Why Time Management isn’t about Managing your Time

What is it about then? I think it's more about managing attention, priorities, wants, needs and choices.

If you routinely run out of time, in reality you didn’t start on time.

If you are routinely late for a specific event, you didn’t switch your attention to that event (and the journey time to reach it) on time.

If you find yourself juggling several things and not completing any of them (at all or on time), you didn’t prioritise any of them.

If you routinely find yourself not getting to do the things you really want to do, you’re not choosing to do the things you want to do.

None of us are in total control of our attention and priorities. We all have external demands placed on us and we can’t always say no, not now or yes, but later.

But even allowing for that, we have more power over our choices than we sometimes realise and that’s why its worth looking at our routine patterns of time management.

If you’re curious about your time choices, try the following exploration and experiment:

1. How do you feel about your time?

How would you describe your use of your available time? Be specific. How many things get done, on time, not done, partly done but not completed?

2. What does good time management mean for you?

What would be your ideal use of your time? All things being equal, what would you do on any given day, week, month?

3. What are you doing now?

Having thought about your ideal time use, take a look at the present and do an audit of all the things you do. Pick a timescale that makes most sense for you and make a list of everything you do. The list should include each item and the time you spend on it. Then organise it. See if you can group activities into categories. Once you have sorted into categories, take each one and rank the time spent into a descending order. This will show you all the big time spends. What patterns are emerging?

4. What would you like to spend more on/ less on?

Now you know how much time you’re spending on different things/groups of things, the next step is to decide what time you would like to spend on each thing.

5. What do you need to do?

What do you need to do to move from your current time spend to achieve your ideal spend? This will form your strategy for getting from present to ideal. If you want to reduce an activity from 6 hours a week to 3 hours, ask yourself what steps do I need to take to achieve that? Include all the resources at your disposal and start to work out a step plan.

6. What will you do?

The hardest part of any project like this is putting your strategic decisions into action. There’s a big gap between need to do and will do and this step requires a commitment to action. The trick here is to create an accountability structure that will increase the chances of you doing what you decide. Try to devise a timeline. I will do x by y. Perhaps share your plan with someone and ask them to check in with you at a specific time to see if you have followed through.

7. How are you doing?

Give yourself some feedback. Check back with the ideal you envisioned at the start and measure how much closer you are to that. Notice how you’re feeling about your time. What’s different? Is it a significant enough improvement for the effort? Do you need to tweak anything at this stage? Do other people notice any change? Like any effective feedback loop, the aim is to reinforce the good and reduce the ineffective, so look out for ways to reinforce the positive progress you’re making.

8. What impact are your changes having?

Have your routines changed? Are you getting more done? Have you done something you had been putting off? Have you prioritised things you wanted to do? Have you dropped things you didn’t need to be doing?

And looking to build on what you’ve done:

Was your ideal ambitious enough?

Are there even more changes you could make about how you use your time?