Time Management Part 2 of 8 – Planning Strategies

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.

Specifically, we can learn how to plan for our long-term and short-term goals by breaking them down and compartmentalizing them into more manageable plans. Today’s episode and blog provides tips and tricks for monthly and daily planning. Read on!

Quick recap of the 1st episode

The first episode of the series was about the basics of priorities and time management.

• Stop and reflect;
• Organize;
• Take action.

What is “Planning”?

Planning means 4 things:

• Knowing where you are going;
• Anticipating obstacles to achieving your goals – don’t be overly optimistic;
• Prioritizing the tasks to be done;
• Setting your schedule.

Three key elements to consider when planning time

• resources;
• activities;
• the result.

→ In a nutshell: when you want to achieve a result, the expected result must be clarified in order to define the activities to be carried out and the resources these activities require.

• The resources answer the question WITH WHAT (what it takes to get there)
• The activities answer the question HOW (the steps to get there)
• The result is the ultimate goal. A result is not the action of completing an activity, it is the visible consequence of the planned activities once they are completed.

Start Here – Translate your planning into specific behaviors and actions

• Get the information needed to plan the tasks
• Identify the people, material and financial resources required
• Develop and plan the steps for completion
• Take into account the unpredictable – I talked about how unpredictable should be factored in the time it takes you to complete something
• Adequately plan the use of one’s time
• Determine mechanisms to monitor, assess and control your progress towards completion

Then – Spread your planning across 2 different timelines

Monthly timeline

→ Monthly planning provides an overview of what you want to accomplish for the month.

It is not fixed and will probably change a lot depending on the daily planning. Don’t panic!

Even though it changes a lot, monthly planning is useful to :

• Negotiate deadlines (whether it’s a dinner with friends or a project at work)
• distinguish between what is urgent and what is important
• postpone what doesn’t impact your goals for the month

Daily timeline

→ Daily planning is the list of activities you need to accomplish during the day based on the time required for each task and its priority.

A few tips when time-blocking:

• Group similar activities together;
• Group and sequence activities that require you to go different places or use the same software;
• If you’re in the office, group your questions to your colleague or your boss so that you go see them once instead of 5 times throughout the day;
• Distinguish between real time and process time;
  • Real time is the time directly related to the action.
  • Process time is the time to react to the action (e.g. if you have to communicate with others after the action, or save the file, etc.)
  • You want to apply a correction coefficient. In general we multiply by 1.5.
• Take note of the time the tasks you planned took in reality and readjust.

TL;DR – Time Management And Planning

1. You have to be ruthlessly realistic about the resources you need in order to accomplish your goals.
2. Whether it is time, other people’s inputs or material, do not be overly optimistic but rather adjust and plan a minimum of 1.5 what you think you’d need.
3. Don’t forget that other people are not at your disposal either so notify them ahead of time regarding what you’ll need from them and when!