Time is on Your Side: Master Time Management for Professional and Personal Growth

Have you ever felt that time slips through your fingers? Leaving you with a sense of disappointment and unfulfilled potential? If you answered yes, then this article is for you. In my previous article How to Stay Motivated When Life Gets Tough - Utilizing a Habit Tracker and Gamification Strategy I talked about how to use a habit tracker and gamification to help you stay on top of your goals. This is a follow up focusing on how to best leverage time to make incremental progress.

In our modern world, time has become one of our most precious resources. Each day has a fixed number of hours, and how we utilize those hours can significantly impact our personal and professional aspirations. Personally, if I don’t use my time effectively I end up feeling wasteful and the lack of progress toward my goals leaves me feeling disappointed.

This is where time management comes into play. Time management allows me to consciously allocate time to specific tasks, activities, and goals. Whether I’m juggling multiple projects at work or seeking a healthy work-life balance, effective time management is the key to making incremental progress toward my goals. In this article, I will share my process that helps me optimize my time and productivity.

My mental model for time management?

Time management keeps me organized, reduces my tendency to procrastinate, and ensures I have enough time for everything I need to do while still saving time for myself and the things I enjoy. For me, it’s a combination of the Inbox Zero concept by Merlin Mann, some concepts from Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, and a lot of time blocking. My mechanism of GTD is to focus on time blocking and batch processing. Time blocking allows me to dedicate specific blocks of time to specific tasks and activities. It doesn’t matter what I’m looking to do, it needs to be on my calendar or it’s not getting done. This includes making time for time management itself. These blocks also help minimize tax from context switching, focus my concentration, and significantly improve my productivity. I even go as far as retrofitting blocks after the fact, in case of last min change ups, doing so helps me better evaluate how I’ve spent my time.

I also batch similar tasks such as email clean up and follow ups. Side note, to keep from being distracted I will turn off all notifications (emails, slack, text, calls) which helps me stay on task, especially when I’m writing docs, deep diving on technical designs, or anything else that requires sharp mental focus. This is just a good practice to help keep me on task.

How do you make time for time management? What kind of things do you block on your calendar?

Have I mentioned that you should BLOCK your calendar! Seriously, put in place weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly blocks. For example for me, my daily cadence contains 30 mins for planning, 30 mins to batch process new work requests, and two 15-30 min blocks for cleaning my inbox. My weekly cadence contains a 30 min block at the end of the week to plan for the following week. This gives me time to look ahead to reschedule meetings and secure time for focus work by placing 30 - 60 mins “Focus Blocks” on the calendar. I then use these blocks to slot in actionable work during the work week. My monthly cadence has a 30 min block to organize and record key accomplishments for the month, and to look forward to next month. Just a note, I don’t always use the full block, but I make a point to block my calendar for the entire duration.

Just a heads up, as you begin blocking your calendar, you will need to learn to say no. When I first started blocking time on my calendar I started noting just how often I received last minute meeting requests. These last-minute requests often conflicted with my focus time, and I would push out my focus time to accommodate. I had to learn to say no, much easier said than done. Saying no for me is still challenging, but it’s a crucial skill to develop to protect my time. I’m still learning to politely decline or delegate requests that don't align with my goals and priorities. It's important for me to be helpful, but differing my own tasks resulted in me being overcommitted, which left me stressed and unfocused. To make it easier for me to say no, I try to identify the thing I’m saying yes to, and this often works well enough for me. I read somewhere, saying no to one thing means saying yes to yourself and hopefully something more meaningful. Thinking this way has been very helpful. I should be clear, I do selectively let high priority projects or discussions override my blocks. However, in these cases, those discussions/projects align with my own priorities.

Now that you can make time for making time, what do you do with it?

I have a constant bombardment of asks coming through a multitude of directions: email, slack, action items from meetings, one on ones (1:1) discussions, and random water cooler conversations. If you have an impeccable memory at best you’ll be able to manage 80% of the requests or if you’re like me it will be closer to 20%! ?? According to Hermann Ebbinghaus’ research people forget about 50% of the information they’ve learned in an hour .?This is why it’s important to utilize a central system to capture requests. Over the years I’ve used pen and paper, wiki, OneNote, and other forms of digital capture. If I don’t have it going to a central location I will most likely drop the request or remember it too late. Currently, I make sure all requests flow through my inbox. To capture work requests outside of email, I send myself an email specifically outlining the action I need to take, by when, and relevant context. This leads to a substantial volume of emails. To manage this, I semi-loosely follow Inbox Zero along with rules to automatically process certain emails.

What is Inbox Zero? How do you keep it going?

The Inbox Zero method aims to maintain an empty or nearly empty email inbox at all times. It involves a few key actions: Delete, Delegate, Respond, Do, and Defer . To implement this process effectively, you are asked to quickly review each email in your inbox and apply the following actions. If an email is not necessary, delete it. If it can be handled by someone else, delegate it by adding the delegate to the thread. If you can promptly respond to a question or request with a quick action, do so immediately. Finally, if a task will take more than a few minutes to complete, defer it to a more appropriate time.

I follow this process loosely. For me the goal is to move things out of the Inbox as fast as possible. I’ve simplified this process to either take action (same as delete, delegate, respond, do) if I can right away or file to work on later. I use 3 categories (sub-folders) for things to work on later and they are:

• To Schedule - anything that cannot be done immediately, less than 5 mins, gets pushed here, where it will be placed on the calendar for focus time to be worked on.
• Read Later - this folder is used for anything I’m interested in reading, and doesn’t have any action items on my part. This normally contains newsletters, non-urgent emails, articles, and etc. I can leave emails here for days or even weeks without feeling guilty about not reading them.
• Follow Up - anything I’m waiting on others to get back to me on. I normally batch process these to re-ping contacts I’m waiting on.

To schedule or not to schedule?

It’s a trick question, the answer is always schedule. “To Schedule” is my most important folder. This is where all my action items go from all projects and people. To properly address the set of actions in this folder I will either place it in its own dedicated block or within a batch process block. I use my morning Planning (30 min) block to dive through this folder and allocate time for each request. I review and identify how much time I might need for each, then place a block on my calendar to take the appropriate action, these will replace my “Focus Time” blocks. I will also attach the email directly to the block along with any thoughts/notes. Once scheduled, I’ll file the email away to its project folder. Next, I use my Batch Process (30 mins), for a set of emails that don’t need a full 30 min block. These are emails that take longer to read and think through then the 5 mins dedicated during the Inbox review. I batch process and respond to these requests. If there is a follow up required I will also place a copy in the follow up folder to check-in on at a later date.

I could write for days on each of these sections, and hope you’ve found this overview helpful. Remember, effective time management is a continuous journey of self-discovery and refinement. As you implement these techniques into your daily routine, reflect on what works best for you, and adapt them to suit your unique circumstances and goals.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic! How do you currently manage your time, and what challenges do you face? Have you discovered any additional strategies or tools that have significantly improved your productivity? Share your experiences and insights in the comments section below or reach out to me directly. Let's continue supporting each other in our quest for productivity and goal achievement, and together, we can create a community of empowered individuals striving for personal growth and success.

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