Time management. 3 proven ways to get things done
We are living in the Internet Era, fast-paced world, which is constantly evolving. 100 and 200 years ago the tempo of living was much slower. Today the society, business, and government require us to be fast and efficient at the same time. Sometimes, it becomes a real challenge to get things done and keep the balance in life. The outcomes of trying to fit everything into your schedule can make you exhausted and sleep-deprived.
“You can’t make up for lost time. You can only do better in the future.” Ashley Ormon
Being productive and time-efficient is the goal for many business people from all over the world. In this article, I would like to review three techniques that I selected when decided to give my time management skills a boost.
1. Prioritize & plan strategically
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
Let’s face it — you will never have fewer tasks unless you go down career ladder or quit. Though all assignments might sound very important or urgent to do, prioritization is crucial for getting your work done.
I remember hearing about the prioritization and strategic planning from my manager, who is very efficient, constantly travels to business meetings and has a thousand of emails arriving daily. He referred to the Eisenhower’s time management matrix.
The former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower found the efficient way of organizing his workload and setting priorities back in 1954. His later called “Eisenhower’s Principle” is based on the belief that people should spend the majority of time on things that are important and not just the ones that are urgent.
He defined important and urgent activities in the following way (source: MindTools):
- Important activities have an outcome that leads to us achieving our goals, whether these are professional or personal;
- Urgent activities demand immediate attention and are usually associated with achieving someone else’s goals. They are often the ones we concentrate on, and they demand attention because the consequences of not dealing with them are immediate.
Next, think about each activity and put it into one of four categories, as shown in Figure 1, below:
Figure 1 — Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Principle
This division will help you to see the tasks that have critical deadlines and which are important (quadrant one). The ones, which are important and are not urgent (quadrant two), are the ones you need to work on most of all as they harvest long-term results and success. The tasks in quadrant two and four are subject to rescheduling or delegating.
2. The 80/20 rule
Look at your tasks again and consider each of them. Which tasks bring value to your business? Which are routine and require less effort? Don’t just spend your energy on doing everything. Remember: “only 20% of effort give 80% of result” as concluded Dr. Juran in the Pareto principle (source: Investopedia).
Dr. Juran said that we should distinguish “vital few and trivial many.” It all stands up for finding the main focus and prioritizing the important things.
The key to avoiding 80% of useless effort is to judge each activity by its importance and relevance to your current focus, having the courage to say “no” to the tasks, which will make you lose it.
Sometimes, we tend to be overambitious and take everything on us. Though, the actual leaders focus on one or just a few things. Don’t try to do everything. Have one focus and prioritize the tasks accordingly. “Vital few and trivial many.”
3. Visualize your work and review the results
The third way to get things done on time is to see your end goal. Divide the long process into smaller steps, set core goals, and then break each of them down into a set of tasks. Personal Kanban is a great way for a manager to get hold of the objectives fulfilled.
Kanban (see presentation on SlideShare) helps to visualize, organize, and complete work. The first official use of Kanban goes back to Taiichi Ohno’s work at Toyota.
There are two real rules with Personal Kanban:
- Visualize your work
- Limit your work-in-progress
On a special board, you show three states: Backlog, Doing, and Done. Tasks move across this simple workflow (source: Personal Kanban).
This is done to show three main things:
- Work that we have in progress
- All the work we haven’t gotten to yet
- Our performance
Trello.com is a free online board, which you can use for Agile or Kanban processes. It might come in handy to get a good overview of your work progress, and it also works on all devices.
To sum up the above said, a good help in getting things done is to have a visual overview of your activities, sorted by priorities and combined with strategic planning.
Afterword
As an afterword, I have the challenge to share with you. Next month (30 work days starting from October 22nd) I will test all these approaches and, as a result, I will share the insights on how it influenced my performance. Are you up for a challenge too?
Share your tips for better time management!
Originally published at www.linkedin.com.
