Powerful time management is a learnable skill. Distinguish what is important from what is urgent, apply the 80:20 rule, find things you can defer, delegate or drop. This chapter will give you an overview of the basic principles of time management, so that you can once again feel in control of your time.
There is no single solution to time management; different techniques will work for different people. In Brilliant Time Management, the OATS Principle is used to draw together a lot of powerful techniques into a simple process. Here is a brief introduction.
The OATS Principle
Write it down
If you have a head full of things you need or want to do, this can cause you stress. Just by writing it all down, you can free up mental capacity without the worry that you will forget something important. Secondly, once you have written something down, it will take on a more objective level of importance in your mind. So, that job around the house that you have been telling yourself that you must do for the last year will start to look a whole lot more like a ‘nice to do’ job that you can schedule into a Sunday morning in the next couple of months.
The OATS Principle gives you a simple process for writing down and planning the things you need to do.
OATS
OATS stands for:
- Outcomes
- Activities
- Time
- Schedule
It sets out, in sequence, the four steps in planning how to use your time effectively. Some people will ask: ‘When should I get my OATS?’ Well, if you ever have trouble sleeping at night because the things you need to do tomorrow are buzzing around in your head, then you should get your OATS before you go to bed. Otherwise, it is equally effective to do it in the morning, before you start your day’s activities.
The next four sections of this chapter describe each of the steps in turn. Then we will turn to three of the commonest stress-inducing time management problems: putting things off, saying no, and dealing with a feeling of being overwhelmed. We will end on a lighter but crucial note: the importance of celebration.
Outcomes
The first step in OATS planning is to decide what you want to be different at the end of tomorrow or next week, next month or next year. These are your outcomes. From here on, we will illustrate OATS planning with a daily planning process, but you can plan your next week with it, or your next month, or even the next year. Keep the number of outcomes you set to a manageable number. For example, in one day, three would be a good number, but it is possible there may just be one thing you want to achieve. If you are getting past five, ask yourself: ‘Am I just creating more pressure and stress than I need?’
Goal setting
Deciding your outcomes for the next day – or week or year – can be difficult. There are often so many competing demands on your time and attention. This is stressful, so really effective time management (rather than being reactive and managing the tasks you already have) requires a big picture of what you are trying to achieve in your life: your goals.
Put aside at least half an hour – more if you can – to sit quietly with a notepad, and think through the answers to these four questions:
- How is my life, now?
Inventory each aspect of your life: your family and friendships, your home life, your career and work life, your financial situation, your hobbies and interests, your education and self-development. How content and successful do you feel in each area, and overall? What are you happy with? What would you like to change, or develop? - What is important to me?
Now think through what sort of person you really are. What words would you use to describe yourself? For example, you may be ambitious, arrogant, caring, dependable, enthusiastic, intellectual, jolly, miserly, practical, selfish … Pick a dozen or so words. Once you have done that, ask yourself: ‘What things are most important to me in my life?’ - What do I want?
Such a simple question. Ask yourself what you want for yourself, what you want to achieve, and how you want your life to be in the future. What do you need to learn, to do, to acquire, to achieve? Write these down, because these are your goals in life. - When do I want them?
Pursuing too many goals can be stressful, so start to prioritise and sequence them. For each goal, prioritise it as either primary (something you feel you must achieve to create fulfilment in your life) or secondary (something that will add to your life). Then, starting with your primary goals, give each a timescale. Keep it simple, like one year, five years, 10 years or 20 years.
This work will form the basis from which you can start planning your time and evaluating the value of the possible outcomes you could set in your OATS planning.
Activities
Once you have your outcomes for tomorrow, the next thing to do is to list all of the things you need to do in order to achieve them. You may think that this just sounds like a ‘To Do’ list, but it isn’t.
To Do lists
A To Do list is a long list of all of the things that you would like to do. You can prioritise them, you can set deadlines against them, and you can cross things off them, but you can rarely finish them. To Do lists have a habit of growing as fast as we get things done. Just restarting the list on a new sheet of paper does not detract from the essential nature of a To Do list: the better you are at using it, the faster you will add things to it. Since there’s always more to do, the diligent time manager will never stop work, and the struggling time manager will rapidly feel overwhelmed. Either way, To Do lists are a common cause of stress.
To Day lists
When you add activities against each outcome in your OATS plan, you get a To Day list. Unlike its harmful cousin, it is a closed list: you can complete it and, having done so, feel good about yourself and stop working. The other advantage is that each activity is prequalified as important: it will help you achieve an outcome you have decided that you want, and that outcome will be linked to one of your goals.
Important or urgent?
President Eisenhower knew what it was to have a lot to do. He is commonly credited with a helpful insight:
‘Most things which are urgent are not important, and most things which are important are not urgent.’Attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower
This insight has given rise to a very helpful time management tool, the Urgent–Important quadrants, illustrated in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1 Urgent versus important
If you are able to assess separately what is urgent (subject to real time pressure) and what is important (with real consequences), you can start to prioritise the demands on your time. You can neglect things that are neither urgent nor important – and you should. Things that are urgent but not important can also be neglected, but if you do choose to do them, tackle them quickly and do not invest more time than you need to, to meet a minimum standard. Important and urgent things need your attention now, and you should give them all the time they need. Once you really gain control of your time, you will start to find your days filled with things that are important but not urgent.
They may have become urgent to you in the past, but you are now so ‘in control’, that you are getting them completed in good time, before they can become urgent and important. By now, you will find only one real criterion for assessing importance: ‘How much can this activity contribute to my goals?’
Time
Once you have a closed list of activities for the coming day, the next step is to estimate how long each one will take. You may not be good at estimating timings now, but if you get into the habit of doing it every time, you will find, almost magically, that you start to get better and better at it, as your brain starts to recognise patterns and home in on them.
Underestimation
Underestimating how long things will take is another cause of stress. As you near your estimated completion time and things aren’t done yet, your body will start to react to the threat that this, and then the next thing, won’t get done, and the possible consequences of incomplete activities and unrealised outcomes. This is especially so if you have been diligent in focusing on only important tasks, because these matter; they have consequences.
So, there are three ways to manage this risk, and effective time managers use all three in combination:
- Prioritise
Even if everything you plan to do today is important, it is wise to assess which things are the most important, so that you can get them started early and allocate your most productive time to them – when you feel at your best and can work uninterrupted. Likewise, knowing what is least important (or least urgent) will give you the confidence to reschedule some activities to another day, if you need to, freeing up more time for the higher-priority tasks that are taking you longer than expected. - Contingency
Always add a little extra time to your estimates, to create some contingency. Add more contingency for unfamiliar or complex tasks, or tasks requiring contributions from other people, or other people’s agreement. - Breaks
Allow time in your day for breaks. Not only will these keep you fresh and working at your most efficient levels, but, if you are under pressure, then you can use some of your break time to get more done. If you only schedule minimal breaks, you will not have this flexibility.
Schedule
The last step in OATS planning is to schedule your activities into your day. You will need to know any fixed commitments you have before you start, and, to do this well, it will help you to divide your activities into three categories, according to how substantial the tasks are.
Elephants, sheep and mice
Divide your activities into ‘elephants’, ‘sheep’ and ‘mice’. Elephants are the biggest, most complex and demanding activities; sheep are of significant size, while mice are small, quick, easy tasks.
Start with the elephants. Schedule these into times of your day when you can give them your best and most focused attention. Choose times when you are at your best and are least likely to be disturbed. For me, writing this book is an elephant task, and I schedule it into the start of the morning, when I feel fresh, alert and am able to get things done before emails arrive and phones ring.
Then schedule the sheep into other times of the day when you are feeling good and can allocate a solid chunk of time to them. Finally, schedule the mice into the gaps between sheep and elephant tasks.
Reduce stress
Keep your stress levels low by also scheduling breaks for small pleasures and rewards that will help you relax and discharge any stresses and tensions. These can also act as contingencies, if important activities over-run.
Procrastination
A big source of stress is the inability to get started. We all put things off sometimes, but chronic procrastination adds the stress of feeling guilty to the stress of having a workload build up. Then, there is the stress of complaints about what you haven’t done.
Ten quick tips for beating your urge to defer
- Footprints
Split the task into a series of small achievements, each of which you can easily attain. - Rewards
Promise yourself a reward for completing the task (and be sure you keep your promise). - Differently
Find a different way to do the activity; for example, instead of typing a letter, write it out in pencil if it’s easier. Typing it will then be easier too. - Blitz
Set yourself a challenge to make as much progress as you can within the duration of an external event, like a TV ad break, a piece of music, while your partner is out shopping, or between now and leaving for a meeting. - Time-box
Set aside a specific time, like 20 minutes, to work on the task, with no anticipation of completing it. This will relieve performance pressure, and limit the time you spend doing something you don’t like. And often, you’ll get to the end of your time and be so near finishing that you’ll want to carry on. Go for it! - Just one thing
Don’t try to do the task: just do one small thing that gets it started. Instead of weeding the garden, go out and pull the weeds out of one small part of the path. - Dreaming
Fantasise about how good you will feel when the job is done. The more vivid and powerful you can make these emotions, the more desire you will have to get started. Visualise the task as being on one end of a piece of elastic, and pleasure on the other. Feel that elastic stretching … - Nothing else
Clear your workbench, clear your worktop, clear your desk. Hide your To Do list and put away anything that relates to any other task. Turn off any computer program that you don’t need, and leave only one task available. With all of the other things you have to do out of the way, it is far easier to focus on the one thing that’s been bugging you. - Promise
Make someone a promise that you will get it done. Or two people, or three. The bigger the promise, the more you’ll want to get on with it. - Bring it on
If all else fails, get macho. Think about I’m a Celebrity … and the task of eating a live spider. Psych yourself up, open your mouth, and bring it on.
Say NO
Part of controlling stress is not exposing yourself to unnecessary stressors, so a vital part of your time management toolkit is your ability to say ‘no’. Once you have your goals and you know what is important, then you should be able to weed out the unimportant calls on your time and decline them.
Noble Objections
Saying ‘no’ is difficult for most of us, because it feels like we are letting others down. ‘No’ is a negative word, and who likes to be seen as negative? However, it is perfectly reasonable for you to decide how you use your time, and therefore perfectly reasonable for you to say ‘no’ to unwanted demands.
So ‘no’ can be positive, when you say it for the right reasons. Then it becomes noble: a Noble Objection to a proposal. Saying ‘yes’ to everything might be a great way to advance in the early stages of a career, but it will rapidly bring diminishing returns. No longer will people respect you more for saying ‘yes’: they will respect you less. Too much ‘yes’ and you become a ‘yes-man’ or ‘yes-woman’ – treated like a doormat by anyone who wants a mug to do something for them.
On the other hand, when you get a reputation for saying yes selectively, to important things; and that reputation is backed up by a 100 per cent record of delivering on your commitments to the highest standards, then people will really respect and value you. So don’t just say ‘no’ to unimportant tasks; make a Noble Objection: say ‘NO’.
Delegation
Once you can gracefully decline responsibilities and work from other people, the next skill to learn is how to delegate some of your work to others. This can be good for you and also good for them, but only when you delegate carefully. Here is how to do so, in five easy stages.
Matching
Carefully match the task to the person. Choose someone who can learn from the task, or gain confidence or recognition from doing it. There must be something in it for me, if I am to take on a task for you willingly. If, on the other hand, you simply dump the jobs you don’t fancy, or set people up to fail, they will soon come to resent you.
Briefing
If you are delegating to me, then brief me well. Let me know the background, so I can understand the context of the task, and what you expect of me. You may want to set me objectives in terms of what you want, the standards I must meet, any deadlines or timescales, and the budget or resources that I have available. Be really clear about the level of authority that you are delegating to me. For example, are you leaving every decision to me, to do the whole job and report back when it’s done, or do you need to be involved in key decisions? How do you want me to report back to you during and after my work? Finally, think carefully about how much advice you give me on how to do the job. Find a good balance between giving me too much guidance and thus stifling my creativity and robbing me of the learning experience of figuring it out for myself; and giving me too little guidance and leaving me anxious and exposed, with a risk to me, to the organisation, and to you, if I get something wrong.
Commitment
Check that I understand what you want, am able to do it, and am committed to taking it on. In return, give me your commitment to provide me with the support I need, to do the job well, to do it safely, and to learn from my experience.
Monitoring
The task started off as yours, so the ultimate responsibility for it – and now for me – lies with you. So, periodically, check in with me to find out how I am doing and give me the support I need. Set the frequency and style of your monitoring to match the level of risk, the importance of the task and my needs for support and guidance.
Feedback
When I am finished, review my performance. Give me good feedback on what I have done, that will help me learn and build my confidence. Thank me for my work and give me praise for what I have done well.
Dealing with overwhelm
Sometimes there is just too much to do and you are frozen by a feeling of being overwhelmed by it all. You need to grasp control and here is a simple five-point plan to do just that.
1 Make a list of all the things that are overwhelming you
This will look like a To Do list, and it is important to get everything down so that you can manage the problem.
2 Apply the Urgent and Important categories
For each task, assess whether it is urgent or not and whether it is important or not. Now be bold: delete every task that is not important. If this feels just a little too scary, before you delete them, place them on to a new list: a To Don’t list. You can then file this away so that you won’t lose sight of those tasks, but, equally, they won’t distract you from the important ones.
3 Divide the remainder into three lists
| A | Urgent and Important and quick (Type A) These are the things you can do in a few minutes. |
| B | Urgent and Important and substantial (Type B) These are the things that will need some focused effort. |
| C | Important but Not Urgent These are the things to save until you no longer feel overwhelmed. |
4 Clear the Urgent and Important things first
Use the ‘Boxed Burst and Break’ (BB+B) method:
- Frenzy
Allow exactly 15 minutes to clear all the quick things (Type A) you can. - Burst of work
Now do 40 minutes of intense work on one of the more substantial things (Type B). Aim to make some real progress in a strict 40-minute slot. - Now take a break for five minutes
This must include one glass of water and some time outside in the fresh air.
5 Repeat step 4
Continue the BB+B method until you feel in control of your task lists and you are no longer overwhelmed. Take a more substantial break after three or four cycles. You will probably find that you clear all of your quick, Type A tasks before you have finished your Type B tasks. If you are still in overwhelm, then skip the Frenzy step and allow 50-minute bursts of work on your Type B tasks, with 10-minute breaks.
Celebration
If you want to break the cycle of success, it is vital that you recognise progress, so that your brain can start to stand down its fight-or-flight troops. So, make a point of noticing and acknowledging your successes. Praise yourself and celebrate your achievements. Even give yourself little rewards. Noticing your successes will change your stress levels all on its own.
Take your time
As you start to bring your time under control, mastery will come when you start to slow down and take your time over things.
There is an old proverb: ‘more haste, less speed’. Who knows if it’s true? It certainly seems to be. What is true, however, is that taking the time to be present in the moment, to savour the sounds, colours and textures around you, to relish the company you are in, or to enjoy the flavours of your food, will relax you. Make time for good company, make time for your loved ones, and make time for yourself. These are the ultimate rewards of good time management.
- For brilliant time management, get your OATS.
- Don’t put things off – you’ll only end up wasting more time, feeling guilty, and getting more stressed.
- Say NO when it is the noble thing to do.
- When too many things overwhelm you, use the structured Boxed Burst and Break method to take control.
- Celebrate your successes, so you know you are making progress.