Let’s be Productive!

Time Management for the Organizationally Impaired

By Regan Gill, VP of Engineering JustAnswer

I was asked recently to do a presentation on Time Management; it was a topic that our staff had requested for a lunchtime lecture. Easy enough, I thought…

But when it came time to prepare, I realized I had two problems:

• Although I understand the basis of Time Management, I don’t use most of the recommended tips myself. I would be as authoritative lecturing on heart surgery techniques since I have approximately the same experience level.
• The internet is full of advice on Time Management, anyone could search and find the “7 ways” or “10 steps” or “12 tips” or “15 skills” needed to be perfectly organized and optimally productive.

So, creating a useful lecture was not going to be the slam dunk I had thought. Oops. Rather than regurgitate info anyone could already find on the internet, I needed to find my insights to share. I invested in some panicked self-analysis and came up with what I think of now as my guiding practices and presented those:

Do the most important things first

Make good decisions, but make decisions when needed

Take care of your brain

Not earth-shaking revelations perhaps, but building these into habits made a difference in my productivity and success. There must be other people that need more than the 3, 7 or 15 easy tips and tricks, and I hope they can find something useful in my methods.

The Reality of Management Time

The reality of my day to day work includes the following:

• Running a software engineering organization at a startup, I could never do everything that should be done even if I work 24 hours a day. There is never an end to my theoretical to-do list.
• My workdays are an endless stream of changing priorities and interruptions. In war, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy; for managers, no

• plan for the day will survive reading their morning email.
• In classic Time Management terms, procrastination is the enemy; in my life, it’s a valuable tool. When used appropriately, I can often avoid unnecessary work and the work I eventually do is better.
• Rather than worry about micromanaging my day to squeeze more into the last useful minute, I am primarily focused on helping others make the best use of their time.
• Finally, attempting to corral my thinking about challenging problems into a preplanned time box does not allow my brain to find creative solutions.

I need to think offline and off schedule to find non-obvious ways to solve hard problems.

Given my realities, I manage my time using the following 3 rules.

Rule 1: Do the most important things first

It’s a fact of software development anywhere that there are always more things to do than there is time to do them. You leave work each day without completing everything, but you can make sure you have done the most important things and used your time wisely. I have a habit, before I pick up a new task to do: I think about all the things that I need to get done and decide which is the most important one to get done first.

How do you decide what is most important? That will depend on where you work and what you do, but generally, it’s what will have the largest impact in the area for which you are responsible.

But most of us have so many different areas to manage that we must choose among equally important tasks: is it giving key employee feedback? Is it a business analysis for a key project? Is it getting the paychecks out? These are all competing for your attention. If you don’t think it out, you could get in a cycle of starting on multiple tasks, jumping between tasks before you are done with one, getting progressively stressed and less efficient. You are not a computer and changing tasks is very costly in time and energy, so you want to minimize that.

Through practice, thinking about your role, responsibilities and goals, and some experience you should be able to decide.

Personally, here are some of the ways I decide the next task to work on.

Commitments: Did I say I was going to do this by a certain date? Trust and reliability are important, so always meet your commitments.

Support: Is someone dependent on this getting done? Even if I haven’t promised it by a certain time, if I am holding someone up its high priority. (It’s best to avoid being in this position when possible; I try to avoid being a blocker).

Consequences: If I don’t do this now, what are the consequences? If nothing will break by delaying, postpone it. Conscious procrastination is a very valuable time saver. In fact, sometimes if you procrastinate long enough the tasks just go away. But be very careful using this and don’t get in a situation where you don’t have time to do something important.

Time: Can I get it done now? If so, and it is impactful, just do it. If I can’t get it done, it’s probably more efficient to do it later when I can focus and complete it than start it and stop partway through.

If I am not sure where I should be focusing my time, I may bring that up with my manager. I will list out the things I have identified as priorities and ask for feedback. Are they the right priorities or should I put others first? This is particularly useful in a new job or role to make sure you and your boss are on the same page. (This is also a good tool to prevent micromanagement).

Remember that doing the right thing is more important than sticking to a plan.

Rule 2: Make good decisions, but make decisions when needed

You need to know when you need to decide, and you need to make the best decisions you can. And because you will make mistakes, your decisions need to consider that you may need to roll the decision back.

How do you make good decisions? You need to have information, you need good judgment, and you need to accept the risk of being wrong. This is hard. Because of this, many people stop in their careers before the point they must start making big or difficult decisions. Either they can’t make good decisions, or they hate the stress of having to make decisions that they know may be wrong.

Before you decide something big, do the following:

Due diligence. Determine what information you need and seek it out. Do the analysis or have someone else do it and evaluate the results. Ask questions. Question your own thinking — humans have so many built-in biases that you have to question your reasoning to avoid them.

Get Feedback. Talk to people whose judgment you trust and ask them for feedback on your plans. Listen to them and evaluate the feedback without bias.

Plan B. You will make mistakes, so have a backup plan. There is no way to avoid making mistakes, no one always decides correctly and there is often no right answer anyway. So, determine what the consequences will be if this is the wrong decision and take them into account.

Timing. Sometimes you can postpone decisions to a better time when you have more information. Learn when that is true and when you must decide now. Postponing a decision incorrectly can have very dire consequences for your team or company — in the best case, it can cause a lot of inefficiencies and wasted effort, in the worst lead to bankruptcy and layoffs. If you must decide now and you don’t know the right answer, follow the rules above and do your best.

Rule 3: Take care of your brain

To be as productive as possible, you need your brain to work at full capacity. The basics of looking after your brain are:

• Sleeping enough
• Exercise regularly
• Eat healthy
• Avoid recreational drugs and Alcohol (Sorry!)
• Relax

You simply CANNOT be productive when you are tired, stressed or cognitively compromised.

No one is thinking at their best after working all night, no matter what you see in movies.

Maybe you will be able to do mechanical and repetitive work, but nothing requiring unique or creative solutions. Licking stamps? Yes. Solving problems? No.

You may underestimate how badly you are performing when your mind is compromised and continue to try to complete a task for hours with no success. This is a terrible waste of time — time you could use to rest and recover. Instead, just stop, get some rest and try again later.

There is no magic pill to make you smarter (yet), but there are a lot of things you can do to make yourself dumber. Every time you decide to not get enough sleep or take drugs (including alcohol) or live half your day like an energizer bunny on Red Bull and the rest like a couch potato on churros, you are impairing your brain.

It is your choice how to treat your brain, just make the decisions consciously. Keep in mind that the more tired you are, the less likely you are to make good decisions. So, make choices with long term consequences early in the day. It may make for a more boring life, but it will be a more productive one as well.

In the end productivity and time management is a matter of personal choice.

Everyone has different tricks to help them. You might like lists, tools, scheduling and optimizing every second of your day. Some people choose to Eat the Frog ala Mark Twain. Or you could be like me, essentially lazy and opportunistic.

Finally, a Small List of Tips

But, I will end with a few personal tips that I have used and found helpful.

1. Gather Data. To solve any problems, you have to have data to define the problem. To find out where you are losing time the first step is to write down where you are spending it. Some tools for this will track what applications on the computer you use. Or, if you are not on your computer that much, stopping every ten minutes to note what you are doing is an effective manual solution. I found this really helpful when changing my job or role because the tasks I needed to do changed and new patterns were formed.
2. Prioritize Your Time. Once you know where your time is going, you can decide what you can stop doing by prioritizing it. For instance, the first thing I stopped doing as soon as I could afford it was housework. I can pay someone else to do this more efficiently than I do it.
3. Stop Caring About Things That Don’t Matter. I hate housework because it is never completed. You can mop a floor and an hour later it needs to be cleaned again. You can mop it every week for 40 years and it will never improve, and for me this is the most frustrating of activities. In this case, I solved the problem by delegating the task, but if you don’t mind a messy house you could just not do it at all. There are probably many things in your life that really don’t matter in the big picture, but you are still spending time on them out of habit or social pressure.
4. Mental Health. This also falls under the take care of your brain area, but I want to make a special note here. No matter how your brain works, it is the only one you have, and you need to treat it as well as you can. I have had recurring depression most of my life and its now under control through medication. Depression has a substantial effect on my mental abilities and I learned that whatever I need to do to keep it under control — I just need to do it. You can’t out-think mental illness, it’s not a problem you can solve by force of will or personal strength.

If you were looking for a simple list of magic actions that would keep you from having to spend time on things you hate — like going to meetings or staying late at the office — or The Easy Way to Never Miss a Deadline Without Hard Work or Stress, I am sorry to disappoint. If you find out that list of magic actions, please send them to me.