Remarkable Tools for Time Management
Struggles with time management are something I hear a lot from coaching clients. So often there just aren’t enough hours in the day, and before they know it, they’re behind on pretty much everything.
If you’re experiencing this struggle, I totally understand – because for many years I was in the same boat! For so long I thought I just needed to learn the right productivity technique and suddenly I’d be able to take care of everything on my to-do list.
But the truth is I was simply adding too many things to my to-do list and no matter how efficient I was, it just wasn’t humanly possible to do them all in the time I’d allotted.
Time Management & Staying Focused
Today’s questioner asked not only about time management, but also about staying focused. These are both big topics and I have so many techniques to share, I’ve broken this question into two different episodes – today we’ll cover time management. And catch next week’s episode for all my favorite tools for staying focused!
Please approach this with a sense of play and exploration, try each technique and see which one (or ones) work for you!
I’ve also created a Worksheet for this episode you can use it as a reference to remind you of the tools and techniques to help you with time management the next time your find yourself wishing you could add an extra five hours to the day. Grab your copy using the pop-up on this page or the form below.
Reduce overcommitment
As a people-pleaser I struggled for most of my life to say no. It was so easy to just say yes to everything and everyone. No one was disappointed in me, and I got to feel like the hero taking care of everyone else.
But when I got really honest with myself, I discovered I was actually short changing everyone – including myself. I said yes to so many things I couldn’t actually give any of them the time and attention they deserved. And I was constantly exhausted, overwhelmed, and stressed out. Which meant I wasn’t particularly enjoyable to spend time with!
Every yes is also a no
Reducing overcommitment starts with remembering every yes is also a no. I talked about this in Episode 5 where we covered who and what you’re actually responsible for. If you identify with the feeling of overcommitment, this is a great episode to go back to.
To quickly review – when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to anything else you could use that time, energy, or other resource for. And when you say no to something, you’re offering yourself the opportunity to say yes to something else that you feel more aligned with.
We’ll come back to this idea of when to say yes and when to say no throughout this episode as well as in next week’s episode. To get started, think about each item on your to-do list as a yes, and consider what that means you’re saying no to.
What’s your job
There are so many mental and emotional hygiene tools and techniques that support reducing overcommitment, but today I want to offer a simple filter you can use to help you decide when to say yes, and when to say no.
Identifying your job
What’s your job? I don’t mean what do you do to earn money to pay the bills (although that might be part of your job). What I’m asking is – what’s the purpose or goal behind the actions you take? In one sentence, what are you working to achieve?
If your first thought was the thing you do to earn money, let’s zoom out a bit – why are you doing it? What do you want to use the money for? Why that specific position? What are you hoping to achieve through this work?
Once you have that answer, ask yourself why again, keep zooming out, asking why over and over until you’ve got a sentence that when you ask why results in something along the lines of:
“Because that will make me my best and happiest self, enable me to take care of myself and those I love, and in my own unique way contribute positively to the world.”
Your job might be to buy a piece of land, build your dream home, and raise your family on a sustainable farm. It might be to treat yourself with deep self-respect. Perhaps your job is learning how to create healthy boundaries. Or your job might be to retire early and travel around the world in a sailboat.
Using your job as a filter
Once you identify your job, it becomes a lot easier to feed everything through the lens of – is this part of my job? Does it bring me closer to achieving the goal I’ve set for myself? Or does it pull me away from it? Once you have that answer, start practicing saying no to things that aren’t part of your job.
Keep in mind your job will likely change over time. Just like few of us remain in the same position we took right out of school until the day we retire, your job will change as you achieve goals and set new ones!
If you start feeling like things in your life that line up with your current job description feel more and more like a burden, it’s probably time to revisit your job description and redefine it.
Stop multi-tasking
This probably isn’t what you want to hear, but the truth is that what we often consider multitasking is actually rapid task switching. True multitasking requires that of the two tasks you’re doing, one needs to be nearly autonomic (something so well learned your body does it without engagement from your mind).
True multitasking includes things like being able to walk and talk at the same time (walking is the body action, talking is the mind action) or eat and read (chewing and swallowing is a body action, reading a mind action).
What we often call multitasking is rapid task switching. Things like watching television while scrolling social media. Listening to a podcast while writing a report (or in my case in college watching to a Real World or Road Rules marathon while writing a paper).
And while we think we’re doing both of these tasks at the same time, what you’re really doing is paying attention to the the first thing for a bit of time, and then switching your focus to the second, and back and forth and back and forth.
What actually happens when we’re multi-tasking
And while some people may be better at rapid task switching than others, it’s often a key ingredient in time management problems!
Imagine you’re driving a car. Every time you switch from one task to another, you have to slam on the breaks and go from forward to reverse (or vice versa) and get back up to speed. It takes time to slow the car down, shift directions, and then speed back up. While with rapid task switching that can take as little as a few tenths of a second, the more complex the task the longer it takes.
Now imagine you switch your focus once every minute (odds are you’re actually switching more often than that). That means you would shift your focus 60 times an hour.
We’re starting to look at the time you’ve lost in minutes, not seconds. Multiply that out by a day, a week, a year. Add in more time lost if you’re working on more complex tasks that require more time to slow down, change directions, and speed back up. And you start to understand why some experts cite 40% as the amount of productive time people lose in multi-tasking.
How to stop multi-tasking
If you’re struggling with time management and staying focused, take some time and notice how often you try to do more than one thing at a time.
Get curious and experiment – what happens if you put your phone on silent, in airplane mode, or in another room for an hour while you undertake a task. What happens if you pause notifications on your email and Slack? What happens if you turn off the tv, radio, or podcast you’ve got on as background noise?
It’s important to note, we often use all these distractions to keep us from hearing our own inner dialog.
When the only noise we hear is the voice inside our head, it can be really uncomfortable if that voice is primarily our inner critic. If you find turning off the distractions in your day leaves you feeling anxious or unsettled, it might be a great sign you would benefit from working with a coach or therapist to look at some of the underlying stories and beliefs you’ve been trying to avoid.
Curious to learn more about what working with a coach would look like, you can set up a Discovery Session with me to start the conversation.
Plan room for margin
I’ve talked about planning margin into your day before in Episode 9, but it’s so important to time management that I’m covering it again! Often when we struggle with time management, it’s because we haven’t given ourselves enough time to take care of something.
Let’s play this scenario out. You have three projects to finish for work today and you have eight hours to do them. You estimate project A will take you three hours, project B will take you three hours, and project C will take two hours. Based on that estimate, you should be able to fit everything in.
Except you forgot to plan in time for bathroom breaks, calls from coworkers needing information for their portion of the project, and the time it takes to unjam the copier to get the reference material you need printed.
Suddenly you’re just finishing project A and it’s been five hours. Even if you rush, you don’t have time to finish both projects B and C. You might bounce back and forth between them either physically or mentally, but ultimately, by not including margin, you’ve set yourself up for failure.
Or maybe you chronically underestimate the time it will take to complete a task. I love the Matthew Kelly quote: “Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a month.” If you know you chronically underestimate the time it will take you to finish something, building in margin allows you to gift yourself with the grace of actually taking the time you need.
How to plan margin
Every time I provide a time estimate for a project, I remember a particularly memorable Star Trek moment. Captain Kirk is asking Scotty how long it will take to repair the ship. When Scotty tells him it should take eight weeks but he can do it in two. Kirk then asks if he’s always multiplied his time estimates. Scotty responds – “Certainly Sir, how else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker”.
Wouldn’t you rather be a miracle worker than the headless chicken running around at the last minute panicked trying to finish a project? I’m not saying you need to multiple your estimate by four, but add in margin to allow yourself time to take care of the inevitable surprises that come up as you move through each task on your to-do list.
Consider either adding a cushion to each task on your to-do list for the day, or adding in a block of time that isn’t scheduled which you can “borrow” from as the unexpected comes up or something takes longer than you’ve planned.
Productive procrastination
Productive procrastination is one of my favorite techniques to help me take care of the tasks on my to-do list – and honor my natural need for breaks.
This technique involves identifying the distraction activities you turn to when you need a break from what you’re doing, and replacing them with items on your to-do list that also give you a break from what you’re working on.
Key here is picking productive procrastination tasks that use your mind and body in a different way than the primary task your working on – for example, if you’ve been sitting at a desk all morning, you might toss a load of laundry in the washer or take out the trash as your productive procrastination task.
Productive procrastination probably deserves it’s own episode, but today I’m just going to direct you to a post I’ve written all about how to use productive procrastination to reclaim time.
Be conscious of how you spend your time
You might have noticed a key theme running through these techniques is paying conscious attention to how you spend your time.
If you’re running on autopilot, it’s not surprising you might find yourself constantly running into time management issues. Each day presents us with so many opportunities, and in order to feel like we’re good at time management, we need to get really intentional on how we’re spending our time.
As with everything else, think about what works for you in raising your awareness of how you’re spending your time. It might be committing to consistently using one of these techniques. It might be writing down everything you do each day and conducting a personal energy audit. Or it might be simply making an effort to mentally check in throughout your day and bring greater awareness to what is and isn’t working for you.
Whatever route you go, the most important thing is it works for you!
We’ve covered a lot of tools and techniques in this episode – don’t forget I’ve put it all together for you in a free worksheet you can download using the form below. Use the worksheet to experiment with discovering the tools and techniques that help you develop better time management which will in turn allow you to feel less overwhelmed. And make sure you join me next week for the second part of this discussion where we cover how to stay focused on the task you’re working on!
And remember – living your best life isn’t about changing your life – it’s about changing the way you show up for your life!
Show Notes
Additional Resources
Discover who and what you’re actually responsible for in Episode 5.
Learn more about Productive Procrastination.
How to conduct a Personal Energy Audit.
Schedule a Discovery Session with me.
Submit your question to be featured on a future episode.
