Keep Yourself on Track
Good time management is based on preparation. Once you establish goals, set priorities, and develop a plan, it will be easier to stick with it. But, as you can probably guess, even if you invest time in preparing, it won’t always be easy. It doesn’t matter if you’re extremely organized and self-disciplined; you’re going to find yourself in trouble from time to time. There will be roadblocks along the way, and you may fall back into bad habits.
Common weak spots and challenges that cause us to deviate from our well-intentioned plans include deadlines, a proclivity for procrastination, and interruptions—including email and meetings. Manage each of these well and you’ll be on your way to staying on track.
Manage your deadlines
Deadlines for big projects can be daunting. This is especially true if you have a lot of other work on your plate (and who ever has just one project?). Your schedule, your colleagues, and your project may suffer if you don’t manage the deadline well.
If you fail to set aside adequate time to complete a project, and the deadline is approaching at a fast clip, you’ll have to drop everything else at once. The project, whether you like it or not, is now your most urgent and important task (and, suddenly, the most urgent and important tasks for others involved in the project who are depending on you). The rest of your to-do list will need to wait—no matter what important items remain on it. And if there’s a last-minute change to the project, or you get a surprise assignment that’s unrelated, you may be left without options other than missing your deadline.
On the other hand, the better you are at preparing for deadlines, the more reliable and effective you will be at doing your job.
Here’s how to make deadlines doable.
Plan from the beginning
Does the following scenario sound familiar? When you originally got the assignment, you made a quick mental note, a guess really, about how long the project might take to complete, and then you didn’t give it a second thought. But now that you’ve started it, the truth hits you. What you thought would take a few days to finish is going to take you a week or two, and you’re going to miss your deadline.
This situation is easy to avoid with some disciplined planning. When you’re first given a deadline, always take the time to estimate how long the work will really take you to complete. Think about how you will do it: Will you break it out into pieces? Are there logical stages—perhaps some that depend on others’ contributions or feedback? Once you understand all the tasks involved and have estimated how long they will take, work backward from the due date and set yourself smaller deadlines along the way. Give yourself enough time to get it all done at a calm and comfortable pace.
It may sound silly to do this for small tasks, but even then it will help you be realistic about what you will need to accomplish when. So be disciplined about doing this with each assignment you get.
Sequence big to small
If you can, it’s also helpful to sequence your project so that each successive subtask is shorter and easier than the last—that is, start with the most difficult and time-sensitive tasks, and end with the least.
Sequencing allows you to get the hardest and most time-consuming parts of a project out of the way first. This should keep your motivation high throughout the process—by the time you’re finished with the first few tasks, the rest is easy! It will also prevent you from stalling near the finish line, since you’re not leaving the toughest work for last.
Sequencing also allows you to track your progress against the deadline you’re trying to meet. Say you’re three weeks into a six-week assignment, and you’ve completed half the tasks on your list. Because you front-loaded your schedule with the most challenging and time-consuming tasks, you can be confident that you’ll meet your deadline, since the second half of your list should take you less time to finish than the first.
If you find yourself behind schedule, you’ll know to adjust your estimates and to allocate more time to the project going forward. As long as you catch it early on, your deadline should still be within reach.
Overcome procrastination
We all put off work—usually more so the more we dread actually doing that particular task.
That’s not always a bad thing. If the work is unimportant and non-urgent, it should be low on your list of priorities in the first place, after all. But when you have the choice to do (a) more important work, (b) less important work, or (c) nothing at all, and you consistently pick (b) or (c), procrastination can become a real problem.
Understanding why you’re procrastinating can help you stop. Often it’s because either the task is something that you don’t want to do, that you’re not good at doing, or that you find too daunting. Whenever you feel the urge to procrastinate, ask yourself if one of those reasons is the culprit.
Once you pinpoint the cause, use one of these remedies.
• Set deadlines. Deadlines hold you accountable, so they’re particularly helpful if you just don’t want to do something. Deadlines work for larger projects that are too daunting as well: Just break the project down into smaller tasks, and set a deadline for each. Each chunk will be easier to approach, and you know when you need to complete it, so you’ll be less likely to put it off. (See more on starting small below.)
• Start small. When we don’t want to do something, especially a big and difficult task, dread can sink in, and procrastination rears its ugly head. More often than not, however, the dread dissipates when we actually get down to work. The key is to start small. If you’re dreading giving a presentation, for example—all that preparation, not to mention the public speaking—don’t imagine that you have to tackle the prep work all at once. Do some research, take notes, or brainstorm. Consider it a warm-up of sorts. Once you’re comfortable, you’ll be more apt to jump into the rest of the project without trepidation.
• Ask for help. If you’re having trouble with something, ask a colleague for assistance rather than postponing your work on it. It sounds like common sense, but our coworkers are a resource that many of us don’t utilize enough; instead we struggle, get stuck, and then put the work aside (because somehow later it will be easier?). But if a colleague can provide you with a quick answer or point you in the right direction, or even listen to you talk through your thinking on something, you’ll get the task done, you’ll learn something, and you’ll help build a relationship with this individual.
• Make it a game. We also procrastinate if a task provides us with little to no satisfaction, such as filing or filling out expense reports. We dislike doing these tasks, and once we finish them, we don’t experience a buzz of accomplishment. So make a game out of it: Group a bunch of your menial tasks together, set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes, and get to work. If the tasks require more thought and attention, and your time limit isn’t wise, you can always challenge yourself to improve.
Avoid interruptions
Not all interruptions—from non-urgent emails to crises—are created equal, but sometimes we treat them as if they were. We get caught up in the rush, and respond to everything right away regardless of its importance and urgency.
Give yourself some ground rules to ensure that if your attention is being diverted, you are making the right choice about what to focus on at that time. Here are some rules of thumb:
• If the problem is urgent and important, take care of it as soon as possible. Yes, it will steal your focus from the task at hand, but as discussed in the previous chapter, this category of concerns should be your highest priority.
• If the problem doesn’t need immediate attention and it’s going to take up more than a few minutes of your time, then move it to a time box that you’ve dedicated for less urgent work.
• If none of the options above are viable, refer the interrupting person to a colleague who could also handle his or her problem as well as—maybe even better—than you could.
We all have a love≠hate relationship with email. It’s an efficient way to communicate, but it can also eat up a lot of time, especially if you open and respond to each and every message right away.
Some of the push and pull of email is unavoidable. If you work in a client-based or customer-centric business, for example, you may need to keep a close eye on your inbox all day long. But think hard about whether the nature of your work really requires you to be “on” all the time. If not, there’s no reason to drop what you’re doing every time you receive an email—especially if you’re focused on another task. Sure, you want to be responsive and alert, but you also don’t want to be in reaction mode all day. It will kill your focus.
Email can provide a refuge from more difficult tasks, so it is easy for it to turn into a time-wasting trap: First you answer one non-urgent email, then another, then another, then another. If this occurs multiple times an hour—which is very common—you’ll end up taking valuable time away from more important work.
If you find yourself accidentally surrendering more time to new message notifications than you’d like, try dedicating small blocks of time each day to email. First thing in the morning, every hour, before or after lunch, or right before you call it a night—these are all great times to respond to non-urgent messages.
Remember: Your objective is to devote as much focus, energy, and time as possible to the things that are most important to you. By restricting the times during which you can be distracted by email, you’ll allow yourself more time for uninterrupted work.
Meetings
Meetings, especially if you’re a manager, can take up a large amount of your day. But when you’re shuttling from conference room to conference room for hours at a time, it’s hard to get important work done.
Meetings do serve important purposes: They keep everyone informed, solicit critical points of view, and even encourage social interaction. But some meetings fail to meet those goals; they’re superfluous and inefficient. Those are the meetings to watch out for.
Whether you “own” meetings or whether you’re just an attendee, consider whether the time you’re spending in conference rooms is valuable—more so than the other work you could be doing in that time.
If you run meetings:
• Don’t always default to an hour-long meeting time. Sometimes the agenda only warrants a half hour or less. Consider scheduling a 20-minute or a 50-minute meeting so you and your attendees can complete follow-up tasks within the remaining 10 minutes.
• Cancel an instance of a recurring meeting—say, a weekly staff meeting—if you don’t have an agenda.
• If you’re scheduling a meeting to share information, consider whether a simple email would be an adequate option. Reserve meetings for items that require a direct response from team members, or if the matter is sensitive enough that attendees will want to hear from you in person (but not so sensitive that it should be handled one-on-one).
If you are a meeting invitee:
• Be more selective when accepting meeting invitations. Ask yourself this question: If you were to call in sick the day of the meeting, would it need to be rescheduled? If the answer is no, then you may be able to decline it. This can be risky, however. The other participants may make important decisions without you, or a higher-up may notice your absence. You can mitigate some of these risks by getting approval from your boss or the meeting leader beforehand and following up with the important parties after the meeting to see if they need your input on any of the discussion points.
• If you’re swamped with work and need some breathing room, evaluate the meetings already on your calendar. Do you have an instance of a recurring meeting that doesn’t have an agenda posted? Are there any meetings you could skip or move? Don’t assume that just because a meeting is on your calendar that that time is inviolable. However, if you’re declining a meeting after accepting it, verify with the organizer that your role in the meeting is not critical—and as a common courtesy to let him or her know you won’t be there—and follow up with colleagues later that day, or ask to see the meeting notes if you need to catch up.
Meetings can be difficult to manage because they’re often beyond your control. Unless you own the meeting, you don’t decide its time or length or what’s covered. But know that you can make more constructive choices. You’re valuable to your organization because of the quality of your work, not the number of meeting invitations that you accept. Being more selective about which meetings you attend reflects your ability to prioritize and manage your time well.
Think on your feet
These traps and roadblocks are ever-present in our work lives; you won’t be able to completely avoid them. But if you’re always on the lookout for them, and have a solid plan in place for dealing with them, you’ll do a better job making good time-management decisions as these challenges come up, and get back on track as quickly as possible.