I often hear the phrase, “I don’t have time for that.” This is a pet peeve of mine because it’s a defensive excuse, deflecting responsibility for one’s actions. This statement makes it seem like, “if only there were more hours in the day, I would do this thing.” I’ll call your bluff.
A more honest way to handle this would be to say, “I prioritized other things this week.” This is still not ideal because you have still eluded an answer as to whether you will ever do this thing. If you plan to not do it, just say that. Or, if you plan to do it, give some kind of expectation of when you will prioritize time to do it.
A more ideal way to handle this would be to say, “I prioritized other things things week, but I have scheduled an hour of my time to do this next Thursday.” In this way, you acknowledge it was not done, by your choice of relative priorities, and you have made a point to plan an appropriate amount of time to complete the task on a specific date. Doing so, you stand a very good chance of actually completing this task.
Time
We all have the same constraints of time. We are all tracking our travel through this odd dimension in the same pace, using the same set of units. Whether you account for 24 hours per day or 7 days per week, it is a common framework around our tasks.
There might be differences in how many hours per day one person is willing to spend at work versus another. That’s fine. The point here is not to shame someone into spending an unfair excess of time at work just to claim “productivity”.
So then how is it some people seem to get more done in the same amount of time per week or per month?
One approach is to set limits on how much time will be spent on each task. Some tasks might be well served by no more than 30 minutes while some tasks require several hours. But we should recognize when we approach the limit of return by continuing to invest more time in a task.
Related, another approach is to break a section of time, like a week or a month, into chunks. For example, instead of having a list of things to do on Thursday and hoping you complete them, plan your day. Allocate a reasonable amount of time to each task and be honest about whether you’ve filled the day, exceeded it, or short-changed it.
Priorities
Not all tasks are equally important. It’s expected that you won’t complete some tasks because they are low in priority. But let’s talk about how priorities are set.
Urgency is an obvious factor when defining priority for a task. Perhaps some task is required before a scheduled event and after such date of the event, there is no point in doing the task because the event will have been completed.
Impact is another factor. What happens, or does not happen, if this task is not completed? How important is it that you do this task?
I’m not doing to drone on about these factors. There are plenty of self-help books out there for that. But I intend to come back to these terms later in this post, so it helps to set some thinking points.
Schedule
Once you have defined how long each task is expected to take and the relative priority of each task, consider creating events on a calendar for each task. You do this for meetings, likely, so why not for actual work? In fact, a meeting is a task. Well, I assume the meeting has a purpose and intended outcome. Otherwise, why are you spending time in it?
Priority should become an evident motivator in scheduling your tasks. Don’t put higher priority items on Friday unless you truly expect to complete them in the time allotted. Don’t over-book each day and take pride in identifying low-priority tasks that must be either deleted or moved out to a future week.
Recurrence
Usually we think of a task as being a one-off, something performed once, check the box, move on to the next. But what about tasks that we plan to repeat with some frequency?
Here are some examples of recurring tasks:
Read email
Read chat discussion
Read meeting minutes
Respond to email
Respond to chat discussion
Think about what I got out of this week
Think about upcoming milestones and goals
Schedule my tasks for next week
What deserves to be called a “task”?
You might be thinking some of my examples are not tasks. If we describe a task as something that requires a duration of time, something that should have a priority applied to it, and something that should be scheduled in my day or week, then these should count.
Whether responding to email and chat takes time is probably not something we’ll disagree on. The nuance is in whether you consider this a bunch of little tasks associated with each discussion thread, or a single task of all the combined conversations.
You might try to make the argument that you can do a few email or chat threads throughout the day, in-between tasks. You might even say you do this during meetings. If so, I’m guessing you’re the person who has no idea what’s going on when called for your opinion mid-meeting. Be careful when trying to read email or chat with someone during a meeting. There is no such thing as “multi-tasking” and you’ll likely miss something someone said.
What about the two “think” tasks I gave as examples? Do you think those deserve to have time blocked off on your calendar? Do you think your boss would be upset with you if they found out you charged an hour for “thinking”? With all the meetings you listen to or lead, the documents you read, the emails and chat you respond to, when do you actually stop to think about your work and consider how you might do better? It deserves some time and priority.
My take
I’m not claiming to be an expert at productivity, but it’s on my mind and I’m looking for ways to do better.
I structure my work by ~months, weeks, and days. Then within days, I break it up into chunks as little as 30 minutes, but no smaller. By “~months”, I mean that this largest chunk of time is not exact. It’s more like “within the next month I want to do x and within the next 3 months I want to do y and z.”
At the largest scale (~months), I keep a few lists on wiki pages for my longer-term plans. Then I use my calendar for the smaller-scale time chunks. I have not found a great way to integrate the two, but that’s how it works for me.
For each task that has any priority to me, I create an event. I estimate how long I think it’ll take. If it’s necessary to perform at a specific time, I mark it “busy”. If it can be done at any time, I called it “flexible” and mark it so using “free” as the indicator. I also use the color orange for scheduled tasks and yellow for flexible tasks, but that’s just to help me quickly see the difference in types of tasks in a given day.
Each week, by the end of Friday, I review the upcoming week. I review scheduled tasks and decide if I will attend/support. I indicate so by marking it as “accepted” and “busy”. There are times I am invited to meetings/events and I decline. I might keep it as “tentative” in case I get ahead on my week. But I accept that I cannot participate in everything. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a distraction.
Within each day, I try to fit flexible tasks in between scheduled tasks. I admit, sometimes I double these up. I’ll put two tasks at the same time knowing I likely won’t get to both. I think I do this because some tasks will take less than 30 minutes, but it’s probably an area where I can look to improve my methods.
As I perform each day, I re-schedule. I either complete the flexible tasks when I had them scheduled, or I move them forward. This is where I have to review the priority and be honest with myself. If I keep moving something forward, I likely wasn’t honest with myself about its priority. Sometimes, when a priority flexible task keeps getting delayed, I’ll just mark it as scheduled and “busy” so I won’t put it off any more.
There is some nuance to this last comment worth expanding upon. I probably don’t do it often enough, but there are times when I schedule a task that really has no dependency on a specific time during the day. I do so because then I’m forced to ignore distractions like Teams and email so I get the task done. It also prevents others from dropping last-minute meetings onto my calendar. If they see I’m “busy” they will hopefully respect that.
Going back to the example tasks I gave of reading and responding to email and Teams, reading meeting minutes, thinking, and scheduling, I’ll admit that I don’t actually put events on my calendar for these. Perhaps I should so I’m more honestly accounting for my time spent on them per day. But so far, it has worked out for me to do this as the first thing I do in the morning before my first scheduled activity.
For example, if my first meeting is at 9:00 AM, then I make sure I am at my desk before 8:30 (or even 8:00) so I have time to review wiki pages that have changed, meeting minutes, Teams chat, and email. This is a cornerstone to every morning.
I also make it a point to review email and chat before signing off in the evening. Whether I keep up with email and chat throughout the day is of a much lower priority to me. I’d rather ignore those and spend some focused time on other tasks.
What’s your style?
I hope this post wasn’t too much of a ramble. I didn’t want to spend too much time organizing these thoughts. Instead I just wanted to lay out some of the basics that drive my workflow and then ask you to share your ways.
Please leave a comment describing how you stay on top of your game at work.