Laura Stack* says everyone has the same amount of time each week — it’s the way we use (or misuse) it that counts.
“This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; gnaws iron, bites steel; grinds hard stones to meal; slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountain down” — Gollum’s riddle for Bilbo in The Hobbit.
If you haven’t already figured it out, the answer to Gollum’s riddle is time, and no matter what we do, it seems there’s never enough of it.
We all get the same 168 hours per week.
So why is it some people get very little done, while others are paragons of productivity?
Simple: productive workers treat time as the finite resource it is, making use of every minute.
They’re not necessarily smarter than you or work longer hours.
They’ve learned the lessons of efficiency: They work harder and smarter.
Rather than let themselves become overwhelmed or flail fruitlessly between tasks, they plan ahead.
They stay on course, exercise self-discipline, and work to continually improve.
Some are masters of delegation.
A colleague once told me about a self-made millionaire who didn’t seem very smart at first glance.
It turned out he surrounded himself with trustworthy people who were experts at his weaknesses.
His personal strengths lay in organisation, good judgment, and fiscal responsibility.
No matter how overworked you feel, you probably have more time available than you realise.
Ironically, calculating how much time you really have (or should have) requires some time investment.
It’s worthwhile, kind of like paying to have a diamond professionally assessed before you buy it.
Try these tips to get your time back.
Test your multitasking skills:
Only 2.5-to-three per cent of workers can truly multitask.
The rest of us just switch rapidly between tasks.
Every switch requires you to shift gears, clear mental buffers, and refocus on the new task, all taking time.
One day, try juggling a couple of tasks at once, and note how long it took when you finish.
The next day, focus on just one of those tasks until you complete it, shift gears, and focus on the other task until you’re done.
Then compare your multitasking time to your single-tasking time.
You’ll probably find single-tasking is faster.
Keep secondary tasks secondary:
Do you often tackle minor, low-value tasks until you can psyche yourself up to do your big tasks?
If so, you’re wasting valuable time.
Think about it: Would it make any difference if you did all those little tasks at the end of the day, or even tomorrow?
Larger tasks tend to be more time-sensitive.
If a big project intimidates you, break it into sub-tasks you can finish in an hour or two at a time, while still meeting your deadline.
Push the secondary tasks to the end of the list.
Let them fall off if necessary.
Now, how much time do you really have?
Say “no” more often:
Being a team player is one thing; taking on too many tasks because you don’t feel you can say no is a productivity killer.
So next time someone asks you to be the group morale officer or attend a quick meeting, politely tell them your personal schedule is booked solid or you have a deadline looming.
Return tasks to those they rightly belong to if necessary.
Keep a time log:
This is probably the most helpful and instructive of these four tips.
For several weeks, include everything you do at work in 15-minute increments, including your breaks.
Be unflinchingly honest.
After logging your time for two or three weeks, I suspect you’ll be amazed by how much useful time just slips through your fingers.
You may discover you spend more time around the water cooler or coffeemaker than you realise.
Or your lunches are a tad too long.
Your little Facebook breaks cost you two hours a week.
A task you thought took five minutes really takes 12.
Once you see it in black-and-white, you can sift through and decide how to fix the timewasters.
With the possible exception of the last tip, you probably already know the things I’ve outlined here.
However, in the hustle-bustle of a busy office, it’s easy to lose yourself in the grind and forget basic time management strategy.
Sometimes you just have to go back to first principals, get back on the straight and narrow path, and aggressively work to conserve your most valuable resource.
When you care enough about your time to find what went wrong, you can use what you’ve discovered to refocus on what matters.
*Laura Stack is a speaker, author and authority on productivity and performance who has written seven books, including Doing the Right Things Right: How the Effective Executive Spends Time. She can be contacted at theproductivitypro.com
This article first appeared on Laura’s website.
