We often see and hear “time management” in everyday life and may have even encountered it when applying for a job. It seems obvious — you keep track of time, don't let yourself get distracted, stop the team when necessary, and that's it. However, in practice it often doesn't work that way. There are always reasons to delay a meeting, motivations to attend to a less important task, to spend a lot of time on something that is interesting, and to start doing a lot of things in parallel.
In the workplace, time management is closely intertwined with prioritisation and planning. The team leader must create work schedules, set deadlines and follow up on tasks to achieve the overall goals of the team.
How to keep up with everything: 5 tips without diving into prioritization and planning
Book time slots for specific tasks
One of the challenges of being a teamleader is the new calls, questions, and conflicts that constantly need to be resolved. Especially if your team is large — in one day you need to call one part of it, then another, then settle things with a vendor, then discuss plans with colleagues from another department. All these meetings are important, you can't miss them, but you don't have time to work. One of the solutions is to book time in your calendar for working on tasks. Google Calendar now has such a function — you can leave only some time intervals open for meetings, and the rest is your sacred time for planning, solving current tasks and so on.
For example, every day from 10 to 12 you define for yourself that you check your email, answer all messages, move tasks in the backlog, plan the day — and do not set anything else for this time.
Start as early as possible in the sprint three types of tasks
- Abstract tasks
If a task lacks specificity, you've never done it before, and the process doesn't have clear boundaries, take on that task as early as possible. If you don't know what the task is about, you can't know what complications might be waiting inside and how long it might take to solve them.
This is possible even with tasks that seem simple at first glance, such as choosing one of the team's time tracking platforms. On the one hand, everything makes sense, but on the other hand, if you've never used team trackers, learning all the ins and outs of how they work, featuring and prices can take a lot more time than it seemed before.
- Tasks closely related to other departments
Remember that other departments/colleagues have their own deadlines and their own priorities. Even if your task is not the most extensive, a colleague may not have the windows to complete it this week, even if it can be done in twenty minutes. Respect your coworkers' plans, and don't risk missing a deadline for yourself because of a planning mistake of putting off a simple related task until later. Communicate the task and deadlines to colleagues who are involved as early as possible.
- Complex tasks
Complex tasks should not be postponed for the same reasons: they often contain the contexts described above (involvement of other departments, uncertainty). And also branching, the need to control a large number of tasks and directions at the same time. Working on such tasks is in itself a big stress, and postponing it only makes the process even more chaotic, uncontrollable and anxious. An early start provides more time for adjustments and changes if necessary. This allows for more flexibility in responding to possible problems and difficulties.
These rules are simple enough, yet our brains still allow us to fall into this trap of putting off work and prioritizing the most enjoyable tasks. It's good if they coincide with the most important ones, but that's not always the case. So don't let your brain fool you and control the process!
Mix tasks
In order not to burn out or push yourself to the point of procrastination, it's important to make sure that your tasks don't just include those that "suck the life out of you". This affects your motivation and therefore your work processes in general. You can use our template to organize your tasks into different types and see which way is outnumbered right now:
Do your most difficult tasks during the periods when you are most productive
For some people this period is first thing in the morning, for others in the evening. We recommend doing it in the morning for a number of reasons (including personal experience):
- morning segments are often less prone to distractions like phone calls, emails, lunches, and interesting conversations in the kitchen
- so says physiology: decisions are made with greater speed and accuracy in the morning because the brain is not faced with the fatigue and overexposure to information that can occur later in the day
- tackling complex tasks early in the day psychologically allows you to redistribute the workload, as you can allow yourself to be left with simpler and more mechanical tasks that don't require a lot of cognitive effort and anxiety at later and more tired times
This isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, so the choice is yours. The key is to orient yourself to your internal bursts of motivation and energy, catch your mood patterns during the day. Try to use your most productive hours for the tasks that require the most effort and seem the least enjoyable.
Try to systematize your method of organizing your day
If you need additional tools or ready-made templates to organize your day, we'll talk about two below.
Eisenhower Matrix
The matrix consists of 4 squares: urgent and important, non-urgent and important, urgent and unimportant, non-urgent and unimportant. The essence of the method is to help you systematize and distribute tasks from the flow in such a way that you can do your work efficiently, keep up with everything and feel satisfied.
Let's go through each square briefly.
Urgent and Important
Prepare for an interview that's looming, pick up a sick colleague's task, respond to a client. Often related to close deadlines or force majeure — there will always be such tasks in any job.
Non-urgent and Important
More global tasks that allow you to develop and perform better in the long term, but don't deliver results right now. Sharpening a skill on an educational course, sorting through documents, developing a standard of presentation work, developing templates, and so on. These tasks tend to have no close deadline or none at all: they are a never-ending process.
Urgent and Unimportant
The most unpleasant category: small unimportant tasks that you don't want to do, but have to do. Send a sync, check email, answer questions from a colleague in another department, send a CP for review. Usually they eat up a lot of time and, if such tasks are the majority, leave us with a feeling of wasted time. It seems like we worked so hard and did nothing! Or vice versa: they can distract us and give us the illusion of productivity, when in fact the real important projects (and more complex tasks) remain untouched for the day.
Non-Urgent and Unimportant
This is where tasks that we fool ourselves with and distract us from real workflow fall. Reading all the work chats, looking for a picture to update your Linkedin profile, preparing lunch, and so on.
How to use the matrix?
Track your main tasks for a couple of days, figure out your tasks for the following days, think about what tasks recur regularly in your work life. Record them on post-it notes and then assess which of the boxes they fall into.
What to do next:
Evaluate your results!
Urgent-Important: You can't get rid of these tasks, but it's important to make sure you don't have too many of them — this can lead to burnout and the possibility of missing a deadline by accident. Try to plan so that there are as few tasks left in this category as possible. If the top left square is the most crowded on a regular basis — think about whether you are planning projects correctly and whether you are taking on too many tasks. If these tasks are constantly coming from coworkers or bosses — discuss how to control this and ideally stop. You may want to use a calendar or syncup to keep everyone up to date on your workload, or rethink your work plan.
Non-urgent-important: try to have as many of these tasks as possible!
Urgent-Unimportant: control the impact of these tasks on your schedule, as they take away your time in favor of someone else. Since these tasks are still important, you have to do them: so try to redistribute the workload and delegate if there are too many of them or if they are regular. If there is no one or nothing to delegate, then try to do these tasks after you have done the first two boxes!
Non-Urgent-Unimportant: try to get rid of these tasks! They don't help you, your coworkers, or the company. Capture time, use apps that allow you to track your concentration and habits.
Use the matrix from time to time when you feel you have no control over tasks, there are too many of them and you need support in sorting them out.
Template in Miro:
Principle 1-3-5
A method of organizing your day that helps to evenly distribute your workload and align your workflow to increase the chances of closing all tasks for the day. No timers or time slots.
The essence of the principle largely echoes the advice we gave above about organizing a work schedule. In a day, you should do:
- one big/important thing;
- three medium in importance and complexity;
- five small, simple things.
Look for your optimal working intervals
The Pomodoro Method (yes, this one again)
- Make an up-to-date list of active tasks for the current day (or interval of the day) from the sprint tasks.
- Decide on the priority and optimal order of tasks: what is important to do first, what is better to do last so you don't have to redo it? And so on.
- And then — the method itself, which is to use certain time segments. Put everything unnecessary away, set a timer for 25 minutes. Work for 25 minutes without distraction.
- Take a break of 5 to 10 minutes.
- Go back to work for 25 minutes.
- After repeating the cycle 4 times, take a big break of 20 minutes. Have lunch, go for a walk, chat with a colleague.
And then do it all over again until all tasks are done (or the workday is over).
Tony Schwartz's "90 by 30" method (or "52 by 17")
Basically the same as the Pomodoro method, the difference is the length and ratio of rest and work intervals.
This method recommends 90 minutes work, 30 minutes rest.
For those who do not like to work in too short intervals, as in Pomodoro, but also do not have enough perseverance for an hour and a half, there is an average variation — 52 on 17. We work 52 minutes, rest 17.
Apps and platforms to help with time management
For working on the pomodoro technique and more:
A cool platform for organizing your time, your team's time, collaborative scheduling and tracking time spent on projects. With tons of possibilities for integrations:
And here, in addition to everything else, you can also connect online payments if you need to:
One more thing:
Materials we draw on:
Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
"Do It Tomorrow" by Marc Forster