What happened today with my time!
By: Diego Varela
Tags: Efficiency, Time Management, Spreadsheets, Meetings, Time Off

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

What happened today with my time!

It is early 5 am, and I am already waking up, trying to use the most of my time doing things I have to do and doing things I want to do. Probably if I feel ok, I can go for a run to battle the first world issue of having gained weight during this year, then get back to my house, shower, make some hot infusion and let’s rock the day.

I am in front of my calendar, where my first meeting for sure is about an hour ahead so I can do some prep — catch up activities; next time I look at the clock, it is already 5 pm, and I wonder what did I do during the day that actually made a difference. Not every day, I have a good answer, but I work and really hard to get better at it.

The other day I was not thinking clearly, and it was evident that the whole year and effort was taking a toll on me, so I took my car — supported by my family and company — and I disappeared for an entire Monday. The goal was straightforward: disconnect, and find redemption with me on what I was doing, how I was doing, and how to improve my wellness.

I’ve got many conclusions that may probably be the feed of my future posts, but I wanted to share what I found about my time management, where I consider is good enough; still, things can change for the good.

The meetings are the go-to place to see where your time is being spent, but there is a lot of writing about getting better outcomes from meetings and make them relevant. I found a way that makes sense to discover if I will get anything valuable from that meeting by answering the following questions:

What is the purpose of this meeting?

What is the expected outcome?

How many people are going to assist? (More than six should be an informative meeting)

Who sets the meeting (Yes, there are people that as a freak out a reaction, sets a meeting to see what to do)

Is someone already invited to the meeting that could do a better job than I would? (If so, why are you joining!)

I have more rules, depending on whether it is with the client or internal, even when I organize them, where respect for others’ time should be written in stone. Usually, the meetings I call aren’t longer than 15/20 minutes if what needs to deal with is quick. It is also ok if you have booked 60 minutes and after 5 minutes, you have all sorted.

The next point is probably more complex to deal with, and it is what kind of tools are you using? I have a limited view of what is being used all across the companies, but I can get on what IT development is usually a Slack and a Jira — or other brands that also build great of these products. That’s a standard stack, but then, it is nearly impossible to run out of Excel. Excel or Sheets, whatever spreadsheet you want to refer to. As I mentioned that the first reaction was to meet on any appearing issue, the action from that meeting is to fill a spreadsheet file. Spreadsheets gather an enormous amount of information, and I have no facts, but also no doubt that that data collected is not 100% relevant for the first panic moment. I’ve seen dashboards, risk manager, Gantt charts, plans, tracking, and execution of various projects, everything on spreadsheets in different places. Well, I’ve got news, it is not a sin to use a spreadsheet; I use them as well, but only when I consider it is a time saver and would solve my problem quicker than probably another tool, but I have investigated. Found plugins for Slack or other mechanisms that override the spreadsheet use, and also, the usage is neater, but again, the time you save just because you go with a proper tool is enormous. I admit I am a bit of a fan of going and testing new tools to make life easier, people may consider me an extremist, but hey, it makes my life easier and for the rest of the team members who work with me.

And the last point I want to highlight that came out from my thinking was how much time do I wait for others to respond or act? Not every team has an SLA neither the same timezone you are, so let’s face it; you can’t start calling or escalating things every 5 minutes because you become a joke, and in fairness, that is not something I’d like to be. It is good, though, to get a commitment from the other end when things can be done and set a protocol for nudging if time starts passing by even how you will nudge. That simple agreement helps.

My backlog of things to do and achieve is endless, and the truth is, family, tiredness, time to use on just chilling, time with friends are needed, so I repeatedly want to see the way to get more stuff done when I have the chance.