e.g. Calendly or clockwise)
- Work/Project/Task management tools (e.g. Jira, Trello, monday, asana)
Resources
- “Manager Tools” podcast
- “Getting Things Done” by David Allen
- “The Effective Executive” by Drucker
- “High Output Management” by Andy Grove
