Project delays, slipping deadlines, and incomplete to-do lists are very common. The issue is time management. How do we become better time managers? There are plenty of books, blogs, checklists, apps, hacks available. Most of them fail due to a simple fact.
All these tools, recommendations assume a person's skill set, the skills required for time management precede the effectiveness of any app or tool. Using these tools without skills is unlikely to produce positive time management outcomes.
So what are the skills required for managing time? Essentially time management is a process that protects, structures, adjusts the available time to the various, at times conflicting, requirements.
Three particular skills are of importance for managing time
- Awareness: Understand that time is a limited resource.
- Arrangement: Organising your goals, schedules, tasks to effectively use available time.
- Adaptation: Monitoring the use of time and adjusting it to interruptions and changing priorities.
Most of the tools, apps focus on arrangements i.e, scheduling, and planning. There is less understanding of awareness and adaptation.
Research into the relative importance of these three skills revealed that all three are equally important and should be given equal attention in developing time management skills. Research also revealed that awareness and adaptation were rarer skills and more difficult to develop naturally without direct interventions. Also, awareness skills helped people avoided postponing a task, and adaptation skills helped prioritize the tasks well.
How to improve time management skills
First and foremost, everyone should figure out where to focus. This requires analyzing your current skill and the steps you can take to prioritize your improvement efforts.
Build accurate self-awareness of your time management skills: Use objective assessments like microsimulation, asking for feedback from peers, superiors, and establishing a baseline against which to compare.
Recognize that preferences matter: Self-awareness of one's preferences can help understand where you might struggle, as your efforts go against existing habits. But it should help to remember that skills are the most malleable personal attributes and provide the greatest returns on your efforts.
identify and prioritize the skills you need to improve: This is very obvious but avoids efforts that are "an inch deep but a mile wide". In short, do not spread yourself too thin. Prioritize your needs focus on improving one skill at a time and proceed to the next one on completion.
There are quite a few tactics for improving skills. These are discussed below. Remember that these are for developing your basic skills which will improve your time management ultimately.
Develop awareness skills: Both the effectiveness and efficiency are critical. Efficiency is about doing things quickly and minimum resources whereas effectiveness is about doing things well.
- Find your peak performance time.
- Treat your time like money.
- Try timing up.
- Evaluate how realistically you assess your time.
- Take a future time perspective.
- Avoid sunk cost fallacy.
Develop arrangement skills: It is about taking control of life and organizing your work around it.
- Prioritize activities and obligations
- Avoid mere urgency effect
- Use a calendar app
- Schedule protected time
- Reduce underestimation errors.
- Try half-sized goals.
Develop adaptation skills: These skills come into play in high pressure and crisis situations. The challenge is to handle situations without getting upset or distracted.
- Try habit stacking.
- Use short bursts of effort.
- Experiment with time tracker or checklist apps.
- Don't be a reminder miser
- Create contingency plans.
- Seek to reduce time wasters.
We need to become better time managers of our own efforts to improve time management to prioritize our development efforts. Move away from alluring quick fixes and instead assess and build the underlying time management skills for long term benefit.
Time Management Is About More Than Life Hacks
by Erich C. Dierdorff HBR January 29, 2020
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