There Ain't No Such Thing as Time Management!

There Ain’t No Such Thing as Time Management!
By Brad Warren, MA

That’s right, you can’t manage time. Despite all the workshops, software programs, PDAs, and personal planners available today, you can’t really manage time. I say what you do manage are people’s promises and commitments (as well as your own) made in time.

A co-worker promises to have a report to you by three o’clock on Tuesday, you make a commitment to attend your daughter’s soccer game on Saturday, and so on. We make promises and commitments to do something within a certain time frame and that’s what we manage, not time itself.

So if that’s true, how do we manage our promises? How do we organize ourselves to get more done in less time, and with less stress as well? Here are five general principles that I have found extremely useful to help me be productive and effective:

1. Have a planning system and use it religiously. And by “system,” I mean something more than just post-it notes and scraps of paper. It can be a PDA, a software program, or pen and paper planner. Your system should:

Work for you.
Be simple to use.
And be the one system tool you use (don’t lose it!).

Having one planner at work and one at home is confusing, not to mention that we always forget to write down our promises in one or the other and wind up missing an important event; either business or personal. (Oh, I forgot to ask: You do have a personal life, don’t you?)

2. Set goals, both short term (daily, weekly and monthly) and long term (quarterly, annually, and beyond).

The best goal setting formula is the SMART system: specific, measurable, attainable, action-oriented, realistic, and time-bound.

Describe your goal in non-jargony ways so that anyone can understand it. Make it measurable so you know if you reached it. Able to be accomplished by you (with assistance from others) and action oriented; meaning sub-goals or milestones along the way. Make it a stretch, but not so unrealistic that you’ll fail, and have a due-date, a specific deadline, or a “by-when” date.

Your goals should also be written down and shared with supportive others. Brain research shows that the mind would rather move toward a positive goal than run away from or avoid a negative one, so state your goals in positive terms, e.g., “I eat healthy, nutritious food” is better than “I will stop eating jelly doughnuts.”

3. Determine your priorities. You can’t do it all, no matter what they say. So what’s most important to you? This is not what’s most urgent. Some questions I use to help sort this out are:

What’s the best use of my time right now?
If I could only do one of these things on my list today, which one would it be?

Then work on that task until it’s done (completion frees up energy), then begin on the next. In the words of Goethe, “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” Or, in the words of Steven Covey, “Remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing!”

4. Schedule a week at a time. Again quoting one of Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” Look at what you’ve got planned for Friday. How does that impact what you’ll do on Thursday? On Wednesday? Tuesday? Today? Look into the future and plan backwards to the present.

And rather than prioritizing your schedule, try scheduling your priorities.

Efficient is doing things right, but effective is doing the right things. The greatest leap in my productivity and effectiveness (and satisfaction, too) was when I went from daily seat-of-the-pants planning to a very focused process of planning the entire week every Sunday evening. Try this weekly planning process for the next three weeks and if you don’t see a dramatic improvement in your productivity, I’ll refund your money.

5. Complete the day before you go to sleep. Look at your to-do list. Check off all the things you accomplished and congratulate yourself for doing what you did, not lamenting what you didn’t.

Reschedule those things that need doing by transferring them to another day; seeing if they can be delegated to someone else; or dropped, if they are no longer relevant.

Then go to sleep with a clear mind, uncluttered by thoughts of all the things you have to do. They’ll still be there in the morning. You’ll be much more refreshed and capable of handling them after you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep.

The key is to make and keep your promises and hold others accountable for theirs. I promise you a richer, more rewarding life if you do, and you will become a Master of Time Management in the process.

Brad can be reached at brad@bradwarren.com or 510-537-0107. Website is www.bradwarren.com

(First published in the July, 2000 issue of Perspectives.)