The goal of managing your time well is to be able to have fun and spend time doing things you enjoy. The result of effectively managing time is to get rid of the feeling of being continually bogged down, stressed, and overwhelmed – that feeling we all know so well.
Have you ever struggled to start, continue, or finish a looming project? I know the feeling. Here are five tips to reinvent the way you approach time management and have you feeling better than you did before:
Start Small
Faced with a ridiculously large task or project? Don’t think of all the work you have to do – just think in fifteen-minute segments. If fifteen minutes seems like too much given your fast-paced, demanding, and hectic day-to-day life, try working on it for five minutes or even two or three minutes.
What good will the small dent of five minutes of work do for a large project? Several things. One, there is such a thing as a momentum principle where five minutes can easily turn into ten minutes, ten into twenty, etc. Two, even if you literally only have five to ten minutes total to work on a given task in a day, some work is always better than no work. I’m an author working on another book right now and at the end of a long, busy day, when I work on my book for a few minutes before going to sleep I always feel ten times better than if I didn’t work on the book at all. I may only have written one page, but that’s one more page of the book that’s complete.
Three – where the evolution of time management comes in – more than about what you get done, it’s about how you feel. If you work on something for five minutes, feel happy, and know you are making progress, who cares if you are done with it yet or not? More so than robotic task-completion, what life is really about is having fun and enjoying each day as it comes.
Stop Over-Delegating
Many of the time management books out there will emphasize the importance of delegating. And to a large extent, I don’t disagree with that because there is undoubtedly enormous power and value in delegating tasks to other people. With that said, in today’s society the scale is tipped too much towards delegation and too far away from taking action.
Having you ever come across someone who I like to call a whiteboard hero? These are the kinds of people who love to talk about projects, delegating tasks left and right, spending hours drawing diagrams and figures on the whiteboard, but they never actually get anything done. If all someone is going to do is write on the whiteboard, they are wasting people’s time. Don’t misunderstand: there is value in meetings, taking notes, and discussing tasks. In fact, there is value in using a whiteboard when someone is effectively facilitating a meeting or learning session. I’m just saying – not in a derogatory way, but in a simple statement of fact and truth – there are people out there who would prefer to endlessly write on a whiteboard than to ever take action. If you’re the CEO of your company, then yes – you’ve 100% earned the privilege to facilitate and delegate. But 99% of us aren’t CEOs and 99% of us should have at least some stake in helping do the work that completes a project.
When faced with a task, ask yourself: is this something you are better off doing yourself? Would you save yourself time by not delegating it and instead just zeroing in and knocking it off? If not, then by all means delegate it if that’s an option, but take time to consider the possibility that it’s something you’re better off completing yourself.
Favor Simplicity
I was recently chatting on Skype with my friend Rick Woods, The Functional Organizer. Here are Rick’s insights as he talks about the power of simplicity:
Create a master to-do list to write down all of your goals, tasks, projects, and aspirations. Then create a short daily to-do list pulled from the master to-do list. Keep it simple and have the short daily to-do list have just a couple of things on it. If you get two important things done every day, that’s ten important things done a week, which equates to somewhere around 500 important things done in a year – accounting for vacations and holidays. When it comes to meetings, I’ve found that big meetings are bad and small meetings are good. And when you have small meetings, keep them short.
Rick’s insights are powerful and he’s a master of his craft. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to follow his advice!
Do What Matters
My 53-year-old aunt was in the hospital undergoing life-threatening surgery (she’s passed away now) and my mom had to go take care of my aunt’s son. I was asked, last-minute, to spend time with my little brother who is a freshman in High School because my dad went to the hospital to be with his sister. My little brother is a smart kid and would have been fine on his own, but my parents wanted me to drive down to be with him because it was an extremely difficult time for our family and didn’t want my little brother to be left alone.
For that evening, I had a number of important things planned. I was going to go to a networking event that I was looking forward to for a while that had some key players in my industry attending. I had several overdue errands to run, I had the most important speech of my life to prepare for, and I blocked out some time to work on writing my next book. I also had plans to quickly meet with a business associate over coffee who I really needed to talk to face-to-face. No one ever wants bad news, but this was a particularly difficult night to have this come up.
Thankfully, I had my values and priorities in proper place and I knew that my little brother came first. So I drove down to Newtown, Connecticut, picked him up, and spontaneously took him to a New York Rangers hockey game in Madison Square Garden. While taking the metro-north train down into the city from Connecticut, I realized something important:
It’s essential to have your values and priorities in place because time management is not about tips and tricks, schedule maintenance, or getting everything done as quickly as possible – what it’s really about is doing what matters.
It ended up being a great night and I’m absolutely 100% sure my late aunt would have been proud of us for having fun, enjoying the moment, and taking our minds off of the stress (something she always taught us to do).
Reward Yourself
It’s Friday and I’m a bit tired. But more than feeling tired, I’m also feeling burned out. Writing this post was the last thing I felt like doing. But you know what? I wrote this post anyways. I realized that I didn’t want to put this post off to the weekend when I will have valuable downtime to rest and recharge. I also understood that, as my friend Chip Janiszewski of Happiness and Success GPS said to me over breakfast one morning, “the present moment is all you ever really have.” In a very realistic and practical way, the present moment is all that exists in life. Chip is a smart and successful man and what he says makes sense.
Train yourself to be disciplined – it’s a learnable skill. When you are disciplined and do what you told yourself you would do, reward yourself. Whether that reward be watching a movie or TV show, eating a delicious meal, grabbing ice cream, laying down on the couch, or even traveling somewhere new, you will feel great about yourself while getting more done.
Jeff Davis, author, blogger, and professional speaker, is CEO of Jeff Davis International, a global services firm. While going to Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, Jeff completed a two-year graduate degree program in one year while working, traveling, and writing/publishing a book. He has chatted on the phone or in-person with more than twenty of the world’s best time managers. Jeff spoke on Time Management to a business in Stamford, CT and was told by the CEO that it was one of the best presentations he ever heard. For more information, contact Jeff’s team at 800-315-4832.
