Day 77 — Productivity series 4/7: “Managing Time”
Father of modern management, Peter Drucker, has been famously quoted: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” If we want to measure productivity, one of the most important metrics has to be Time-on-Task. No matter how productive we think we are, if we don’t actually know how much time we spent, it could be all delusional.
Therefore, in today’s article, I’ll introduce methods and technique about “managing time” in the following structure:
- Task Estimate
- Calendar Management
Task Estimation
One of the common issues about personal productivity is the lack of estimation of individual tasks. As a result, a task often exceeds the expected duration, and becomes a black hole that sucks in all our time and energy. If the other tasks are depending on the completion of this task, the situation becomes even more dire. Therefore, having a good understanding of the required time for completion is the first step of successful time management.
For project level time/ effort assessment, I wrote an article before and shared some techniques. For personal level tasks, I’d recommend using T-shirt sizing to estimate with the following steps:
- Define the minimum size of effort: What does extra small — XS level of effort means? Is it a half an hour worth of work? For example, a XS level of work could be: exporting a Sketch file of wireframe into PDF, and writing an email with explanation to stakeholder about what they can expect from the attached PDF.
- Use the minimize to create a scale: if XS means half an our worth of work, the S could be one hour, M could be two hours, and so on. Create a scale that makes sense to you so that it’s easy for you to pick up and estimate task effort with it.
- Setup benchmark: Use the scale to review what you accomplished last week. By doing so, you can get to understand your velocity on a good day vs. average day vs. bad day.
- Test run on your calendar: Once you reach that level of understanding of your velocity as the point above, you can start prioritize your work for this and next week, and see if you need to adjust the scale, or reset the benchmark.
Pro Tip: If you encounter any task that’s a 2L (XXL) or 3L size, try to break it down task into smaller chunks, so that you can have a bunch of not-stressful S, M, L size of tasks to manage.
Calendar Management
The Ephiphay
Have you had the experience that, in the beginning you ignore a certain seemingly trivial task, and it gradually snowballing to a large pile of works, to the point that you don’t even want to touch it? We probably all procrastinate at some point in our lives, and hopefully all learned our lessons. As the saying goes, “out of side, out of mind.” If we don’t put down time to start/ complete those tasks, they’ll just naturally pile up to the point that it’s “too big to tackle”.
I remember I read a interesting interview about improving corporate culture, the author argued that culture shouldn’t be slogan and should be the true priorities of C-suite leaders. The research finding is about how much time CEOs actually allocate their calendar on what they “consider vs. claim” important tasks. What amazed me was that the calendar really reveal one’s priority list. I had an epiphany and realize that I can actually replace my to-do list with calendar so that I make sure everything is properly planned and allocated with a dedicated spot of my schedule.
Track every task on calendar
Unexpectedly, this becomes the most powerful productivity technique I’ve ever developed to effectively manage my time/ task/ priority. Because by doing so, I ensure everything is being tracked on the calendar. It also provides me a realistic look of what I actually need to do in a better visualization. Whether it’s a email from my counterparts asking me for something, or it’s some work I want to initiate, instead of adding it to a to-do list, I just put in on the calendar so that I can keep track.
Plan your day with calendar
In order to more efficiently work throughout the day without feeling burnout, it’s helpful if you plan and monitor the work load of the day. Below is a simple 3-step method to help you stay on top of it:
- Schedule routine planning session: Every morning I spend at least 15 minutes to review what I want to do that day, what should stay and what should go out (move to next day or delegate/delete). By counting the task points comparing to my benchmark (e.g. S = 2, M = 4, L =6, Benchmark of total point is 16 per day), I can better determine how much I can actually accomplish without burying myself.
- Put in placeholder for every important task: Everything you want to do, should be on your calendar. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to “think” what you want to do when you have free time; it’s already planned on your calendar. If you want to make sure others can see enough empty spot on your calendar to schedule a meeting with you, simply put your own task as Free (see figure below), so that it won’t show when others looking at your calendar.
- Schedule routine productivity review: Whether it’s a mid-day review or a end-day review, it’s help drastically once I start to review what actually happened vs. what I planned, I learn more about my scaling system, my estimate, and how much I can /should take as benchmark point. Therefore I can improve the system everyday.
Conclusion
- “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” The first step of improving productivity is to estimate/track time of task completion;
- By using T-shirt sizing for task estimation, you can get a better picture of your velocity and plan your day better;
- Having a 15 minute planning session everyday will help you be more productive and avoid burnout.
What are some methods you use to prioritize your tasks?I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
