An Honest Attempt at Being Better About Managing My Time
3 simple tips for being more productive
Time management is the most undervalued skill in the business world today.
There, I said it.
In all seriousness, though, time is the one thing we’re all constantly battling. It’s a valuable commodity. In fact, your time and attention are two of the most valuable things you can physically lend a person.
As such, like many, I am in constant pursuit of different methods, adjustments, hacks, and ways of being more efficient with my time because, let’s face it, our time is limited — it’s finite — and there is only so much of it we can distribute in a given day.
Now, if you’re like me, you’re really good at constructing a to-do list, but maybe not so good at actually cutting through it. Productivity can be pretty elusive when you balance your wants alongside your needs.
So, here are a few high-level tactics I’ve recently begun adopting in order to be better about my time. If you have any additional insights to share, I’d love to hear them.
1a. Start Saying No To People
This piece of advice is probably ingrained in countless articles on productivity, but seeing as I haven’t had the time to read into many of them, here it is.
Okay, fine. I’ll at least try to expand upon this notion.
When it comes to others trying to grab some of your precious time, it’s okay to say no in the event that you don’t see an immediate impact or benefit as part of the outcome.
People are more understanding than you think. A simple line like this can oftentimes be all you need: “Hey, thanks for your interest. I’m happy to chat sometime but am currently heads down at the moment building my business.”
Level-set the other person’s expectations so the next time they come to you for time, they come with a specific reason.
1b. Start Saying No To Content
When it comes to saying no, that can include content as well. I used to spend an excess amount of time reading different industry articles, publications, and news, which is fine, but also a time suck.
Now that I’m trying to be better about managing my time, I’ve done away with my content consumption. Or rather, I’ve made it a point to push those types of activities outside of my typical work day.
There are tools you can use, of course, to help save these types of things for later (I use OneTab), but what I’ve come to find is that when I do save a bunch of “interesting” links for later on, I find myself skimming over them with much more scrutiny when that time finally comes.
If you can teach yourself to have that type of discipline in the upfront, you can save yourself a lot of time. You don’t need to read every line of every article, or watch every minute of a video. Sometimes, all you really need is the headline, and oftentimes, all you need is 6 seconds to get the gist.
2. Stop Adding Items to Your To-Do List
The second piece of this involves ceasing the oddly satisfying activity of adding items to your to-do list. And I say “oddly satisfying” because, if you’re like me, it feels good to officially add something to your list. After all, that means that you can get that item off of your mind and eventually done.
But it’s that eventually that kills you.
To-do lists tend to be completely useless for me because I don’t hold myself accountable to cross things off of them in a timely manner; and there are a ton of articles and information out there meant to help me be better about this, but I’ve just never personally found a system that’s worked for me.
So, in lieu of swearing off to-do lists altogether, I recently decided to give Gone app a try.
Gone is an ephemeral to-do list, meaning that every item you add on the simple platform disappears after 24 hours, whether you complete the task or not. It also gives you a stat on your overall completion percentage.
So far, this has been great for me. It helps me be more honest with myself and what exactly I intend to (or can) accomplish in a given day and it forces me to list out only my most pressing items.
It’s still a bit of a struggle, I’m not going to lie, but I believe it’s going to make me better over time and at the very least it isn’t costing me very much.
Gone has already taught me a pretty valuable lesson:
If a to-do list item can’t be crossed off within 24 hours, it probably wasn’t that important anyway.
3. Schedule Shorter Meetings
Here’s one last tool I’ve been using lately that I thought was worth sharing in this piece. It’s called Calendly.
What Calendly does is integrate with your calendar and let you send people a link to schedule a meeting with you when you’re free and when it’s most convenient for them.
For me, this does two things:
- It eliminates all the countless emails we business professionals send one another in order to coordinate a simple time to meet
- It helps you fill the gaps in your calendar with productivity rather than stalling until you can jump into your next meeting
And here’s the catch: Calendly’s free plan only gives you the ability to designate one type of meeting: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour.
Which setting do you think I have my account running on?
That’s right. By only letting people book 15-minute meetings with me, it forces us both to be more efficient, productive, and respectful of the other person’s time.
And, having the ability to hold 4 meetings in an hour versus only 1 or 2 doesn’t hurt either. In my experience, 50% of most meetings (and I’m being generous) can be thrown right out the window anyway.
Conclusion
That’s it! I hope you found this advice useful. I won’t take up anymore of your time (wink).
