Personal Productivity105
impact for you, personally and professionally? For example, assess whether
you are spending more time on a side project than you should, not enough
time planning for the future, and whether you are taking enough breaks
in your day to stay productive. Are there activities you’ve been doing that
really should be performed by someone else—or not at all? Look for items
that you might hand off to a colleague or a direct report.
Step 3: Make a goal-driven master plan
Look at your list of activity categories and allocate time to each based on
your goals and priorities. You’ll have to make smart trade-offs here, and
it might take some iteration to get right. The fi rst time through, ask your-
self: “In an ideal world, how much time would I spend on these activities?”
These numbers may not add up to forty or even sixty hours each week.
So the second time, ask yourself, “What’s the minimum amount of time I
can afford to spend on these activities?” Minimize the amount of time you
are spending on low-priority items; this can free up time for more impor-
tant work.
In a well-balanced schedule, however, your highest-priority items may
end up occupying only a small fraction of your time, and that’s OK. Your
mission here is only to fi nd enough time in your schedule to meet these
goals, and if that’s a mere fi ve or ten hours a week, that’s fi ne.
Step 4: Execute your plan: time boxing
Now it’s time to allocate the time you’ve assigned to each item into a sched-
ule. Using a technique called time boxing, you’ll break your schedule into
short blocks and then slot a category into each block, breaking it up into
tasks. (See exhibit 7-1.)
Start by reviewing the week ahead: What deadlines, meetings, and
tasks are coming up? What longer-term commitments do you need to work
on in this time frame? Then prioritize that task list. Put deadline-sensitive
items up top (“Prepare for presentation on Wednesday”), followed by goal-
oriented actions (“Research strategic plan”). You’ll schedule both of these
around your recurring obligations (“Weekly staff meeting”). Note the cat-
egories that these tasks fall into.