Are you one of those people who is always running to keep up? Or are you someone whose life seems to be a smooth and steady flow of tasks, and who always completes everything by 5pm on Friday?
While most of us are somewhere in the middle, the answer is likely to depend on whether you have the right time management techniques in your toolbox. Here is a breakdown of some of the main options, split into groups by the way that they aim to help.
Understanding your work
It can often be helpful to have a visual representation of what you need to do. Pictures change how we think about things. They activate a different part of our brain from words, and can therefore quite literally give us a different perspective on a problem. A Kanban board can give a simple visual representation of tasks to do, in progress and complete, and show you where your focus is needed.
Another way is of understanding your work is known as ‘getting things done’. Capture your tasks in some way, clarify their meaning, organise them into lists, reflect on your progress, and then do the next step.
Prioritising your work
The next area that can help with time management is to prioritise your tasks, and identify the most important. There are several techniques that you can use here, including:
- The Eisenhower Matrix divides tasks by level of urgency and importance. Urgent and important tasks should be done first. Tasks that are important but less urgent need a decision about when you are going to do them. Those that are urgent but less important should be delegated, and those that are neither urgent nor important should be discarded.
- The ABCDE Method is very similar. It divides tasks into most important, important, nice to do, delegate, and eliminate, and you do them in order of importance.
- The MSCW method is generally used for particular projects. It divides tasks into must-have (critical for project success), should-have (important but not essential), could-have (nice, but only if time and resources permit) and won’t-have (deferred).
- The 80/20 method is even simpler: you identify the most important 20% of tasks, and focus only on those. Eliminate or reduce the remaining 80%.
- Warren Buffet’s 5/25 rule is similar to the 80/20 rule. Identify your top 25 tasks. Prioritise them in order of importance. Focus on the top five and ignore the other 20.
You need to be ruthless in assessing the level of importance of tasks. You cannot do everything.
Picking your moment
Time management is also about doing things at the right time. Mark Twain said that if your job is to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. If your job is to eat two frogs, eat the bigger one first. In other words, don’t put off difficult tasks, because they won’t get any better.
- The Time Blocking technique is a similar idea, but more formal. It says that you should do your ‘deep work’—your most important tasks—from 8am to 11am. Between 11am and 11.30, whiz through your quick tasks. Have a break from 11.30 to 12.30. From 12.30 to 2pm, do your important tasks, and then the period from 2pm to 4pm is set aside for meetings.
- The two-minute rule is an interesting one. It says that if a task takes less than two minutes, you should just do it. If it will take more than two minutes, delegate it or defer it to a specific time later.
Maximising your productivity
The final area is techniques that maximise your productivity. These include:
- The Pomodoro Technique: Decide what task to do, and set a timer for 25 minutes. Stop when the timer goes off and take a five-minute break. After four cycles, take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.
- The 3–3–3 Method: Do three hours of deep work, three shorter tasks, and three maintenance tasks.
- Task batching: Sort similar tasks together, block out a dedicated time and do your tasks in batches.
- The 1–3–5 Method: A bit like the 3–3–3 method, but do one major task, three medium tasks and five small tasks in a block.
- The Pickle Jar method: Do your major tasks first, in big blocks of time, then slot your smaller tasks in around them, like smaller pickles in a jar.
Which of these do you use? And which are most useful?