Make Time to Make Time

We’ve all heard the phrase that “if you don’t take control of your time, someone else will” and I’m sure if we took a good look at how we spend our working hours, days, weeks, months, or even years we’d all notice how much time we’ve spent (or wasted) delving into other people’s priorities (meetings, emails, and calls), constantly task-switching without focusing our productive energy on completing our own priorities and trying to finish them all in a rush before it’s dinner time.

We all have the same amount of time in a day — 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds. Doesn’t that make you wonder, how some people achieve more in a day than others achieve so little?

I’m no time-management guru or expert but after analyzing for a couple of weeks how I spent my time I’ve learned that the two biggest time-killers for me were being Reactive and Mult-Tasking. What I’m going to share with you are a few concepts, tips, and tricks I’ve learned from my coaches and mentors and put into practice that helped me take better control of my time and achieve more in less.

Bosses don’t pay for your time, they pay for results

Realize early on that although you get paid a salary for a set number of hours that you work for each week, month or year, that bosses don’t really care too much about how much time you clock in each day, they care more about the quality of results you generate.

You’re not in a Jail where you’re “doing time” — so throw out the mindset where working more hours in a day equates to you being more productive.

Taking Control of My Time (Money)

My boss pays me for 38 hours a week of my time and expects me to head a software practice, manage multiple client and internal projects to timelines and budget, do a couple of sales calls, learn new things, train, coach, mentor, and manage a team of about a dozen, resolve internal and client conflicts and produce predictable, repeatable and profitable outcomes — this roughly takes a couple of client visits each week, 20–25 short meetings, a couple of hundred emails, a couple of hundred timesheet entries, etc to review, digest, reply to and work through and TBH it can get quite overwhelming at times.

If I was making $1,600 a week for working a 40 hour week that translates to me making $40 per hour. If I spent 20 hours a week in meetings and had to work an extra 40 hours a week to get my work done that meant I was working for 60 hours a week for the same pay — effectively dropping my hourly rate to $1,600/60 = $26.67.

This realization is what made me want to take back control of my time (money) and not let others do so. Re-iterating the quote at the beginning of this article “if you don’t take control of your time, someone else will”, and this was true for me and my calendar until I started Time-Blocking. If my calendar was empty, people just booked it for anything and everything, even if I contributed or not. This is how I started time-blocking to manage (or at least closely manage) all of the above.

But, by the time I finish all my meetings and emails to respond to, there’s no time to get any work done

Living in the information age, we all have a hundred emails each day to read, digest, reply to, and out of them another couple of dozen of tasks to get done.

In every workplace, there are two kinds of people and you’ll notice this by taking a look at their Calendars

1. People Who Brag About Being in Back-to-Back Meetings and Multi-Tasking
2. People who a problem solvers and just get things done

The difference between these two types is that the first will always brag about how busy they are multi-tasking and have no time to do much work because they’re stuck in back to back meetings — these fellows Deeply Misunderstand Productivity whereas the latter could get a lot done working multiple projects, learning new things and also helping others along the way.

Why Multitasking Is A Myth, Backed By Science

The only way I’ve managed to move from the former to the latter was by learning to respect my own time and subsequently others, I booked fewer (unnecessary) meetings, declined meetings that didn’t have an agenda or ones that I didn’t add value to, and used email to communicate and make decisions on what can be made via email.

40 hrs per week — 8 per day

Dedicate 20% of the time for yourself

80/20 principle where 80% of the outcomes are achieved through 20% of work

Self Learning — 5 hrs per week

New technology, software skills, etc through courses, certification, blog posts, etc) — 5 hrs per week (1hr per day)

“If knowledge is power, learning is your superpower.” — Jim Kwik

Training and Mentoring Others — 1.5 hr per week

teaching people the new things I’ve learned by sharing — at least 1 hr per week

To teach someone is to learn it twice-Joseph Joubert

Walking and Thinking — 1.5 hrs per week

30-minute post-lunch walk each day to:

• avoid the midday post-lunch-slump
• think about solutions for problems

As your body moves, your brain grooves — Jim Kwik

60% of the time for Focused Productive Work

You’ve taken 1/5 days for Learning and Coaching, you’re left with 4 days = 32/40 hours (or 30.4 hrs if you’re paid for 38 hrs per week or have 7.6 hr days). You’ve still got multiple projects with results to deliver, emails, and meetings to fit in within this.

If you’re working on 3 projects at any given time

• block at least 8hrs/1 day per week of focused time per project = 24 hrs 3 days — this will involve doing the task, reading, and replying to emails related to that project.
• spread these as 25-minute chunks of focused time per task with 5-minute breaks between each task using a Pomodoro Technique
• that’s 16 x 25-minute blocks per backlog item per project
• 16 tasks per project x 3 projects that are the potential of completing 48 tasks per week
• avoid interruptions and task-switching during this 25-minute block of focused time

Give dedicated time (20%) to others

Leave the balance — 1 day (8hrs) for Other Emails and Reactive time

Block some time for reading other emails if you don’t get to all of them during project time. Keep a reasonable allowance of time open in your calendar to give others the opportunity to make use of your wisdom.

Being “busy” all the time doesn’t necessarily equate to being “productive”.

This all might look good on paper but how can I really do this?

• Each day is a new battle to say yes to what matters and no to what matters. “Focus is a practice”. Saying “Yes” to something means you’re saying “No” to a bunch of other things
• Think, Time = Money.
• Let your calendar define your schedule— block time for your priority tasks
• Use Parkinsons Law to your Advantage — https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/what-is-parkinsons-law