Improve Your Time and Task Management Skills
By: A W Ross
Tags: Project Management, Time Management Tips, Task Management

These subjects (both of which are requisite parts of having skills in Project Management) have been the bane of my life on many occasions.

Let’s start with some definitions:

Time Management is variously defined as:

“the ability to use your time effectively or productively”

and Task Management as:

“the process of managing the lifecycle of a task from planning to action and final completion”

Incidentally, Project Management is the topic of a forthcoming series of posts

How many times…how MANY…have I lifted my head to look at the clock and felt my heart sink? Beyond count…

I know I’m not alone. There will be literally millions of us who have, at one time or another, been in that same boat. We will have uttered the immortal words “where did the time go?” or (in my case) “how the FUCK can it be that time already?”. Those feelings of dread are sealed further when a look at the task list shows possibly less progress than was originally anticipated at this point.

The “bigger” of the two subjects (for me anyway) is Time Management.

Over the years, I’ve tried many things to help me manage both subjects. I did the “plan your day the night before” thing, only to find that my day ended up looking nothing like what I’d planned. I went for the “set priorities and deal with the highest priority tasks first” approach, only to discover that everything seemed to be priority 1! I have also been variously guilty of the sin of “making a plan and intending to stick to it” but then not doing so. I’ve set timers and alarms to go off when I’ve said a task is due to finish, only to “snooze” or ignore them altogether and find myself right back where I started…not keeping control of my time.

Did all of these strategies fail for me all of the time? Thankfully, no. Each had its place and, depending on how it was approached and applied, provided varying degrees of success (and failure).

But absolutely nothing about trying different methods to improve something you’re not good at or happy with, is wasted time. Just because something doesn’t work, isn’t a measure of how useful gaining that experience has been. On the contrary, and if you’ll kindly indulge me, I will paraphrase one of my all time heroes; Thomas A Edison. On his account of having tried thousands of different combinations of elements and methods to create the electric lightbulb, he insisted that he hadn’t failed. Rather, he had discovered thousands of ways which didn’t work.

It’s all about how we perceive things.

However (and this is what I’d call a “given”); we will never have 100% control over our time or tasks (or, said another way: we will never have control over 100% of our time or tasks). Even if all of these tasks are generated by you, for you and rely only on you; a fair percentage of them will not be done in the time or way you first envisaged.

You need to be OK with that.

That last statement might get a little stuck in your throat. I know it got stuck in mine, when an experienced manager first said it to me many years ago (we’re talking early 1990's). I scoffed and said (with my shiny-new “team leader” hat on) — “but that’s just wrong!”. I had (not unusually at that time, I might add) missed the point.

I went on to argue that this “attitude” of being OK with failure was potentially dangerous; what if I were a surgeon and I didn’t manage something correctly during an operation? Someone could die! Or, as a pilot, if I didn’t do the appropriate thing at the correct moment, the plane could crash. I even quoted Kurt Russell from the firefighting movie Backdraft, where he says to Alec Baldwin “You have a bad day here and somebody dies… and that’s just not fucking good enough”.

Of course, that manager was right. Almost immediately, and many, MANY times over the years since then, failures happened. Tasks have been poorly defined, time has neither been correctly estimated nor properly allocated (or both).

It’s been better since, but my then youthful ego wouldn’t accept that these issues were because of anything I’d done. If there was an excuse; I’m sure I’d have used it:

“It’s not my fault! How could I know it was going to take that much longer? The last time we did this [particular job] it only took x minutes” “It’s not my fault! I forgot! How can I be expected to remember 100 things at once?!?!”

…and so on.

Of course, I didn’t “get” that the process of failing is how we go on to learn and then succeed, providing we learn from the failure. The subject of Time and Task Management is no different in this regard.

Time Management

A lot of us don’t think we’ve got any issues with managing our time, but if we actually spent time reviewing how well it is spent, we may think differently.

Still, the management of time is an interesting subject. If we look at the common observations that are made about time:

Time flies: in the seeming “blink of an eye”, an hour or two has passed without our noticing, especially when we’re focussed on something;

in the seeming “blink of an eye”, an hour or two has passed without our noticing, especially when we’re focussed on something; There’s not enough time: we think that the amount of time we have won’t cover things we need to do; lots of tasks must needs lots of time;

we think that the amount of time we have won’t cover things we need to do; lots of tasks must needs lots of time; Time drags/there’s too much time: when we’re doing something we either don’t like or don’t want to be doing; when we’re waiting (like waiting for news about something or a kettle to boil); when we are bored/have nothing to occupy us; when we can’t sleep at night; when we’re queueing;

Funnily enough, nowhere in that list is “Time goes at just the right pace”, even though that can and does happen.

Regardless of these observations, we all have the same number of seconds, minutes and hours in each day. So why doesn’t it seem that way? Why does the next person, who is just as busy as you, seem to have more (or less) time than you?

At the centre of this is one key term; perception.

Our perception of time is entirely based around our situation at any given point. So, when you’re focussed on something, you pay less attention to the clock and therefore time seems to fly. When you feel that you have too many things to get done, time never seems to be in sufficient supply. When you’re focussed on the clock, rather than what you’re supposed to be doing, time then seems to drag.

It makes sense, therefore, to find a middle ground to make time go “at just the right pace”. Some simple strategies are listed below to accomplish this for each observation:

Time going by too quickly

Find a way to ensure that you take notice of time at an interval which is helpful. Too long an interval will leave you back where you started, and time will fly. Too short an interval will likely not be enough to accomplish anything worthwhile.

The first time I heard of this approach was when someone pointed me in the direction of the Pomodoro® technique. All you need is a timer (a kitchen timer is fine), some paper and a pen. What you do is pick a task, start the timer (which you’ll set for 25 minutes) and then immerse yourself in that task and not look at a clock until the timer sounds. When that happens, you take a short break for about five minutes. Then you repeat the process until that task is finished.

The inventor of this, Francesco Cirillo, calls each one of these work periods a “Pomodoro” (which literally means “tomato” in Italian). This is because when the technique was invented, the timer used was a kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato.

Every four “Pomodoros” or so, you take a longer break of around 20–30 minutes.

Sketchplanation of the technique — thanks to my buddy, Jono Hey for permission to use this graphic

This technique works very well. Consider the following:

Each timed period (I can’t call them “Pomodoros”…I just can’t) doesn’t have to be 25 minutes. It could be 15, 20 or whatever period makes sense to you and suits the task, but don’t go over 90 minutes.

For each task, estimate how many timed periods it will take. You can mark this against each task for reference. Whether you’re doing this list on paper or not, you could even put multiple tickboxes beside the task to indicate this:

The hardest part (it was for me, initially) is not looking at the clock, especially when you start to settle into the task. Don’t scold yourself for doing this, just remember that the timer “has your back” and return to your task.

Taking the breaks (especially a 20'ish minute one, if you’ve gone for a 90 minute stretch) is mega-important. In terms of health and productivity, I cannot emphasise this enough.

This works well, as you can forget about the clock, knowing that a timer will alert you to the passing of a fixed period. That means that time won’t fly, you’ll make progress (of some sort) and it’s that middle-ground of time passing at just the right pace.

There is more to time management than being aware of time. If we return to the definition at the start of the article (“the ability to use your time effectively or productively”), then being aware of time is certainly helping with using it effectively. The “productively” part will be down to how the tasks being undertaken have been organised and decisions made on the best ways to progress them.

Task Management

Chief among the qualities which contributed to my first outing as a “team leader”, was my ability to get things done in an organised and efficient way. I was known for taking big tasks and being able to break them down, in my head, into smaller parts and identifying the tools and equipment which each part needed. I was also known for having a very good memory.

Needless to say, as a team-leader, life soon became busier and memory was no longer sufficient. I found myself relying on lists (paper lists, as mobile devices hadn’t yet been invented). If I wasn’t physically working on a job, my head was in my notebook, jotting things down and planning the day’s tasks.

It took a few months to refine. I started out with just one big “To Do” list, which fast grew out of control. My job was in a small engineering team, working on maintaining an existing CATV network, whilst also building a new one. So that meant that we had a schedule to which the new network had to be built as well as a daily regime of dealing with customer “trouble” calls and existing network faults. Customer troubles reported one day, were printed the following mornings and allocated to team members in specific areas. We also had outages to deal with and these were radioed to us in the field by an operator at HQ. The list would contain:

Tasks to do with staff (things the team had asked me to look at, holidays, sickness cover, etc.)

Incoming emergency/outage information, as received by radio or pager (out of hours)

The build tasks for that day

Other tasks

The most logical way to handle this was to group the tasks based on what they related to. In the end, I split my notebook up into sections for each group and tasks went in there. In each section, where applicable, I would start a new page for each day, carrying over the unfinished tasks from the previous day. I soon noticed that some tasks were routinely being carried over, so I had to implement a way to know this at a glance. I worked out a system of “arrows” to indicate how long this had been happening for and when I’d come to complete the new list for the day, I added the “arrowed” tasks first, in the order of those with the most arrows at the top:

An example of the list I’d write, with arrows indicating how many days the tasks had been carried over

My next challenge was to prioritise things, as I would often have three or four carry-overs and other high-priority jobs (which weren’t carry-overs). Each one ended up getting a “P” number to indicate their urgency/priority (P1 = highest priority, etc.).

It wasn’t until another few months went past that I discovered that colour would make a big difference to the clarity of the list. This was by total accident too; my trusty blue “Bic” pen ran out and the only pen I could get (or “steal”) from the office was a red one. I remember looking at my list and thinking how it made it look like a teacher had written all over my school jotter! Hated it at first, but then it dawned on me what a great idea this was…the red draws my attention, so I put that on the arrows and used it to indicate priorities too.

These days, we’re all “busy” and lists have become essential for organising busy lives and jobs.

If you don’t use lists but rely on your memory instead, and you have a number of things you need to achieve, then consider this:

According to research (outlined in an article on the Very Well Mind website by Kendra Cherry), our short-term memories can only handle 7±2 (seven plus or minus two) items and that when these memories are not rehearsed or actively maintained, they only last a few seconds. If others depend on what you need to achieve, where would anyone find this information if something unfortunately happened to you? A single task can quickly become multiple tasks with one common heading, so the space of 7±2 will soon be full.

I’ve had a few bosses who fell foul of this and I managed to convince all except one of them to use lists.

Whether your list is paper or a task-list app on your phone/tablet/computer, it will definitely help you to manage your tasks more easily.

I prefer to use list apps instead of paper. The reason I like this so much is because I misplaced that notebook once and I was completely lost without it. There was no backup of any description (wouldn’t have been easy to do anyway) and paper is easily damaged too.

At least with list apps, they are generally synced to a Cloud account of some sort and visible across many devices.

Organising tasks

Following the defintion, the three parts of each task:

Planning

Action

Completion

Planning can be further broken down into:

>> Simplifying — breaking the whole task down into smaller and simpler distinct parts to make it easier to manage. As these smaller tasks become sub-tasks, then the original task becomes a “task group”.

>> Prioritising — As mentioned in my earlier example; everything could be seen as a priority one (or P1), but this isn’t necessarily the case. Determining what is and what isn’t a priority will be specific to your situation, but the general rules of thumb are:

Dont have more than one top priority (P1) task at a time

Tasks which are not P1 are, at best, a lower priority (P2)

There is no P3 — any task that is lower than P2 shouldn’t be on a task list. If it’s something which just needs to be taken note of, do that separately.

>> Scheduling — Determine when you are going to start this task and how long it will take you. Use the advice in the time management section and work out how many timed periods it will take. If a task is scheduled to take more than 90 minutes, it’s likely that this task could be further simplified. Revisit the simplying tasks stage.

Action — Speaks for itself; commence the task, but…

…before Completion, it may become necessary to revisit the following:

<<Resimplifying — This can happen when the task being undertaken needs more steps to complete it than were first determined, which only became obvious after the task was started. The task may then be broken down into sub-tasks and it is possible for it to spawn completely separate distinct tasks too.

<<Rescheduling — If additional tasks are created from the resimplification process, they will need to be scheduled. If the additional tasks are sub-tasks, it is probable that the group task will now take longer. The group task duration should be at least the sum total of the durations of each of its sub-tasks. However, it may be that one sub-task requires a process which is now not in your control (e.g. waiting for something external like a replacement part to arrive or something along those lines), so the rescheduling of that part of the task may have to be estimated or left blank until that part is back in your control (e.g. the replacement part arrives).

<<Reprioritisation — If, for any reason, the priority of the task changes, it’s important to determine the new priority. If the task priority changes to a P2, then any P2 task already on your list which you would consider to be “next” in line, now becomes the P1 task. If the task is now prioritised as lower than P2, it will obviously come off the list and be noted elsewhere. The changing of priority will mean that any parts of the schedule affected by this change, will need to be changed also.

This might sound a tad complicated, but it really isn’t. Once you’ve done it a couple of times, it becomes the natural way to work. At the end of the day, any task list should be treated as dynamic, rather than static, as circumstances can and do change.

Here’s an example of a fairly well-organised task list. I’ve used Google Keep for this, as it has decent indentation facilities for sub-tasks, but use whatever works for you:

Example of an organised task list

As you can see, there are two task groups, each with sub-tasks indented below them. Priority 1 (P1) at the top of the list and priority 2 (P2) below. The estimated time is shown as minutes in brackets at the end of each sub-task and the task group times are a total of these amounts.

Conclusion

This has been a fairly quick look at my way to handle time and task management, which I hope has been useful to you.

The next logical stage is Project Management, which will be the subject of a forthcoming series of posts. I will update this post with the links to those when they are available.