Manage your most precious resource

Time is our most precious (and perishable) resource. Yet, we are terrible at managing it and pretend as if there is an inexhaustible supply. Some people are enormously productive and manage to prioritise family, fitness and recreation.

Parkinson’s Law states that “Work expands to fill the time allotted to it”. This has never been truer than our current work from home situation. Without any end to the natural work day, our duties can expand late into the night and early morning hours.

But are we truly being effective? I would argue that we aren’t.

Attention attenuation: The average knowledge worker is able to concentrate for just 3 minutes before being distracted. And no wonder — we are inundated by notifications from email, collaboration tools like Teams/ Slack, social media and other text messages.

Every time we are distracted, it takes us another 23 minutes to get back to the task at hand. If we are paid to think, then the reality is that most of us aren’t doing the actual thinking for very long.

Collaboration overload: Matrixed org structures, colleagues in multiple time zones and incentives for being helpful, have all resulted in a deluge of extra work. We all want to be cooperative colleagues and the pull to jump in and help is strong.

However, be mindful that there is an opportunity cost to every “Yes” that we say. It just means that you will have to find a way to fit in the additional request on top of your regular work.

Lack of clarity on priorities: In truth, we can’t manage time. It marches on no matter what we do. We can only manage our priorities. However, too often, managers neglect to clarify priorities and feel free to dump more work on their subordinates. They think that they are delegating, so that they can work on higher impact items. But unless they are able to prioritise the new requests, all they are doing is over-burdening team members.

So is the situation hopeless? Are we destined to remain bleary eyed workers, sleep-walking through our workday and stealing time from family and health?

There are still things that you are able to do in order to bring a semblance of order and create space for deep thinking and creativity.

Solutions

Remove all notifications. Some productivity experts like Cal Newport have suggested getting off all social media – or at the very least removing them from your phone. Another technique is to change your social media account passwords to the indecipherable suggested password on your browser (and not save it).

You will have to go look it up in order to log in. The additional friction created by this act, may make you rethink your impulse to just check Facebook for a couple of seconds.

Prioritise your work. When you are assigned a new task, have an honest conversation about the priority of the task compared to all else that you have on your plate.

Sleep. Most people need between eight and ten hours of sleep a night. New sleep research shows that our brains need the pause in order build the synapses to synthesise the information that we consume throughout the day.

Don’t schedule back-to-back meetings. Often our days are so packed with meetings that we don’t have any time to do the actual work. Experts suggest keeping a gap of at least 15 minutes between meetings, so that you can process the information and prioritise your to-dos.

Resist the urge to attend meetings where you aren’t able to add any real value. While we all like to be in the know of what is going on, overloading your day with meetings is ineffective. Insist (if you can) that each meeting have an agenda that is published in advance.

At the very least, start doing so with the meetings that you schedule. Perhaps your colleagues will be shamed into doing the same.

Limit email and Instant message time. The “always-on culture” is something many companies take pride in. However, the true costs in terms of employee burnout and disengagement are now being recognised. Enlightened organisations have begun to recognise the futility of this approach to the extent that some are discouraging emails on the weekends and after-hours.

Experts suggest checking and processing your emails just three times a day. That may take some weaning for many of us, but is by no means impossible.

And please don’t use your email inbox as your to-do list. Additionally, don’t be the person who sends emails at 1 am — you don’t look super productive, you just appear to be a poor manager of your time.

There are many more productivity tools (and many books and blog posts in this genre). But hopefully, these will get you started. Please remember that no one on their deathbed has wished that they spent more time at work!

(The author is a global social entrepreneur striving to practice what he preaches)