Time Management Part 1 of 8 – Back to Basics

The goal of the series is to help you effectively prioritize and adopt consistent time management strategies. I will expand on these strategies but they include:

• Learning to reconcile time management with that of your personal or professional environment;
• Identifying your strengths and weaknesses and build a time management strategy adapted to your personality;
• Optimizing time and energy management;
• Maintaining and increase your credibility and control in managing demands and priorities.

Today’s episode and blog is specifically about the basics. Managing our to-dos with the constant bombardment of interruptions is difficult. So let’s make sure the foundations are right before attempting to build a mansion upon it.

What Is Time Management?

A lot of people talk about it: in a world that only seems to be getting faster and faster, we all come to wish we had 4 to 5 more hours a day. Don’t you sometimes feel like success belongs to the fastest?

Maybe that’s the problem: each of us wants to accomplish more and more in the 24 hours we have and eventually that causes pressure to spread in a butterfly effect on our environment.

This pressure to “do” blurs the fact that time management means something different for people depending of the stage of life they are at.

For instance, I asked ChatGPT to describe time management based on the age of its description’s audience. This is what the chatbot came up with for someone who is 10 year old and someone who is 30 years old:

I am sure that the more details I would add about the target demographic, the more elaborate ChatGPT’s definition would be. Another example that we should not compare ourselves to one another.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

– John Donne

Indeed, a human being, as efficient as one may be, does not function in a silo. Especially in the 21st century.

I mean; I do not get up in the wee hours of the morning to plant wheat, harvest it and make bread out of it before 9AM. Not to mention making the butter, the metal in the oven I use, my coffee beans, etc.

This means that “somewhere” my desire for accomplishment is putting pressure on someone else’s time and priorities.

In summary, we are all part of a big supply chain and it is important to manage what is happening at our stage efficiently so as not to break.

Your Time Is a Commodity For Others But Not For You

We must know how to fight against the culture of urgency by taking the time to stop and :

• Analyze our reactions and change our reflexes – moving from reactive to proactive;
• Take a step back and refocus on what matters the most to us and is within our control;
• Not to let the ambient confusion reach us and confuse the priorities have established for ourselves.
  

Time management is a matter of attitude, analysis and behavior.

Ask Yourself

I regularly go back to these 3 diagnosis questions and really think them through:

1. Do you take time each day to think about what you are doing or what you are going to do during the day against what you are trying to accomplish?
   • This involves identifying the essential tasks that produce a large part of your results (i.e. the Pareto principle; 80% of results come from 20% of the work)
2. Are you able to reduce recurring interruptions in your focus periods? Whether be from colleagues, family or distractions like notifications or social media.
   • I am not saying to eliminate them completely, but these interruptions can add up to a lot of time and you want to plan your time according to the ones you cannot avoid.
3. Are you able to say no without feeling guilty? If so, congratulations.
   • If not, why not? What compels you to say YES to others and simultaneously NO to your objectives?

TL;DR – Time Management 101 Takeaway

In a nutshell, why is good time management first and foremost a question of attitude?

→ It is a state of mind that consists of thinking, analyzing and understanding your tasks, projects and objectives and, constantly re-evaluating your planning.

That is something I learned and I am sure that you can too.