“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” – Stephen Covey
Being busy is a blessing. A day filled with office work, school work, social activities, or even household chores means that your body and mind are still able to handle tasks. But what if your tasks can’t fit your day? What if the demands of your roles need more than 24 hours?
It’s time for time management.
A study by Acuity Training found that 82% of people don’t have a time management system, and only 1 in 5 do. It’s not a skill your best-rated resume writing company can teach you before you’re hired. The nugget of wisdom above from author and speaker Stephen Covey sums up what time management is all about: it’s doing the right task at the right time with the right duration. The key is to determine these tasks, schedule the best time when they should be done, and know the amount of time you should be spending on them.
Here are some popular time and activity management strategies successful leaders use.
Planning & Prioritizing
Most of your time management activities should ideally happen before you do the task. In fact, successful leaders list down yesterday what they do today! Planning takes the stress out of deciding what to prioritize at the moment, when you’re about to start a task. Planning also allows you to group your tasks according to importance and urgency, avoiding cramming and rushing. Let’s look at how some leaders plan their day.
Franklin Covey System
The Franklin Covey Time Management System was inspired by the personal principle of Benjamin Franklin and was popularized by the third principle of Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Principle #3 states: “Put first things first.” This is the very definition of prioritization. Franklin created an entire system for his self-improvement through a daily journal that he carried everywhere. He wrote down his personal goals and virtues he wanted to develop, and often referred to them to assess his progress.
The Franklin Covey system teaches you to set monthly and weekly goals, broken down into daily tasks. The tasks are labeled according to priority. In the Franklin Planner, a tool provided to follow this system, task clusters are assigned a letter, say, A, B, C. Tasks that need to be done within the day are labeled A. Tasks that can be pushed towards the latter part of the day or reassigned to the next day are labeled B. Tasks that are not urgent and can be done any day of the week are labeled C. Under each letter, tasks are further arranged by number to determine the chronology of completion.
Example:
A.1 Cook breakfast
A.2 Fill up the laundry
A.3 Wake up the kids
A.4 Wipe the car
A.5 Take out the meat from the freezer
A.6 Bring the kids to school
A.7 Water the plants
B.1 Cook dinner
B.2 Take out the laundry and fold
B.3 Vacuum Sarah’s bedroom
C.1 Call the dentist to set an appointment
C.2 Check out the new local bookstore
The idea is to strictly follow the priority hierarchy. For example, all A tasks must be completed first before starting the B tasks. Jumping from one letter (or number) to another is not recommended, as doing so ruins the priority hierarchy. Reviewing weekly and monthly goals also helps you check if your daily priorities support your big-picture goals.
GTD (Getting Things Done) Method
The Franklin Covey system can be done together with the GTD Method, created by author David Allen, which takes into consideration all the things that need your attention, not just the things you will do yourself. This is crucial for someone in a leadership role. Some of the tasks on your list may not be actionable (by you) at the moment, but they need to be on your list. You may then organize the actionable ones with Franklin Covey in mind, then assign an action for each task: do it yourself, delegate, or set aside.
RPM (Rapid Planning Method)
This planning system uses visioning as a motivation for accomplishing your tasks. RPM may also stand for Result, Purpose, and Massive Action Plan. Under this system, listed tasks are organized into chunks according to their common purpose – for school, for personal improvement, for career, for community volunteering, etc. You need to create an RPM block for each major task by identifying the task, the result you want when you complete the task, and the purpose for completing the task. Under it, list down the actions you can take to complete the task and achieve your desired result. Do this for all your tasks.
Some industry- or job-specific resumes are written this way, highlighting roles, purposes, and results. You can learn from the best professional resume writers and transform their template into to-do lists.
Pareto Principle or Pareto Analysis
The Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, is a prioritization technique created by an Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto. There’s a slight difference in the definition of this principle. One site says it’s based on the idea that 20% of what we do is responsible for 80% of the important outcomes, or outcomes that solve problems. So, tasks that are more likely to solve your problems go to the top of your list. This implies that your planning habit must include identifying your problems first, so you can identify tasks that are related to their solutions.
Another site states that the Pareto Principle has one fundamental rule: you must spend 20% of your time on 80% of your tasks, so you can later spend 80% of your time on the remaining 20% of your tasks. It essentially means getting the quicker tasks out of the way early on so you can focus on the most significant tasks that need more time.
Time Blocking
This time management system is supposed to be the guiding principle of inventor (and now DOGE head) Elon Musk, who spends more than the normal hours of work in a week and can still set aside time for personal activities. The process of this system is to assign a time block for daily activities, including routines like eating lunch and office commutes.
If you’re more comfortable doing this the manual way, you can divide a piece of paper into two columns. The left column contains hours of the day, such as 7:00, 8:00, or 13:00. In the right column, write your tasks, creating a time block for each in one-hour or half-hour chunks.
Example:
8:00 Wake up/breakfast
8:30 Bath/dress up
9:00 Drive to work
9:30
10:00 Morning scrum
10:30 Touchbase with managers
11:00
11:30
12:00 Lunch
12:30
1:00 Work on new proposal
If you’re a whiz in Google Sheets or Excel, this will be easier to do, adjust, and design for your purposes.
Eat That Frog Technique
This is the opposite of the Pareto Principle. In this system, your objective is to get the most difficult or unpleasant (also, often the most significant) task out of the way at the start of the day. The name was taken from a quote by Mark Twain: “Eat a live frog the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” The logic is that if you complete the most unpleasant and time-consuming task early, you can breeze through the rest of the day doing the easier tasks. You’ll have a better chance of finishing your tasks on time without laboring over the difficult task towards the end of the day.
Pickle Jar Theory
Are you familiar with the anecdote of the pickle jar? The story is about a school teacher who demonstrated priorities in life by asking his students to place rocks, pebbles, and sand in a pickle jar. The rocks represent the most important aspects of your life, like family or work, or the most important things you must finish today. The pebbles represent secondary things, such as your tennis club activities, or tasks that can be done another day or by someone else. The sand represents distractions or activities you can do without.
The idea was to show the students that putting the sand into the jar first would fill up all the space, and there wouldn’t be room for rocks and pebbles anymore. If you fill up your life with distractions and unnecessary activities, there won’t be room for the most significant aspects that can bring personal development and happiness. The pickle jar analogy is a good basis for planning your tasks.
Productivity Techniques
Now that you’ve planned your task list and priorities, it’s time to dive into the actual strategies for raising your productivity on a daily basis.
Pomodoro Technique
This technique is one of the more popular methods of managing your schedule. It divides your work hours into 25-minute intervals (called pomodoros) with scheduled breaks between sessions. The frequent breaks help reboot the brain now and then, which improves motivation over time. The name is based on the tomato-shaped timer that its creator, author and entrepreneur Francisco Cirillo, made.
For this technique, you need your list of tasks and a timer. Under the Pomodoro method, you must work for 25 minutes straight without distractions, then take a 5-minute break after. Repeat this 30-minute cycle set several times until the end of your work shift or your self-imposed work hours. After the fourth session, you may take a longer break (about 20-30 minutes). You can increase your break time as you increase your sessions.
During your 25-minute work time, you’re not supposed to check your mobile phone or other devices that could lure you away from work. One important rule in Pomodoro is to “snooze” your gadgets. The technique encourages physical activity, even minor ones, like standing up to get coffee or a snack, or stretching. But you may also look at your devices for urgent messages.
Eisenhower Matrix
By now, you might be familiar with this method. It’s the matrix of four quadrants that determines whether a task is urgent and/or important. It was a system created by the former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who served as a U.S. Army Allied Forces Commander in World War II. Eisenhower had to deal with a lot of decision-juggling during his tour, so he invented this method of deciding which tasks take priority.
Quadrant A consists of important and urgent tasks that you need to do immediately. Quadrant B consists of important tasks that are not that urgent, so you have some leeway in their completion. Under Quadrant C are the urgent but not as important tasks. This means that as long as they’re completed, you don’t have to be the one to do them, and you can delegate them. The unimportant and not urgent tasks fall under Quadrant D; these are the tasks you can ignore until you have the time for them. In short, you only have to focus on Quadrant A. If you have extra time in your day, you can take some from Quadrant C or B.
Parkinson’s Law
This system was developed by British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson, who was known to have stated, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” It says that if you assign more time to a task than is necessary, you’ll likely spend that much time on it. This productivity technique promotes short bursts of work and encourages you to assign a shorter time to finish a task.
Some examples of ways to strictly adhere to Parkinson’s Law:
- Working without a computer charger and finishing the task before the computer dies.
- Assigning a deadline for a task and cutting it in half to finish the task in half the time.
- Finishing a task early in the day; always setting a daytime deadline
- Setting a limited time for a task, even though you know it could take more than that
Timeboxing
This goal-oriented strategy is a deep dive into your tasks, paying particular attention to each stage of the process. The idea is to break down your overall task into a sub-task with its own timebox. When you’re not certain how much time to assign to a task, this can be helpful. It’s also useful for big tasks that may take hours or an entire day to finish.
Each task or sub-task must have a timebox of not more than 3 hours. You don’t have to exhaust the timebox; just finish the task within a reasonable time.
Example:
If you’re making sandwiches for dinner, you may assign a timebox for each of the following subtasks.
- Bake the bread – 3 hours
- Cook the meat or other toppings – 1 hour
- Prepare the spread/dressing – 2 hours
- Prepare the sidings – 2 hours
There are many ways you can plan your tasks, break them down into doable pieces, and complete them in a reasonable time. Although successful leaders favor specific methods, what works for them may not work for you. Try the techniques in this article and adopt what works best for you.
Sources:
https://www.mytimemanagement.com/franklin-covey.html
https://www.usa.edu/blog/time-management-techniques/