21 slots — a different approach to Time Management

How to stop being better at time management become just a way of doing more and more

Most project management methods are centred around tasks, around evaluating the priority and urgency of actions, capturing inputs, defining the next action.

These methods are hugely helpful, I love them and I find myself taking bits from various different approaches in my own planning both at work and in the rest of my life. However one problem with these time management systems is that they can lead to simply being ways of doing more and more, which may make you more productive but does not decrease your stress, or increase your sense of control over what’s going on in your life.

I have recently adopted an additional approach to managing time in life which works with more task based approaches and serves to protect against burn out and over ambitious planning.

This approach is based on a very simple principle:

It is only ever possible to do three things in a day.

Obviously I need to be clear about what I mean by a thing. Simply replying to an email, or putting on a load of laundry doesn't count as a thing. What I mean by a thing is the action or actions that take priority for a block of time. It is possible to slip other tasks around the edges but a lot of our tasks can only be accomplished when they are central to what we are doing for a significant period of time.

A couple of examples to show what I mean:

When I get home from work I have already used up 2 of my things on work. If I also go for a run it will mean that the rest of evening will consist only of eating dinner, watching TV with my wife and getting the baby to bed. If I try and add in, say, revise my CV, meet a friend for a chat, write a blog post, then this will only be possible if I lose the run. This is because revising my CV and going for a run are both things, and I only have one slot left.

I can pick up my guitar and play at any time, but if I specifically decide to practice, work on a particular song, technique or piece of musical theory it becomes a thing, and means I’ll have to give up something.

And if f we can only do 3 things a day therefore we can only do 21 things in a week.

And 21 is not very many. Particularly if you work full time, which takes up 10 of those things before you've even started with the rest of your life. And in the remaining 11 you need to exercise, socialise, nurture relationships, rest, educate yourself etc. Once you start fitting them in you start running out very quickly. You are forced to choose, you can’t do everything.

To show how this works here is a breakdown of how typical week for me would work out. (This was before we had a baby. I’m still working out how baby time management works.)

To start with there’s work

Then I would run with my running club twice a week, and I try and do a long run on Sunday

I would go to church Sunday evening and my homegroup on a Wednesday night

My wife and I try not to do things on a Monday evening because if we get tired that early in the week then it’s hard to recover, Friday night is sort of a date night and Sunday mornings are lie ins.

Saturday is the day for shopping, housework and other personal admin, which means that in a standard week there are only two free slots for anything else that comes up. Which isn't much.

There is some flexibility of course. Weekend runs can get skipped, or get downgraded to the type of run that doesn’t take a slot (Parkruns are ideal for this), but what this shows is how easy it is to get busy and quickly we end up with very little time for new things. We cannot just add things in, we have to make choices and give things up as well.

The great advantage of thinking in terms of 21 slots is that it stops us from thinking that we can always add something new as long our time management system is black belt enough or we have enough innovative productivity apps. By limiting ourselves to these 21 slots we force ourselves to be honest about our priorities and our capacity, enabling us to make choices about what really matters and living our lives in a way where what we get done what really matters to us, but we don’t end up feeling like we spend our lives like rats on a wheel.