An Exercise in Time Management

Time. A finite resource that no man can purchase however wealthy or influential. All you can do is use it wisely – and by this, it means using it in a way that delivers a goal or value, whatever you have described as goals and values.

Poor time management has a massive impact on both project success, how you’re perceived by others, how you feel about yourself and ultimately your future career development so it’s critical to get it right. Here are a series of exercises that you can do to assess your time management and create a change plan to start earning more quality time back.

EXERCISE 1: How many of the below would you agree with?

• I am often left guessing what is expected of me
• I am bogged down with too many systems and processes
• I find there are always too many stakeholders to approve one activity
• There can be too much ‘dictating of the role’ and not enough empowerment to deliver as we see fit
• I am usually driven by deadline rather than goal
• I seem to be frantic with little to show for my efforts at the end of the day
• I find myself doing what I would rather be doing than should be doing
• I sometimes hide in low-value activities rather than high pay-off activities
• I sometimes procrastinate
• I believe that success is about “Survival of the Fittest”

If yes to the majority of the above, then you need to start managing your time differently.

Plan to change

In order to change a situation that isn’t working for you, you have to understand what’s wrong. What aspects of your role are you finding hard, confusing or maybe even wasteful? What blockers get in your way? What were you expecting to be doing? What’s the gap between expectation and actual?

Gather the facts so you can pro-actively review your use of time for personal reasons, approach your line manager to create a viable plan.

EXERCISE 2: How do you spend your time?

Copy this chart four times and track how you spend your time over the course of the next 4 weeks, remembering to track low value but essential activities such as filing, and any downtime ie. computer issues.
At the end of each week, do a calculation of the hours as a percentage of your working week.

Evaluate the findings

At the end of the month, audit the findings. What is it telling you?

• Is your role very different from the job you accepted and, if so, is that a positive or negative?
• If positive, what does it mean to your career path? Is it heading in the right direction?
• What other training or coaching do you need to help you get a promotion or role (and title) change?
• If negative, plot the differences or gaps and itemise the job activities you should not be doing, and the activities you should be doing.
• Set up a meeting with your line manager to review your role. Together, you can hopefully work on a change plan and start to transition. Or agree suitable alternatives.

EXERCISE 3: High vs low tasks

Sometimes we spend too much time in low value tasks. They are more appealing, and we convince ourselves they need doing first before the harder, more demanding high value task. As soon as you hear yourself claiming a lack of time it means you have taken on too much. Are they all high value, or are there some activities you are doing that you should have said no to?

What are low value tasks?

Low value tasks are the ones where you know in your heart of hearts that you are hiding in because maybe you are putting off a difficult task. They are tasks that you should be delegating to someone else with a lower charge out rate, and/or provide no real value.

It goes without saying that learning moments are obviously essential for our personal and career growth. These might be anything from 30 minutes invested in listening
to a podcast to attending a course

Track the value of your time

One method for tracking this would be to use the headings below and log a list of activities you do. This doesn’t have to be precise, but is based on your personal judgment of how you would rate the value of the task. This is not intended for sharing but a moment of personal insight.

EXERCISE 4: Create a change plan

Examine the insights from these exercises to see what they reveal:

• Are you spending a disproportionate amount of time in low value tasks?
• Are there specific recurring tasks or aspects of your job that are sapping away your time?
• Could repetitive tasks be done more efficiently?
  • Do you need to work out a process to make it more efficient?
  • Who else do you need to involve to improve the process?
  • Who needs to sanction it so everyone adopts it?

• Are there higher value actions you could be doing or want to be doing? Do you need to learn a skill to make them higher value?

• Are there some ‘comfort zone’ actions that you need to stop investing so much time in? How can you self-discipine yourself and train yourself to reduce procrastination?
• Are there any blockers that is going to stop you achieving these change goals? Is there a reason you don’t do the high value tasks? Do you lack a certain skill? Is a colleague reluctant to involve you in a higher value task?

Either on your own or with your line manager, plot your insights using the below Stop/Start/Continue methodology.

And finally…

What time management strategies are you going to adopt?

See the article about 10x-ing your Time Management, and do your own self-assessment on what you do already. Or trial new methodologies and see if they work for you.