5 Steps to Improved Focus and Unparalleled Time Management
By: Matthew A. Overlund
Tags: Focus, Leadership Development, Productivity, Leadership, Time Management

Step 1: The Time Inventory

Learning to manage time more effectively requires that you first gain an understanding of how you spend your time currently.

If we don’t know where we are, successfully planning how we will get to another destination is difficult.

We will start by recording an inventory of your day to day time.

What do I mean by an inventory of time?

Simple: record how you spend your day, and try to be as accurate as possible, but don’t go overboard. It’s perfectly fine if you round to 15-minute blocks. If your inventory contains entries measured to the second, you’ve overdone it.

If you’ve never attempted this, or you are struggling with how to approach the task, use your calendar. If you have an email, you have access to a digital calendar. And, who doesn’t have access to email?

If you don’t want to use an existing calendar for this exercise, set up a new calendar using a free service, Google Calendar is a natural choice.

Start by adding blocks of time to your calendar for every significant activity in your day.

Wait. How do I add a block of time? Add a meeting with no attendees. It’s just for you.

Update those blocks as the time spent on the represented task changes or even moves around.

The level of detail is not overly significant. Don’t overthink it. Just leave yourself a quick note in the description to remind you how you spent the time.

At the end of the week, group all the items you recorded into logical categories and sum the time spent for each.

As an example, you might end up with something that looks like this:

Internal Meetings: 18 hours

External Meetings: 8 hours

Project work: 4 hours

Email & Office Time: 6 hours

Other: 4 hours

The concept of Office Time is something I find useful. I use it to collect the time spent updating my calendar, dealing with emails, and other administrative tasks that need time but don’t fit elsewhere.

Did you find anything surprising in how you spend your time?

Everyone I’ve discussed this with has been surprised by the results.

Step 2: Managing Focus Interrupts

Now that you have a working process in place to pay closer attention to how you spend your time, let’s push it a step further.

I’ve written previously about the effect of focus (or lack of focus) on the quality of our work. In this step, we’re going to start paying close attention to this particular problem.

I want you to keep a notebook or scratchpad handy throughout the day. During any particular work session or activity, record when you are interrupted in any way.

Add one or two words, so you know what caused the interruption, and approximately how long you spent on that detour activity.

Did you stop to respond to an email notification? Email, 10 minutes.

Did you take an unplanned phone call? Phone call, 15 minutes.

Mark it all down.

We don’t need to overcomplicate this. In fact, we need to ensure that we don’t let this activity itself become an interruption. For that reason, I recommend paper over a digital solution, though you are, of course, free to do whatever makes you most comfortable.

Here’s the challenging part.

I also want you to recognize when you are distracting yourself.

When does your focus fade? When does your mind wander? How many times when you are scheduled to be working on a large project do you end up checking social media quickly and lose track of 20 minutes?

Record every occurrence that you notice, and try to be more mindful about when this happens. Be honest with yourself here; it can be enlightening.

In your gap between activities throughout the day, or at the end of the day, take your log of interruptions and record it in the calendar event that represents the activity time you just finished.

At the end of the week, categorize the interruptions just as you did the activity types in the last step. Add all of it to your time inventory.

As an example, your interruptions might look something like this:

Email: 2 hours

Phone: 1 hour

Distracted/Lost Focus: 2 hours

This addition to our time inventory provides us some interesting insights. You will start to understand not just how you spend time on the items captured, but how those items are impacting the focused work you recorded earlier.

Step 3: Prioritize Your Work

Once you understand where you spend your time, it’s time to adopt a practice of ruthless prioritization.

I want you to question the importance of every task you undertake. Our purpose every day is not to be busy, but to be productive. We do this by being more intentional with time, which requires that we understand the priority of our tasks.

There are many ways to approach prioritization. I’m going to share my favorite: the prioritization matrix. If you have a system you like, or this isn’t a good fit for you, then feel free to adopt something else.

Be ruthless and honest in your prioritization.

Try to avoid assigning priority to something based on personal feelings like whether or not you enjoy the task. It’s common and natural to want to procrastinate the items that we don’t enjoy doing anyway, but that doesn’t help us become more productive.

Consider external factors such as deadlines or dependencies with other people or teams.

Not everything is a high priority. If you struggle with this, approach the prioritization assignment as a budget. If you think both items rate the highest priority, remember you can only pick one winner. Give the other task a lower rating.

The prioritization matrix takes these into account naturally. You will rank all your tasks on two spectrums: Urgency and Importance.

If we draw a 4x4 grid with urgency tracked on the vertical, and importance tracked on the horizontal, all our tasks will fall into one quadrant or category:

Not Urgent/Not Important (lower-left)

Urgent/Not Important (upper-left)

Urgent/Important (upper-right)

Not Urgent/Important (lower-right)

Urgent items would be those tasks with a deadline assigned or where an external person, team, or customer has a dependency on your work. Non-urgent items have no particular time requirements; they just need to be done — maybe.

Importance is a determination of how critical the task is. Important items are required. It’s not possible to remove them from your task list. Non-important things are the opposite: they are less significant, possibly even something you can skip entirely.

Done with that? Good.

Now you have a prioritized task list.

You can choose work that is both urgent and important first, moving on to the lower-ranked items as you have available time.

Step 4: Saying No

You are now more intentional about how you spend your time.

You are now treating that time like the valuable commodity it is.

You may, however, still find some things just don’t fit.

You made a legitimate effort to ensure that every task on your list isn’t the highest priority, and yet the list of top priority items is still extensive.

There really is not enough time in the day.

There is a solution to this, and you’ve done the work to understand where you spend your time, so you have the data

necessary to take the next step.

I want you to get comfortable with and embrace the power of saying no.

Let’s consider a concept that I’m going to borrow from economics.

Opportunity Cost is the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.

By saying yes to everything, what critical tasks are you failing to complete?

What is the cost to you or your team when those tasks are not taken up?

Say no, but do so knowing that you understand precisely what your capacity is, and the value and relative importance of the task you are refusing.

Say no strategically. Then carry on with your day.

Step 5: Saying Maybe or “I reserve the right to say no later.”

As a final step, we’re going to continue building on this iterative approach to intentional time and task management.

You now have a functional and accurate accounting of time on your calendar. You are comfortable with saying no to protect your ability to do your best work on things that matter.

We have one last skill to adopt.

We’re going to give ourselves the ability to say maybe when no would be too strong, where we can’t decide with the information we have.

We’ll rely on our handy calendar for this change, as well.

Start by responding as tentative where you don’t feel comfortable sending an outright decline to a requested meeting.

Now, at a regular interval, I want you to start reviewing your schedule. Do this weekly if you can.

When you conduct this review, give particular attention to the tentative items on your calendar. After a few days, how do you feel about that event? Have you gotten more comfortable with saying no?

Good, decline it.

If a second look or more information you’ve received in the interim convince you it’s worth your time, send an acceptance.

What should your criteria be for accepting or declining a meeting?

If a meeting doesn’t have an agenda: decline it with a note explaining why.

As new meetings come in, if you can’t justify your attendance against your other priorities: decline it.

If you aren’t sure, reply as tentative — say maybe. Review it in a few days, and if you still can’t see the value: decline it.

In this way, we continue to evolve the time and task management skills we’ve adopted by recognizing that sometimes we can’t make a firm decision on the spot. We allow ourselves some necessary flexibility without sacrificing the benefits of our new system.

There will always be more things to get done, another task to complete, another meeting you could take.

With the right system, you will be the next high-performer that your colleagues look to and say, “How do they get so much done?”