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Simple Time Management

THERE ARE THE super-organized among us—those who schedule every minute and stick to the plan to the letter—and then there’s the rest of us. We plan our schedules, but our days don’t usually resemble the plan very much.

Of course, that’s because things change, and we have to be able to go with the flow. Time management, especially for the more fluid work arrangements of many people these days, doesn’t have to be a rigid or time-consuming process.

Keep time management simple and avoid rigidity or complicated schedules.

AN OPEN APPROACH

For those who are overwhelmed by a schedule, and would like to take a more open approach, I suggest minimalist time management. Instead of allowing your life to be ruled by your calendar, let your life be ruled by the moment.

How can you do that? First, don’t schedule appointments. This will be a radical departure for many people, but it’s not a new idea and it’s worked for others. If someone requests an appointment, tell them that you don’t schedule appointments. Instead, ask them to call you a little before they’d like to meet to see if you can make it. If you’re free, take the meeting. I suggest keeping your meetings to a bare minimum if you want to get a lot of work done. Now, there will be some things you’ll want to note on a calendar (I use Google Calendar, accessible from anywhere). These are events that you’d like to have on your calendar, but you don’t necessarily have to go to them. The calendar, then, serves as a way for you to see what your options are, but not as a tool to rule your life. I suggest not keeping too much on the calendar, though.

What do you do instead of keeping a schedule? Know your priorities (see the next section) and from moment to moment, decide what you should be doing based on your priorities, how much time you have available, and your energy level.

Learn to be in the moment, focusing on one task at a time, and immersing yourself completely in that task. If you aren’t finding yourself passionate about a certain task, allow yourself to move on to something you’re more passionate about. The more passionate you are about a task or project, the more energy you’ll put into it, and the better you’ll do with it.

Immersing yourself in a task, completely, is a phenomenon called “flow.” Flow has gotten a lot of attention recently, in both the scientific world and the world of productivity, because people have discovered that the state of flow can lead to increased productivity and happiness. Basically, flow is a state of mind that occurs when you lose yourself in a task, and the world around you disappears. You lose track of time. We’ve all experienced this from time to time—the trick is learning how to purposefully get yourself into flow.

The way to get into flow:

1. Choose a task you’re passionate about. If it’s something you don’t care about, you won’t find flow.
2. Choose a task that’s challenging. But not too challenging—if it’s too difficult, you’ll have a hard time getting into flow. If it’s too easy, you’ll get bored.
3. Eliminate distractions. The less you think about other things, the better. You want to focus completely on this task. Get rid of distractions such as phones, e-mail notifications, instant-messaging, clutter on your desk or computer desktop, etc.
4. Immerse yourself in the task. Just start on the task, and focus completely on it. Forget about everything else, and let the world melt away. Get excited about the task and have fun. Warning: You may lose track of time and be late for your next appointment—which is why it’s a bad idea to schedule too many appointments.

KNOW YOUR PRIORITIES

If you have an open schedule, how do you know what you should be working on at any given moment? Priorities. See the last chapter on Most Important Tasks (MITs)—basically, you should decide first thing in the morning what you want to accomplish each day. Make a short list of three things you’d really like to accomplish. Your three most important things. You can have a short list of other small tasks you’d like to do in a batch (save them for later in the day), but the focus of your day should be the list of three important things. Let this list, and not your schedule, be the ruler of your day.

Once you’ve set your priorities, the trick is finding focus. I highly recommend that you focus on one thing at a time. To get your short list of three important tasks completed, you’ll need to focus on each one of those tasks in turn, and try to focus on them to completion. This will also be a radical departure for the multitasker in all of us. But single-tasking is not only more productive, it’s more relaxing as well.

It will take a little while for you to get used to single-tasking, if you are used to jumping from one thing to another and back. That’s OK. Just gently bring yourself back to your task every time you feel yourself being pulled away. Keep at it and you’ll soon be knocking off your most important tasks easily.

While you’re working on your task, you’ll think of other things you need to do, or be interrupted by a coworker with a request, or an idea will pop into your head. You can’t let those ideas and requests rule your life. Instead of switching tasks, just make a note of other tasks or ideas as they come up, to consider for later. Have a sheet of paper or a small notebook or a text file on your computer (or wherever you write your list of three important tasks), and get back to the task you were working on. When you’re done with that task, you can take a look at your list to see what you should be working on next.

REDUCE YOUR TASKS

The fewer tasks you have, the less you have to do to organize them. If you focus only on those tasks that give you the most return on your time investment, then you will become more productive and have less to do. You will need only the simplest tools and system, and you will be much less stressed. I think that’s a winning combination.

With task management, as with any type of organization, my philosophy is to reduce before you organize. If you only have three things to organize, instead of twenty, you actually don’t need to organize. With time management, that means you should reduce what you need to do. You can eliminate tasks, delegate them, postpone them, get out of commitments. Focus always on simplifying, reducing, eliminating. And keep your focus on what’s important. Everything else is easy.

BATCH PROCESSING

Aside from your three Most Important Tasks, there are always smaller tasks you need to complete each day. The trick is 1) not to let these smaller tasks take priority over your Most Important Tasks, and 2) to do them in batches as much as possible to save time. Computer programmers call this last trick “batch processing” or “batching”—you save similar tasks and then do them all at once. It saves the time it costs to switch between tasks, because instead of switching from important tasks to phone calls to e-mails to meetings to projects to phone calls again, you do all the important tasks first, then phone calls at once, all the e-mails at once, etc. Less switching means fewer complications, less time wasted, and a simpler schedule.

Make a note of these types of “batch tasks” on your to-do list, below your list of three MITs. You can group the batch tasks into different categories (“calls”, “e-mails”, etc.) or just have a list of “batch tasks.” I highly recommend that you wait until later in the day to process these batch tasks, instead of doing them early in the day. Save the mornings for your important tasks, get them out of the way, then focus on knocking out your batch tasks as quickly as possible.

What kinds of tasks work well for batching? Here are some ideas:

• Phone calls. Instead of making calls throughout the day, just make a note of the calls you need to make, and do them all at once. I often reserve about thirty minutes for calls, but your needs may vary. You might also consider only receiving phone calls during a certain time—route everything to voice mail during the times you’re unavailable. This will allow you to concentrate on the important tasks, rather than being interrupted every time someone feels like calling you.
• E-mails. This is a huge issue for most of us these days—e-mail has become so important that it can rule our lives if we let it. I’ll expand on this topic in the next chapter, but basically, to batch your e-mails, just check and process e-mails at certain predetermined times throughout the day. I suggest twice a day—perhaps at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., or whatever works best for you. Avoid doing it first thing in the morning, or you’ll get so caught up in your e-mail that you’ll push back your important tasks.
• Errands. Do all your errands at once to save the time it takes for you to go out of the home or office. You might do them at the end of the day, or save one day as your Errands Day.
• Paperwork. I don’t have a lot of paperwork these days (I’ve gone paperless), but that’s not a luxury for most offices. If you have a lot of paperwork you have to process or fill out or review, do that all at once rather than throughout the day.
• In-box processing. Similar to e-mail processing once or twice a day, in-box processing is going through the papers in your physical in-box to determine what action, if any, is required for each document. If you do this as papers come into your in-box, you’ll be ruled by that, instead of being in control of your schedule. Instead, set a certain time to process your entire in-box to empty.
• Meetings. You might not be in control of meetings, but if you are, I recommend that you do them all at once, at a certain time, and set a very defined purpose and time limit for each meeting. It helps to batch meetings because then you have a larger part of your workday open for important tasks. If possible, avoid meetings altogether—they’re most often a waste of time.
• Different Web sites. If you’re like me, there are certain Web sites that you check regularly. Instead of letting these sites interrupt your important tasks, set a certain time to check them and do them all at once.
• Research. Some jobs require that you do research or reading in preparation for writing. Do this all at once if possible.
• Maintenance. There are little tasks that we must do as maintenance for our jobs—for bloggers like me, those are things like checking reader comments, checking or tweaking our ad systems, doing HTML code tweaks, and so on. For other jobs, there are other maintenance tasks—not your important projects or tasks, but little things that still need to be done. Batch these at the end of your day, if possible.

SIMPLE TIME MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Time management wouldn’t be simple if you had too many tools, or tools that were too complicated, to manage the system. If you’ve followed the simple time management philosophy outlined above, you won’t need a lot of tools.

Here are some simple tools you might use:

• Calendar. Instead of using a hefty organizer, or a complicated computer program, I recommend that you keep it as simple as possible. If you have few appointments, you might try a simple paper wall calendar—basically just boxes where you can note one or two appointments or events each day. If you have other things that need to be noted, such as your kids’ soccer schedules and parent-teacher organization meetings, you might use an online calendar—I highly recommend Google Calendar, as it is simple, quick, and easy, and accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. The paper calendar or Google Calendar can also be used as a “tickler file” to mark reminders for things you want to remember later.
• Paper notebook or text file. I recommend a simple pocket notebook, and that’s all. You can use this notebook to capture everything as you think of it, to write down your MITs and batch process tasks for today, and to write down your One Goal. If you only have one tool, you don’t need to worry about it too much. If you’d prefer to use the computer to write down your tasks, I recommend just using a simple text file. That’s my current setup: I have a to-do text file, and pop it open when I need to write down a task or idea. At the top of the text file are my MITs for the day, and below that are my batch tasks, and below that are other notes or ideas that might come up. I process it once a day.