How to Manage Your Time Effectively

The time principle (aka natural law) says “You must allocate time and actually do, if you want to accomplish something”. Seems simple, yet we have a lot of challenges using this principle effectively.

There are other natural laws. I’ve discussed a few in this previous article. It’s amazing how obvious and familiar they are and yet we, including me, seem to forget or ignore them frequently and as a result have negative consequences instead of positive.

How do we use the time principle

Let’s look at the different ways people allocate time and how effective each is.

In the moment

The first way to allocate time is in the moment. We sit there and have nothing currently taking our attention and we start to think about the things we wanted to do. We pick one and start working on it. This is a start as we are actually doing something but as you can imagine, not very effective. The problem with this is that there is no end in mind, no organization to what is more important or urgent than something else, and it’s completely random. However, something is getting accomplished so it’s a first step.

Daily

The second way people allocate time is by the day. They will start their day, usually with a list of things that has been on their mind for a while, and figure out what they want to accomplish that day. Then, more or less, they will go down that list whenever they have time. This is better than the previous method as there is a list of things and usually they have some sense of importance or urgency. The problem with this approach is that it’s just for one day, and long term goals, if there are any, are impossible to plan. Additionally in the course of one day, there may be many distractions like meetings and urgent matters that come up resulting in nothing much getting done. I’m sure you’ve likely experienced this.

Weekly

The third way people allocate time is by the week. This is an improvement over the previous method. A week is a good amount of time to make progress on several fronts. It allows us to absorb meetings and interruptions and still accomplish something. It also gives a manageable chunk of time to accomplish goals as most people can visualize one week at a time and plan it.

It turns out that somewhere between 1-2 weeks is the sweet spot for most people and teams. It’s short enough that you can visualize and plan it relatively quickly, yet long enough to make progress.

Balance

A few words about balance. We have many roles in our lives. We are an individual, a friend, a son or daughter, a brother or sister, spouse, church member, etc. It’s is desirable to balance attention to all these roles as they are all important in our lives. How many times have you seen people center on their work role and ignore other areas like themselves or family to the detriment of those areas?

Adding Goals

The 7 Habits Book recommends weekly planning (1 week at a time) and recommends to look at all our roles, picking 1-2 goals in each role to achieve that week. In this way, we’ll plan balanced progress across the different things that are important to us.

Remember the natural law above that we discussed, “You must allocate time and actually do, if you want to accomplish something”. Having goals each week is great, if we do not allocate time to do, and work on those goals, then we will not make progress.

Calendar planning for goals

One way to allocate time to do goals is on a calendar. This method is also called Time Blocking. There are paper calendars and electronic calendars. I prefer electronic calendars since they are easy to create, update, share, and are portable these days. You can look at each goal and specifically block off the time you need on your calendar. For example, you can say from 10AM to 12PM on Monday you will work on goal 1. This “focus time” usually happens around meetings and other obligations. Then when the time comes, you can spend that time to work on that goal.

Calendar planning works but its tedious

This works better because now we are planning and “making time” to accomplish our goals. While it works better because we allocate a concrete time to do something, it can get tedious to create many little blocks of time for the different things we want to do. It’s also very difficult to do this for more than a few days at a time. However, it works and is very helpful.

I’ve used the above method when I got overwhelmed with the many things I wanted to do at work and my personal life. Most of the time, if I didn’t block time on my calendar to accomplish something, I did not end up doing it. But, as you saw above, it got tedious for various reasons. I also had a challenge balancing the work and life goals, scheduling time for life goals, and knowing if I was actually achieving my balance goal.

A solution!

I thought I could use my software engineering skills to make it easier to solve these problems and as a result created the Yomez App to automate this process. While the goal was simply to automate Time Blocking & Scheduling of time so people could have an easier time with this, it actually revealed several more benefits that were not expected.

Auto-scheduled tasks resulted in many insights

One of the benefits that was not expected was that people could concretely and easily see how much they could do (and more importantly, could not do) and by when. Since the App realistically lays out time to do things on a calendar they could get a sense when something would be done as it would show this estimated completion time on the calendar. People also learned very quickly that if they did not actually do during those scheduled times, the completion time would take longer.

Concretely see how much capacity we have

Folks also quickly learned, with their own goals, that their time was limited and it encouraged them to really think about their priorities and what they wanted to spend time on and in what order. It also made it very obvious that the ultimate way to overcome personal time limits was by having a team! There were many more lessons learned from this experience and I will share more of these in future blog articles.

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