Time: Do you get enough out of your most valuable asset?

Working with innovation, you are bound to have time issues. This career is time-consuming. You are being pulled from all directions, and no matter how many items you cross of your to-do list, the number of tasks just seems to keep increasing.

Time – or more likely the lack of it – is something we often get into during my network meetings as all of our members spent most of their time in a little box labeled URGENT. We have a general tendency to assume there’s nothing we can do about it; issues with time just go with the territory, right?

Well, that answer is only partially correct. And the reality is that unless you get control of your time management issues, you stand little change of making the type of change happen as discussed in earlier posts.

So here I’m going to touch on two principles that help us understand why managing time is such a challenge and then suggest that there are some things you can do to get more control over your time. But first, let’s look closely at where your time goes.

Analyze your time budget

Many people run into financial trouble because they have never established a budget that sets spending priorities and allocates their money accordingly. They have trouble making it from paycheck to paycheck and are uncertain exactly where their money went. The same thing happens when you don’t analyze where your time goes and set priorities. You get to the end of the day or the week and realize you haven’t completed important work tasks, have only made it to the gym once, and have spent very little time with your family or friends.

Where did the time go? You were ultra-busy all week long, but what did you accomplish that moved you toward your vision of success? I am no big fan of capturing a lot of data and overanalyzing what is going on, which is what most time management exercises are about. Smart people already have an idea of what is wrong and why. More often, they just need a quick overview. You can get this by simply ask yourself questions such as:

How do I communicate (meetings, phone, e-mail) with others? Do I even have to interact with these people? What would happen if I cut meeting times in half? What if I decided to communicate by e-mail first, then phone and only if necessary have meetings?

Which kind of activities would I like to spend less time on? Why do I spend time on things I do not like to do? What would happen if I did not do them? Could someone else do them for me?

Which kind of activities would I like to spend more time on? Why am I not spending more time on these activities?

Where and when am I wasting time? What can I do to stop wasting my time?

Where and when am I most productive? What can I do to create more slots where I am highly productive?

This is a simple exercise that will not take much of your time. The purpose is to make you consider whether you spend time on the things that are important to you and whether you should start making changes to the way you handle your time management. 

How did things get this way?To understand why time management is such a challenge for most of us, we need to understand two principles:

 

•  Parkinson’s Law. This is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” First put forth by British naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson in an essay in The Economist in 1955 and later in a best selling book called Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, this principle explains why you–and the people you delegate to–rarely finish a task before its deadline.

Given 30 days to complete a report, we will research, research and research some more before buckling down to write it in the last few days before the deadline. Yet if given two days to write the same report, we will manage to do all the research and writing within two those days. This also explains why so many people are seen in stores on Christmas Eve doing their shopping at the very last minute. Some of them are there looking for last minute markdowns, but the majority are probably there because of Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law is responsible for many of the mind-numbing meetings we all find ourselves in each week and explains why your time budget almost undoubtedly shows that you’re spending vast amounts of time on non-priority issues.

•  The 80/20 Rule. The 80/20 Rule (also known as the Pareto principle) also can be applied to time management. Using this rule, we can say that 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of the causes. In other words, 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts, which means we all spend a lot of our time and energy on doing things that don’t move us closer to our work or personal goals.

Being aware of the effects of Parkinson’s Law and the 80/20 Rule can help you take a fresh look at your time budget to identify ways in which you could better manage your time. Ask yourself these questions:

•  Are there times when you stretch work out, doing more research or holding more meetings than necessary to make a decision, prepare a report, or otherwise more a priority forward?

•  If you had to, could you realistically accomplish in four days what it now takes you five days to do? In other words, are there items on your to-do list that could be delegated or even dropped altogether without the world coming to an end?

•  Are there items on your to-do list that could be outsourced to a virtual assistant? Think beyond your work life to your personal life.  Are there tasks there that could be done by a virtual assistant? Just Google “virtual assistant” and a whole world of possibilities will open up for you.

•  Which 20 percent of your effort produces 80 percent of your results?

•  Are there a lot of non-priority tasks that could be bundled together to be accomplished in one quick burst of energy? For example, do you take time out to do one personal errand each day when you could actually combine five errands and get them all done in approximately the same amount of time that it previously took you to do one?

Time is the most precious thing we have. Do you make enough out of it?