The Time Management Table: Fundamentals of Time Management
If you want to manage your time effectively, it’s important to think about the fundamentals. Fundamentals win championships in sports and help people earn top scores on tough exams. If you want to be more productive, manage procrastination, and use your time in a more satisfying way, you’ll want to master some fundamental principles of time management.
What you read here won’t be a complete time management system or an ultimate guide. Instead, think of this as a checklist. As you read about each of these fundamental principles, think about how it shows up in your own life and work. Is this something that you do well, or an area that you can improve?
Build a Stable Table
It can help to think of time management as a table. A standard table has four legs. If you remove one of the legs, the table falls over.
Similarly, there are four important principles of time management:
- Split
- Simplify
- Prioritize
- Schedule
All four of these principles or “legs” are important. There are different ways to incorporate them into your life and your work. You’ll see some simple examples below, but it’s fine to have your own preferred methods. The important thing is to notice if any of the legs on your table are missing or wobbly.
Some of these principles might seem very familiar. There’s a good reason for that. An effective time management system will incorporate each of these principles in some way. Even simple tools and tips are likely to be based on one or more of these principles.
If you’re reading a book on time management or watching a video, notice whether it addresses some or all of these fundamentals, and how it addresses them. If you’re working with a coach to improve your time management skills, discuss these principles with your coach. Your coach can help you recognize which legs of your personal table are solid, which ones are missing, and which ones just need to be tightened up a bit.
Split: Make a “Today” list that is separate from your “to-do” list
A to-do list is probably the most common and well-known productivity tool. To-do lists take many different forms, from simple ones written on paper to sleek phone apps with an abundance of features. And while many of us use some type of to-do list, we might not realize how easily they can undermine our productivity.
To-do lists can quickly grow too long to be useful. When a to-do list contains too many tasks, the important ones get lost in the crowd.
Even worse, a long to-do list is overwhelming. We look at a long to-do list and instinctively think, “how will I ever get all of this done?” This leaves us discouraged and demotivated. And what happens then? We procrastinate. Or we complete tasks, but feel stressed out while doing them.
If any of this sounds familiar, take a few minutes right now to create a “Today” list that is separate from your to-do list. A Today list only contains tasks that you will complete today. Every day, you’ll copy tasks from your to-do list over to your Today list. Exactly how you do this depends on the type of to-do list that you use—for example, whether it’s on paper or on an app. What’s important is that, when you look at your Today list, you’re only seeing tasks that you will complete today.
You might find yourself initially putting more tasks on your Today list than you can actually complete in one day. That’s okay. It’s part of the process. With practice, you will learn to choose a number that you can realistically complete.
Simplify: Break tasks down into actionable steps
You have a Today list. It seems to contain a reasonable number of tasks. But you still have trouble getting started. It still feels overwhelming.
Break the tasks down into smaller steps. How small? Just like choosing the number of tasks to put on your Today list, you’ll need some practice in order to learn what works best for you. It can also vary depending on how motivated you feel.
Suppose one of your tasks is to write a report. You’re finding it hard to get started, so you break that down into smaller steps. You decide that step #1 is to read through some emails containing information that you’ll need for the report. If that still seems overwhelming, a smaller and more manageable first step could be to locate all of the emails that you’ll need.
Prioritize: Identify the most valuable tasks on your list
It’s far too easy to do lots of things without doing anything important.
If that sentence didn’t make you pause for a moment, read it again.
Suppose you take the first five tasks from the top of your to-do list and copy them to your Today list. Why did you pick those five tasks? Is it because your to-do list is already prioritized, with the most important tasks at the top? If so, fantastic! You already know where we’re going with this.
Prioritizing is crucial if we want our work to be meaningful and impactful. That’s true whether we’re at a job, completing schoolwork, or doing chores at home. We might think that we have too much to do and not enough time to do it, when the real problem is that we’re spending time on tasks that can be done at a later time—or might not need to be done at all.
If your to-do list is huge, prioritizing it will take some time. It’s a task in itself. But it’s a worthwhile investment. It’s like organizing your closet, your kitchen cabinets, or a messy garage. Once you’re done, you’ll have a clearer picture of what you have and can find things more easily.
Schedule: Be intentional about the time that you spend on each task
We can’t talk about time management without talking about time. The tasks that we complete are only part of the equation. When we will complete each task? How much time will we spend on each one?
Our lives easily become driven by deadlines. How often do you start a task at the last possible moment? How often do you declare a task finished simply because you ran out of time?
How often do you plan to complete several tasks, but only finish one?
Just as it can be helpful to break tasks down into smaller steps, it can be helpful think about how much time you’ll spend on each task in your Today list. If you have several high-priority tasks to complete, or if you have a tendency to spend more time on tasks than you intend to, set time limits for each task.
As with the other fundamental skills, learning to schedule effectively can require practice. Many of us tend to underestimate the amount of time that a task will require. Setting time limits can help us get better at this.
There will almost certainly be some trial and error involved as you master these skills. The more you embrace that as part of the process, the more solid your table becomes.
Building your time management table can be a lot like building a real table: it’s easier when you have help. Contact me to schedule a free consultation and learn what Core Energy Coaching can do for you.