Time is elusive; we are only assigned 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Learning to manage time is the only way to maximise the time we do have.
In this blog, you’ll learn how to organise your time and handle tasks most efficiently, so you can work smart and achieve more, while not being limited by time.
Why You Don’t Have Enough Time
While there are people who can’t seem to find the time to finish their work, there are those who manage to do everything in time and still find a couple of hours to relax and do what they like.
Why is that? People who are pressed for time usually share a few common characteristics...
Not Organised
People who're disorganized not only waste time looking for missing tasks, but also lower their productivity and hinder their chances for success. If you're organised, you will give your productivity a real boost and can also create time for the things and people that matter in your life.
Not Prioritising
Prioritising ensures that you make the most efficient use of your time. If you don’t rank tasks in order of importance, or make decisions on what’s most important at work, you will always feel like there are not enough hours in a day.
Not Tracking or Budgeting Time
Tracking and budgeting your time is vital to taking control of your day. People who don’t budget and track their time are the ones who wonder where time has gone and can’t understand why they do so little at the end of each day.
Create More Time
If you are lagging when it comes to mastering your day-to-day, then this section is essential for you to understand.
Every task contains three components:
Intention: Why you are doing it
Value: What benefits this task brings you
Cost: What you have to give up or invest to achieve the value (in resources, time spent, etc.)
To be able to identify the right tasks to focus on--and spend the right amount of time doing them--you’ll need to know how to evaluate them.
This method helps to put your actions in perspective and test them. It helps you to think of actions like building a skyscraper. You start from a solid foundation before you reach for the sky.
Step 1: Start with a Clear Intention
Look at all the tasks you have on hand and think about why you need to do these tasks. Ask yourself:
What benefit am I getting out of this task? Will this action help me make progress toward my goal this week?
Step 2: Decide the Task’s Value
Based on your goal, sort the list of tasks into one of these three categories:
Must-haves: critical to achieving the goal. Without it, the outcome is meaningless.
Should haves: Important but not critical. But, leaving it out may lessen the impact of the final result.
Good to have: Having it is nice, but not including it won't have any negative impact on our goal.
The next step is to quantify these tasks into something you can rank using numbers.
Start by assigning a number value to each of your tasks. The higher the number, the more important/urgent/valuable it is.
Instead of a linear scale like 1 to 10, use a set of Fibonacci Numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21) because as the numbers go up in larger intervals, it’s easier to visualize the difference between the numbers
Step 3: Figure out the Task’s Time Cost & Score
After quantifying the relative priority among tasks, we need to look at each task’s cost - the time cost.
Some tasks are difficult, need external help, or need extreme focus. Usually, this is reflected in the time required to complete it.
At this stage, rough estimates are all you need. Usually, we split cost estimates into half-hour intervals:
0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3
We don’t suggest having a task longer than 3hours. This reflects that the task is too big and needs to be broken down further, Class that as a project instead and repeat the process from the start.
When you have both Value and Cost quantified, Divide the task’s Value by its Time Cost now you can calculate the Final Score of each task and rank the tasks by the Final Score -- from the highest to the lowest.
Step 4: Schedule the Tasks
Now that you know the priority of your tasks and approximately how much time you’ll be spending on each task, it’s time to put all these things into your calendar and start working on them.
If you're looking for more structure on how to set and achieve goals, take a look at the OUTLR PURPOSE PLANNER
Bodhi Bones
