I spent 50 years managing and building people and everything that makes them successful. If you can’t manage your time, you can’t manage anything.
1. Where did your time go? Did it vaporize, and you can’t document where each five-minute or longer chunk went? Keep a ‘Time Log.’ Yes, it’s a pain, but it’s the first step. A week is best, but even 2–3 days is beneficial. Log, preferably on paper, each 5 minute or longer time segment and what you were doing. Yes, it takes more time to do it, but it’s crucial. Yes, you doubt you have time to do this. That’s the very reason you should.
Log the length of every phone call, talk to associate, task, and interruptions that take more than a minute or two. At the end of the day, look at each block. Any surprises? Chances are you see where you want to trim or delete things that were not necessary or needed to spend the time you did. If you are in a single spot, a twist kitchen timer is helpful when you take a call. See how long it lasts. Use the timer on your phone.
2. Plan your day. List all appointments and things to do, and the time it will take to do them. Have your ‘to-do’ list handy and add to it as things come up, or you add more. Put numbers to the left of priority. Do most important things first, put a single line through them, and at the end of each day, or each week, you have a list of what you accomplished. See, you DO get things done. You also may see where it took longer than it should. Don’t let it next time.
3. Have a Day, then Week, then Yearly Calendar to put events on. I like the ‘month at a glance’ with square blocks to write on. It’s excellent when planning far out appointments or events like vacations.
4. Decide on your To-Do-Today list what truly must be accomplished. Do this by U and I. Think of a square with 4-blocks in it. The upper left says U and I. The upper right block says U but not I. The lower left says I but not U and the lower right says Not I or U. Put it on paper and look at it. Now label U as URGENT and mark the I as IMPORTANT. Then put all your tasks for the day (or week) into one of these boxes. Clearly, anything Urgent and Important should be done, no matter what else. It’s also easy to see that something appearing that is not Urgent or Important, like cleaning out your sock drawer, does not need to be done right away because it’s not Urgent and it is very low on the Important scale.
But the real question is which to you do after the U and I block? It’s Urgent but not Important. This might be a salesperson on the phone, right now, wanting to sell you a new vacuum cleaner. They are on the phone now, so it’s urgent, but you could care less about the vacuum, so it’s not important. Will it become important in the next week or month? Probably not.
But by contrast, look at the Not Urgent but Important. Put on a party in three weeks? You don’t have to do it now, but will it ever become both I and U? Yep. Thus it should take priority to get done or start work, over something that may be urgent, but not important and never will be.
This is how to keep the little interruptions that happen from soaking up your time. At the very least, dispatch them in the shortest order, since they are NOT important.
5. Manage your time on less important things. Shorten up phone calls to friends, look at the time when you call, and decide 15 minutes is enough, and strive to get off the phone in that amount of time. Don’t let it drag for 30 or 45 minutes.
By seeing where your time escapes you each day from a time-log and planning out your activities being mindful of the amount of time, you should spend, and finally tracking the time various activities take and hurrying to end before the ‘window of time is up,’ including your writing sessions. It will make you significantly more efficient. You may find an extra hour or two to do what you really want to do, like write, right?
