Controlling Time

Time spent on optimizing time is time well spent. I’m writing this post to share how I manage my time, which is usually split between managing Aleph, helping our (8 at the time of this posting) portfolio companies, looking at ~ 500 deals a year and trying to be a good husband and father of 3; YMMV. I have clustered the techniques into 5 stages, each one building on the concepts of previous stages.

Stage 1: Clear Your Mind

For me, the a-ha moment was reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen 10 years ago. Ever since, it has been my favorite founder gift. Before the book and the resulting re-do of my time management habits, the inability to manage time led to the acute pain of failing to deliver several complex parallel projects and to the ongoing chronic pain that comes with a strong sense of not having enough time.

There will always be more things to be done than there is time to do them, so the basic question really boils down to “what should I be doing now?”. It’s also important to know what you shouldn’t be doing. This means creating a not-todo list — containing the list of what you’ve considered and explicitly decided not to do provides a framework for you to evaluate new tasks coming in. Some immediate takeaways from GTD were:

1. Do tasks that take less than 2 minutes immediately — don’t let them linger in your inbox, mind or list, just do them and cross them off.
2. Use just one to-do list. Once things get out of whack, the easiest thing to do is to create yet another, “high priority” task list, replacing your task list altogether. Once you can’t prioritize tasks against each other, the battle is already lost.
3. Tasks are the physical action that is required, not the high-level goal — this is what gets listed on your to-do list. e.g. tasks should be physical (“call dave’s assistant and schedule a meeting”, not ”arrange a meeting with dave”), atomic (not a project or set of tasks, “search for good gyms in Herzliya” and not “replace gym”) and clearly defined (e.g. “draft a blog post about GTD”, and not “blog post”). This way, when you have 10 minutes to do something, you don’t need to think about abstract tasks but have an immediate action you can take.
4. Set a context for each task. This lets you filter out and ignore tasks you can’t do right now (for instance, tasks for the home and tasks for the office, tasks that require Internet connectivity, etc.).
5. Prioritize tasks and then re-prioritize them. When prioritizing, always keep in mind your power multiplier is the people you are working with. Tasks and deliverables they depend on must take priority so you don’t slow people down.
6. When you delegate a task, set a reminder for the task with a due date. This will allow you to clear it from your mind until the reminder pops up again.
7. Tasks that aren’t relevant before a given date should be attached to a due date and cleared from your task list.

#6 and #7 are the only good use cases for due dates. Really. Bad use of due dates is setting a target date for a given task. This only sets you up for failure because it diminishes the purpose of a due date — indicating when is it really due. Knowing when something is really due allows you to prioritize it accordingly.

Stage 2: Planning a Productive Day

My daily routine:

- 7am: fruit & water, 30 minutes sport, 1st priority task, 30 minutes of email

- After lunch: 30 minutes of email, go through reading list

- End of day: record action items from meetings, review next day’s agenda

- 10pm: email, create the next day’s to-do list, decide on the 1st priority for tomorrow, print

When you plan your day, be aggressive in setting goals but stay realistic.

To plan my tasks for the day, I count the aggregate of non-meeting time I expect to have throughout the day. I then prioritize tasks for the day from the single task repository according to available time and the different contexts which I’ll be in throughout the day. Tasks are allowed 15-minute increments. In my experience, the type of GTD tasks — requiring a “next physical action” — do take 15 minutes on average.

Once I’ve settled on the to-do list for the day, I print it out. There are several advantages to using a hard copy list:

1. Crossing things off on paper is fun;
2. The list is always there, regardless of battery and location;
3. No one can change the list, not even you.

Forming habits requires you to create a cycle of (a) cue (the trigger as to which habit is to be used), (b) routine (what you should do) and (c) reward. The reward (a sense of completion, for instance, or the minty fresh breath you experience after you’ve brushed your teeth) is what helps your brain remember the habit and reinforce it. When I finish the day and have accomplished all the tasks I allocated for it, the sense of reward is a huge motivating factor which solidifies the time management habits. And hey, if you have some free time, you can always cross off some backlog tasks.

Stage 3: Control Time Management Killers

Email and IM are the top time killers. There are two reasons for this negative impact.

- Context shifting: Both email and IM are context shifters and, therefore, make for an extremely disruptive interruption that messes with your ability to concentrate.

- To-do disruption: Email and IM let others insert things into your work queue, even if they weren’t there to begin with. To say it bluntly, email is a way for others to give you tasks and defocus you from what you intended to do that day.

This means you need to optimize your email workflow to be able to stick to your time management technique. Put some time into optimizing your email workflow (see here: http://on.fb.me/1N7s9Aj). The basics are these:

• Pre-schedule three times a day to read email, you can only read it then. Yes, it means disabling email notifications on the mobile. The problem with this approach is that people already assume everyone else is online all the time. To overcome this, you need to create a “contract” with your family & co-workers that urgent issues requiring immediate attention should be sent via IM or SMS.
• Read every email only once and then immediately archive it. To do that you need to immediately generate the tasks resulting from an email and prioritize them against your other tasks. This is the way to get to the elusive inbox zero.
• Your ultimate goal is to make every email the last in its thread. If that isn’t possible, stop using the email channel and resort to a voice conversation.

Stage 4: Automate and Outsource

I do a weekly review of things I do multiple times to see how can I optimize time spent, what can I delegate or outsource, and ideally whether some tasks or steps can be fully automated. A first step in achieving this is to create a spreadsheet of all steps involved in getting something done and the time allocation required for each. Once you have this, add a column with ideas for delegation (in your team), outsource (outside) or automate (via code/product). This is, by far, the biggest time saver you will ever have.

There has been a lot of hype around services like Operator and Magic as means to getting things done, but you don’t need to wait for them to launch or scale. Some of my favorite tools to delegate or automate non-core tasks & services are:

1. Task Rabbit: Outsource relatively small, usually location-based tasks, like errands, duties and other time wasters.
2. Fiverr: Originally focused on tasks costing $5, Fiverr has since become a marketplace for finding voiceovers, recording an original track, proof-reading and many other time savers.
3. Coders Clan: A marketplace with great engineers that build smallish projects / code snippets for you, with relatively less-defined scopes than Elance & similar sites. Great for task automation.

Stage 5: Taking a Longer-Term View and Creating Routines

Before the beginning of the quarter, I build a matrix. Its rows are the responsibilities and goals for the quarter. The columns are the weeks. This is a simplified form of a project management GANTT. The quarterly plan helps me load-balance deliverables across the weeks.

The Sunday routine — Every Sunday morning I review and follow up on the tasks in the list, generate tasks by going through the calendar for this week & needs by portfolio companies, and, finally, I review the quarterly plan to see which tasks I must complete this week in order to achieve my goals.

Last but definitely not least — you also need to leave time for the bigger things that need to get done. Block a no-meeting Tuesday. As both a maker and manager, this is a lifesaver for productivity, as it acts as an anchor mid-week to complete bigger tasks and better understand what’s required to finish outstanding projects. If you can, make no-meeting-Tuesday (or Wednesday) a company-wide policy.

Time Management Summary

Using the time management techniques described here doesn’t promise to solve the bigger questions, like work-life balance, but I do find it is pretty valuable in clearing my time to focus on the important things like portfolio founders, staying curious and spending time with my family. Implementing a single task list gives you a better sense of control. Generating a list of things you are likely to achieve during your morning setup reduces guilt, and you get to the end of the day knowing you are in control and have managed to do quite a lot. Controlling email time and refusing the “push” element of messages reduces the noise level during the day and at home time. After gaining back some sanity during family time you can always see what needs to be done tomorrow and close out your day.

Thanks to Eran Shir, Lior Grossman, Ben Rubin, Inbar Raz for reading early drafts and Shai Geva, Adam Benayoun, Nimo Rotem, Nathan Zeldes, Yoav Zurel for caring enough to comment on the Facebook note that was the basis for this post.