Strategies for Effective Time Management

A reader paid me a very lovely com­pli­ment recently. What intrigued me was the ques­tion that accom­pa­nied the remark (I’m para­phras­ing): How do you write such high qual­ity arti­cles on so many blogs with all that you have going on in your life?

My time man­age­ment sys­tem is based upon four over­rid­ing principles:

1. Pri­or­i­tize
2. Remain Flex­i­ble
3. Resist the Urge to Procrastinate
4. Work Quickly and Efficiently

Req­ui­site Tools

You can­not man­age your time effec­tively with­out the proper tools. All of the suc­cess­ful peo­ple I know have a per­son­al­ized sys­tem that they have devel­oped and honed over time through a process of trial and error, stick­ing with the tech­niques that are most effec­tive for them, aban­don­ing those that are inefficient.

I used to employ tra­di­tional, num­bered “to do” lists — pro­fes­sional and per­sonal. How­ever, in recent months I have been using mind maps and find them extremely handy for keep­ing track of tasks I must com­plete, as well as con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing, orga­niz­ing, and draft­ing doc­u­ments and arti­cles. I can’t believe that I ever actu­ally out­lined. Mind maps are fluid and allow you to orga­nize your ideas in a non­lin­ear fash­ion that fos­ters and inspires creativity.

I usu­ally main­tain one mind map for each week’s sched­ule, along with an indi­vid­ual mind map asso­ci­ated with every spe­cific project I am work­ing on, using the most adapt­able of many avail­able formats.

My com­put­ers have cal­en­dar­ing sys­tems, of course, as does my Black­berry, but I am old fash­ioned — and cau­tious. If I do not have com­puter access, I want to be able to ref­er­ence my orga­ni­za­tional tools. So I keep a phys­i­cal cal­en­dar with me in order to visu­al­ize the week and month ahead by ref­er­enc­ing the full-month and two-page per week views. I use a 5.5″ by 8″ refill­able style with pock­ets in the front and back where I keep mind maps that I can pull out to add notes. It fits per­fectly into my purse for those times when I do not have my brief­case with me.

Each morn­ing, I review my weekly mind map and cal­en­dar to make sure that I do not miss a dead­line, meet­ing, con­fer­ence call or any other item(s) that need(s) my atten­tion. I usu­ally do that first thing while tak­ing my vit­a­mins and check­ing e-mail. With that review in mind, I refine my plans for the day while I am in the shower and dress­ing. By the time I’m back­ing the car out of the garage, I am a woman on a mission.

Pri­or­i­tize

Each day, there are cer­tain projects that I must work on or com­plete, meet­ings to attend, phone calls to return, e-mails to read and respond to, etc. My orga­ni­za­tional sys­tem is sim­ple and work­able. All tasks are des­ig­nated as belong­ing in one of four categories:

1. Today — The task or project must be com­pleted that day.
2. Loom­ing — A due date is loom­ing, so all items in this cat­e­gory are pre­sented in order of the approach­ing asso­ci­ated deadlines.
3. Work Toward — Tasks in this cat­e­gory must be com­pleted within a non­spe­cific time frame. This is where long-range projects, such as lengthy writ­ing assign­ments that either won’t be com­pleted for a sig­nif­i­cant period of time or for which no firm date for com­ple­tion has been estab­lished are listed.
4. When­ever — As you can imag­ine, there are few items in this category!

Remain Flex­i­ble

Pri­or­i­ties shift, fre­quently due to fac­tors beyond one’s con­trol. So when I estab­lish my “game plan” for each day, I always keep one word in mind: Ten­ta­tive.

I learned years ago to view vir­tu­ally every plan as “ten­ta­tive” until such time as the event in ques­tion actu­ally takes place, approval for a project or event is received, etc. In busi­ness, there is fre­quently no follow-through on what seemed like a great idea, a sug­gested process or pol­icy is never imple­mented, the plan­ning for a pro­posed event never com­pleted so it does not take place, etc. That’s just how things work out, so it is imper­a­tive that I always remain open to a dif­fer­ent approach, a new plan, a change of schedule.

In what color do I make most of my cal­en­dar entries? Pen­cil. I am fre­quently asked to “hold the date” pend­ing approval, travel arrange­ments, etc. which means that my cal­en­dar has a lot of era­sure marks as things shift from one date to another. If I were going to write every­thing in ink and take a dog­matic approach to sched­ul­ing work and events, I would have a cal­en­dar full of white-out, never accom­plish any­thing — and be very unpopular.

Resist the Urge to Procrastinate

I am a nat­ural pro­cras­ti­na­tor. If the dead­line is 5:00 p.m. and I esti­mate that I can com­plete the assign­ment in three hours, my innate ten­dency is to start work at 1:30 p.m., giv­ing myself about 30 min­utes leeway.

Not a suc­cess­ful strategy.

Dead­lines get moved up when other per­sons’ pri­or­i­ties change, cru­cial infor­ma­tion is not received timely … all sorts of unfore­seen obsta­cles can impact the ten­ta­tive sched­ule I estab­lish for com­plet­ing tasks.

When I first grad­u­ated from law school, I learned to cal­en­dar real dead­lines, but also arti­fi­cial ones, and adopt a pol­icy of com­plet­ing work in con­for­mity with the ear­lier date. That approach serves me well.

For instance, when I was in pri­vate prac­tice lit­i­gat­ing full time, my sec­re­tary never put real dead­lines for fil­ing doc­u­ments with the court on my cal­en­dar. She always entered the dead­line on my cal­en­dar at least one full busi­ness day prior to the actual “drop dead” date and time, prefer­ably two. We some­times expe­ri­enced momen­tary panic when some­thing when wrong. But then we’d stop and remind our­selves that the date we were work­ing toward wasn’t the true dead­line. We would double-check the cal­en­dar, recal­cu­late the dead­line and real­ize that, in real­ity, we had one more day to, for exam­ple, get over­due infor­ma­tion or doc­u­ments from the client that were crit­i­cal to com­ple­tion of a brief, plead­ing or motion.

Wait­ing until the last moment is never a good approach. It is akin to play­ing Russ­ian roulette. Sooner or later, the bul­let is going to be in the cham­ber when you pull the trig­ger and your days of lead­ing a charmed life will come to a very messy end. A graphic, but apt, analogy.

Work Quickly and Efficiently

I am a firm believer in not “rein­vest­ing the wheel” or pour­ing more energy into a project than is nec­es­sary in order to com­plete it effi­ciently. So I always seek effec­tive short­cuts such as gen­er­at­ing doc­u­ments from basic tem­plates or uti­liz­ing forms to com­mu­ni­cate mun­dane but nec­es­sary information.

One of the smartest things my mother ever did was to insist that my sis­ter and learn to type. I have been unable to con­vince my kids to learn to type with their hands prop­erly posi­tioned. They both type quickly, but I can beat them. Being able to type extremely fast and accu­rately con­sti­tutes a huge step toward work­ing efficiently.

I avoid and elim­i­nate key­strokes when­ever I can. Set­ting up e-mail soft­ware with con­tact lists, fold­ers, rules for han­dling incom­ing mail, and sig­na­tures saves an enor­mous amount of time, as can con­fig­ur­ing your browser and uti­liz­ing add-ons. I use Blog­lines (I did not like the Beta ver­sion) to keep up with my daily read­ing and have been exper­i­ment­ing with Netvibes, but I do not think I am going to uti­lize it fully. Although you can import your e-mail account on the front page using a wid­get to see if you have any new mes­sages, in order to actu­ally read or respond, you have to open another browser tab and log into your web­mail account. So that pretty much defeats the pur­pose, in my esti­ma­tion, of using the ser­vice. But there are a lot of other great fea­tures and many blog­gers are post­ing about how delighted they are with them.

I strive to make the most of every minute of every day — I hate to sleep because time spent sleep­ing is, in my opin­ion, time wasted.

What tech­niques do you employ to man­age time wisely and effi­ciently? Leave a com­ment, includ­ing links as appro­pri­ate, with your best tips and suggestions!

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