A collection of thoughts around time management and a recipe for achieving your goals, especially as applied to work. A 'light' / less structured version of the same can be applied even outside of work. It is essentially the Pomodoro technique, however, I did not know that this technique has a proper name when I started using it a few years ago.
- Every week, I try to plan out my next week and wrap up this planning activity by Friday of the preceding week.
- This allows me to be better prepared and more deterministic about my next week.
- Note that distractions, and high priority events will always happen, but other than that, it allows me to make sure that my time allocations are aligned with what I set out to achieve.
- I assume that you already have a list of short term and long term goals and deliverables that you want to accomplish.
- If you don't, then that would be the first step.
- Ensure that you carve out time, via Calendar-based events for all the different goals that you have decided on a short term and long term basis.
- This is probably the most important step, because this allows you to evaluate the importance of each goal against the time you have available. In other words, in this step, you are putting your money ( attention ), where your mouth ( time ) is. It also allows you to prioritize your goals in a more concrete manner, rather than amorphously thinking, I will accomplish xyz. If you are unwilling to carve out the time for your goal, then the goal is probably not that important to begin with !
- The time you carve out for each goal, should be proportional to the importance of that goal.
- Ensure that you have proper calendar events for those specific carved out times.
- Make sure that you carve out the time as 'free' on your Calendar, so you continue to be available to your team if a high priority issue comes up and if a meeting needs to be setup at the last moment for a discussion.
- Make sure that the duration of such chunks of time matches the stretch of time you can focus well. In other words, if you can focus continuously and be productive for x minutes, then make sure that the chunk is of duration x minutes.
- Keep a short mental break of say 5 minutes between such chunks to allow you to context-switch to the next task / goal.
- Sometimes, I did not keep this short gap and it made context-switching pretty difficult, and also led to mental exhaustion and potential burn out.
- For any meetings that you are an organizer of, make sure that the agenda is clear and well-defined.
- Also, have an expectation around which questions to anticipate and also from whom, which inputs will be needed.
- If the topic / subject area could be big, it might make sense to meet with a smaller group ahead of time, to clarify an issue.
- Make sure that all the meetings you are a part of, have a well-defined agenda / goal.
- If not then solicit feedback from the organizer about the goal for the meeting. This ensures that you are aware of what the expectations are for the meeting, and how specifically will you contribute to that meeting.
- For One:One meetings setup some dedicated preparation time and follow up time
- For One:One meetings, setup some dedicated preparation time, in which you call out the high level talking points in terms of what you want to present, as well as discuss / ask.
- Additionally, setup some dedicated time after the meeting to follow up on the next steps / tasks that came out as a result of the meeting
- Some of the follow-up items might be high priority, and it is best to get those addressed then and there, or the items might be lower priority in which case those could be deferred to a suitable date.
