The fact that I wrote this post at about ten past midnight after I had finished off processing some of the days e-mails is probably some kind of indication of what my own time management skills are like.
Time management is one of the hardest thing for a consultant to get a handle on. One of the reasons for this is that clients have a tendency to randomise your day. You may have walked into the office with a plan but you will quickly get sucked into the first meeting that is even remotely related to your area of expertise.
Unfortunately there isn’t a lot you can do about this because in essence thats one of the reasons you are there. Lately I have been trying to push back a little and attempt to focus more on my main deliverables and try to have meetings scheduled in advance.
What I was finding is that I had a list as long as my arm of what I wanted to do but when I got into the office, unless I had dedicated a specific time to doing that task it simply didn’t get done. Everyone has to come up with their own regime to getting their work done.
In the past two weeks I have adopted some of the practices from “Getting Things Done” – a process described in a book of the same name written by David Allen. My adaption of the method goes something like this.
- Find a spare moment; while GTD essentially advocates that you only check your e-mail at a few set times a day the way that we work at Readify really doesn’t work with this approach. So rather than checking my e-mail a few times a day I check it more regularly, but only when I don’t have some other kind of activity scheduled. This means I can process my Inbox faster each time and still keep on track with the short and longer term tasks that I have set for myself.
- Process my Inbox; this is where after finding a slice of time I process the contents of my Inbox. Deleting times which aren’t relevant to me (I’m getting better at this) and moving other items into the tasks folder. I do this simply by hitting CTRL-SHIFT-V which brings up the move dialog which I then select Tasks. What Outlook does is copy the e-mail into a Task as an attachment. This processing activities allows me to accept stuff into my life without actually having to deal with it right there – I’ve just made a commitment to take a second look.
- Process my Tasks; in the past I found that creating a whole heap of tasks just let to gigantic task list which I eventually gave up on and forgot. So rather than just abandon things in the task list, after processing my Inbox I go through my task list and any items that I really need to get done I actually schedule a time to do them in my calendar. By doing this and actually using my calendar as a workload scheduling mechanism I ensure that I don’t overload myself on a day by day basis.
- Keep to the schedule; here I work on the appointments in my schedule. If I keep to the schedule then nothing will be forgotten and everything will get done in due time. Sometimes my estimates are off and I need to get progressively better at estimating how long certain tasks will take (writing a good blog entry takes way more time than you plan for). If time runs out you need to decide whether you can drop or push other items in your schedule out or simply reschedule the remainder of the work for a later time.
- Rinse, repeat.
Now - the above system seems to be working, but one of the observations that I’ve made is that there is no way to get everything I want done as fast as I want it done.
This is where my metal gets tested because I really want to just abandon the system and just start context switching to fool myself into thinking I am making progress on two tasks simultaneously faster than I would by doing one task in a serial manner – and like every single processor device, it fails miserably.
What my system is actually telling me is that I have too much on and I need to look at delegating some of the tasks (if I can) or dropping the ball on some of them.
Good time management is all about removing the stresses of juggling as many balls as we all do. When you are stressed you aren’t managing your time well, and when you are grumpy and tired because you have had to schedule things into the evening its because you have taken too much on.
Its advice that I need to give myself every day – because its easy to forget.