.
Personal
Productivity
You did a great job juggling all your many tasks as an individual contribu-
tor; that’s probably one of the things your organization saw when it chose
to promote you. But many new managers are surprised by how much more
they’re responsible for now: not just more work, but more kinds of work, all
seemingly top priority. You need to think strategically and plan for the fu-
ture, while optimizing execution every day. You can feel as if these respon-
sibilities are pulling you in a hundred different directions at once: “Did you
see my email?” “I need you to take this over.” “Could you help with this?”
“What’s your plan for the next fi scal year?” “When are you going to be home
for dinner?”
To orchestrate your time and your energy so you can meet all these de-
mands, you must manage your personal productivity. That phrase covers
everything from corralling your calendar to understanding tricks to make
you more productive and help you relax. In this chapter, you’ll learn how
to prioritize calls for your attention, stay focused, and keep stress—and
work—from controlling your life.
104Managing Yourself
Time management essentials
Your time is valuable. Time management is a deliberate practice that
helps ensure you’re using all the time available to you in the best way pos-
sible. You may not feel able to justify the effort it takes. But the payoff is
worth it. It will allow you to see patterns and begin making adjustments
so you can get the right work done at the right time and become more
effective.
Step 1: Understand how you spend your time now
A schedule is like a budget, says Elizabeth Grace Saunders, a time man-
agement coach: you can’t manage your assets unless you understand your
current spending habits. Start by logging your activities for at least a day or
two, preferably for an entire week. Use a time-tracking or calendar app or a
simple spreadsheet, noting your activities in half-hour increments, as well
as any major interruptions. Keep track of unplanned activities like fi elding
phone calls in the middle of a meeting or dipping into administrative work
when you’re supposedly preparing a presentation.
Step 2: Look for patterns
When you’ve completed your log, collect the activities into fi ve to ten cat-
egories and tally the minutes you’ve spent on each. Consider categories like
answering emails, planning, dealing with crises, project work, managing
people, administrative work, relaxing time, personal chores done at work,
and professional development.
Now analyze the data you’ve collected. How are you distributing your
time across all these activities? How much time do you spend on planning,
compared with crises and fi res? How much time do you spend on your own
project work, versus managing your team members? As you look at your
tallies, what surprises you?
Now step back and ask yourself the most important question of all:
Does my time usage match my highest priorities? What’s the payoff asso-
ciated with each activity? Which activities are tied to your core responsi-
bilities and which aren’t so relevant? Which investments have the highest
Personal Productivity105
impact for you, personally and professionally? For example, assess whether
you are spending more time on a side project than you should, not enough
time planning for the future, and whether you are taking enough breaks
in your day to stay productive. Are there activities you’ve been doing that
really should be performed by someone else—or not at all? Look for items
that you might hand off to a colleague or a direct report.
Step 3: Make a goal-driven master plan
Look at your list of activity categories and allocate time to each based on
your goals and priorities. You’ll have to make smart trade-offs here, and
it might take some iteration to get right. The fi rst time through, ask your-
self: “In an ideal world, how much time would I spend on these activities?”
These numbers may not add up to forty or even sixty hours each week.
So the second time, ask yourself, “What’s the minimum amount of time I
can afford to spend on these activities?” Minimize the amount of time you
are spending on low-priority items; this can free up time for more impor-
tant work.
In a well-balanced schedule, however, your highest-priority items may
end up occupying only a small fraction of your time, and that’s OK. Your
mission here is only to fi nd enough time in your schedule to meet these
goals, and if that’s a mere fi ve or ten hours a week, that’s fi ne.
Step 4: Execute your plan: time boxing
Now it’s time to allocate the time you’ve assigned to each item into a sched-
ule. Using a technique called time boxing, you’ll break your schedule into
short blocks and then slot a category into each block, breaking it up into
tasks. (See exhibit 7-1.)
Start by reviewing the week ahead: What deadlines, meetings, and
tasks are coming up? What longer-term commitments do you need to work
on in this time frame? Then prioritize that task list. Put deadline-sensitive
items up top (“Prepare for presentation on Wednesday”), followed by goal-
oriented actions (“Research strategic plan”). You’ll schedule both of these
around your recurring obligations (“Weekly staff meeting”). Note the cat-
egories that these tasks fall into.
106Managing Yourself
EXHIBIT
Time-boxing tool
Schedule for Monday and Tuesday mornings
Time Monday Tuesday
8:00 a.m. Planning
Task: Prepare for budget presentation on
Wednesday
Actual time spent:
Planning
Task: Research SP
Actual time spent:
9:00 a.m. Planning
Task: Research strategic plan (SP)
Actual time spent:
Project work
Task: Follow up on new leads
Actual time spent:
10:00 a.m. Managing others
Task: Plan to delegate invoicing to Ivan
Task: Review résumés for administrative as-
sistant position
Actual time spent:
Managing others
Task: Meet with Ivan about invoicing
Actual time spent:
Personal tasks
Task: Call Mom for her birthday
Actual time spent:
11:00 a.m. Communication
Task: Respond to emails
Task: Call Asana back
Actual time spent:
Team meetings
Task: Weekly staff meeting
Actual time spent:
Source: Harvard Business Review, Managing Time (20-Minute Manager Series). Boston: Harvard Business Review Press,
2014.
Next, allocate a specifi c block of time to each category. Within each
box, list the tasks you’ll accomplish. As you go, calculate the amount of
time you are spending on each category so you match your allocations in
step 3.
Put the time boxes into your actual calendar, wherever you keep track
of your appointments, so you treat your boxes with the same respect as you
would a meeting with your boss.
As you begin, it’s much better to overestimate how much time each
task will take than to underestimate. But for this technique to work, you
need to be able to make accurate time estimates, so keep track of how your
Personal Productivity107
schedules work out. You can use these experiences to make a better plan
next time.
Finding focus
Even with a perfectly calibrated schedule, disciplining your attention can
be diffi cult. You have a big task to work on, and you know when you have
to work on it, but you just got fi ve emails while doing your last task. Or
you have a problem from yesterday that you still haven’t solved, or a dead-
line for another project looming tomorrow. A news story you’re antsy to
check up on. A sheaf of papers that’s not aligned quite so with the corner
of your desk.
Finding your focus is about learning how to tune out all this mental
noise so you can concentrate on the work at hand. That concentration can
be powerful. Psychologists call it “fl ow”—when you’re so completely en-
gaged in what you’re doing that you lose track of time. Mihaly Csikszent-
mihalyi, who pioneered research on fl ow, describes the concept this way:
Imagine that you are skiing down a slope and your full attention
is focused on the movements of your body, the position of the skis,
the air whistling past your face, and the snow-shrouded trees run-
ning by. There is no room in your awareness for confl icts or con-
tradictions; you know that a distracting thought or emotion might
get you buried face down in the snow. The run is so perfect that you
want it to last forever.
Flow boosts both performance and motivation. You do your best work
in this state, and you feel good about yourself, too. But to achieve it, you
need to eliminate the behaviors and environmental cues that send your
brain off-task.
Forestall interruptions
Interruptions often take you away from the task at hand for much longer
than you had planned. Diving back in is hard: according to research at
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.