While I believe there is truly no such thing as time management, we can manage ourselves and how we use time. Managing how we use our time is a big part of success.
Do you look around at people you consider successful and wonder how they seem to ‘do it all’? They have an active family life, a busy career, are involved in volunteer work, exercise, and always seem to be available for anyone at any time. What do they know that the rest of us don’t?
These people that seem to have superpowers have learned how to manage themselves when it comes to how they invest their time. They know that success depends on recognizing what is important, and have developed practices and techniques they use daily to manage themselves and the activities they need to be part of. Here is a list of some of the best practices they use.
- 1. They have routines. If you ask successful people how they manage time one consistent theme is they have routines. Most will start the day the same way waking up at the same time every day, their personal care routine, checking their schedule, catching up on the news…whatever it is there is a consistent routine.
This continues throughout their day. You’ll find they have times they like to have meetings, read email, think and strategize and every other part of their day.
Routines add structure which helps with focus.
2. List makers. A huge energy drain is trying to remember what you are supposed to do. Writing it down eliminates this problem. A bigger benefit of writing it down is it’s easy to see what needs to be done and prioritize.
If you spend time looking at your list and determining the top 5 – 10 things that absolutely positively must be done today, you won’t waste your time on activities that don’t move you towards your goals.
3. Manage their schedule. Ever notice how the most successful people seem to have the fewest meetings? That’s no coincidence, they plan it that way. Meetings are huge wasters of productive time and interfere with being able to complete work.
In addition, they find spots that could be time wastes but they put to use. For example, they catch up on their reading while on airplanes, in waiting rooms, or when there are ten minutes before a meeting starts.
4. Schedule dead time. While it seems counter-intuitive to not fill up your schedule, successful people recognize that leaving unplanned time in their calendar is useful.
This provides flexibility for unforeseen situations, availability for opportunities that might otherwise be missed and time to think, create, and focus on what’s important. When running from one thing to the next there is no way to take full advantage of learning, assessing, and evaluating what occurred before.
5. Focus on what doing now, not multi-task. If you put 100% of your attention on what you are doing until it is complete instead of jumping between email, a task in front of you, making that phone call you forgot about, or thinking about the meeting two hours from now you’ll find that it takes less time, there are fewer mistakes and you might even enjoy what you’re doing.
I know everyone multi-tasks, and it’s almost satisfying to be so busy you feel like you have to multitask. Yet if you do any reading on this topic studies show that multi-tasking costs time rather than saves time.
6. Systems for managing. Whether it’s their phone, a physical calendar, an assistant, or some other system, all successful people have a system they use to keep track of appointments, events, and their to do lists.
They don’t depend on their memories and neither should you.
7. Permission to be human. None of us is perfect, even those wildly successful people who seem to have it all. What they have learned is accepting themselves as humans, who will make mistakes, overlook something important and yes even miss a deadline. They recognize that even with the best plans something is going to happen they didn’t anticipate and can’t avoid.
Successful people don’t have less to do than the rest of us. They simply have learned to focus on what is important, delegate appropriately, don’t take time to do something someone else could (and should) easily handle, and have created systems and processes to keep everything managed neatly.
Looking at the list decide what you can do differently. Try it for two weeks and assess how it’s working and what you notice about your schedule, your productivity, and how you’re feeling. Applying these techniques so they work for you takes time and patience. Changing behavior you have had for years won’t happen overnight.
We’ve developed a Time Management Checklist to help you assess how you are using or misusing your time. Download it for free.
