Improve your time management skills today, not tomorrow
Covid, a new relationship, a family illness. Many factors that can bring disruption to your daily routine and challenge your time management. Before engaging hectically into new year’s resolutions, now is a good time to reflect on your time management skills and learn how to get better at it.
Time-management is defined as “the decision-making process that structures, protects, and adjusts a person’s time to changing environmental conditions” (Dierdorff, 2020). Here, we distinguish two types of challenges : short-term time management-how to get a task done in a given time interval- and long-term time management -how to get things done while still accomplishing what matters to you at the end of the week or the month, this is where we will put our focus on in this article.
1. Be aware of your time — Identify constraints
Time is money, do we commonly say. Realizing how limited a resource time is and what your constraints are both represent essential steps towards awareness of your time management. Research proves that most people lack accurate self-awareness on their time management. So conduct your own research : microsimulations are available, ask your friends or co-workers for feedback, evaluate how long you took for a task and compare it how long you thought it would take. To avoid procrastinating, a simple exercise is to break your day into four parts to identify when you are the most productive and plan accordingly. Also, being aware of your personality traits -such as a preference for multitasking or proactiveness- is good to understand where you might struggle but be aware that changing those patterns is not going to have a significant impact on your time management skills.
2. Set your priorities — Where to focus
Evaluating how long you took for a task isn’t only about raising awareness, it should also be about realizing whether the time spent matches the value you place in that task -even if you finished it long before the deadline. Avoid the “sunk cost fallacy” (Dierdorff, 2020) : if you feel that you have been spending too much time on an unfinished task, take a step back and assess how important it is to you. If a task is 80% completed, ask yourself if pursuing the 20% left will bring you as much value as getting on to the next task. To ease the process of setting your priorities, imagine that you have 100 points and allocate them across the week. Identify both fixed time -activities you must do- and variable time -activities you would like to do. You shouldn’t overweigh yourself with what others expect from you, the focus is on you. What do you need to be happy ? What makes you feel alive, strong and confident ? Exercising for half an hour every other day, watching a movie every other week-end, listening to music, giving phone calls to relatives, reading or checking the news every morning. Identify the frequency and length of these activities in order to achieve a personal balance. This is not about setting unrealistic goals or completely changing your usual routine, this is about identifying and defining the minimum conditions for your happiness that are reachable within your current environment. You want to help yourself embody who you are. Defining goals and priorities is different from defining the means to achieve them — you want to keep flexibility to adapt to disrupting conditions, like switching to online gym sessions.
3. Arrange your schedule — Take back control of your life and structure work around it instead of doing it the other way round
Once you have your goals and priorities sorted out, it is time to organize your plans, schedules and tasks accordingly, from top to bottom. You want to distinguish important tasks that have long-term implications from urgent tasks that must be done immediately. While planning time estimations for each task, you might want to ask a close friend for their opinion on your forecasts and reassess afterwards. Save time slots for yourself to work on your most important projects or to enjoy fun breaks. Building a schedule should be about releasing the pressure, not putting more on yourself. A good hint is to divide your tasks into several smaller tasks. As soon as you learn of a deadline or an appointment, record it in your calendar app and use colors for each category of activities (work, personal life, school, etc).
Does this mean that you should plan every minute of your life, set deadlines and targets for everyday tasks ? No, one extreme is not better than the other. Test what works best on you and implement accordingly. The objective here is for you to feel better in control of life, and to be aware of when deadlines are arriving that you should anticipate. That way, you will enjoy both better-quality free time and valuable activities more regularly.
4. Respect your schedule and adapt — Stay focused on your goals
You might need an adaptation phase to better assess your speed for each activity. Envision best case and worst case scenarios for your plans in order to better adapt to disruptions. One should also keep in mind the difference between efficiency -doing things fast- and effectiveness -doing things well. Overall, adapting also means taking action against distractions, like social media, in order to better concentrate. If one task seems too difficult, give yourself a 15- to 30-minute interval where you put maximum effort in for it, or break it down into several tasks. Taking regular short breaks between high intensity working slots allows for better productivity. You can also set timers, use time-trackers, and checklist apps. At the end of the day, reflect on your progress, recognize what you haven’t been able to do, but also what you were able to do and identify what conditions allowed for that success.
Bibliography
- HBR, Time Management Is About More Than Life Hacks, E. Dierdorff, 2020
