Fabio Rocha

Great tips on time management from Professor Anthony Finkelstein. (BTW, his blog is awesome and has a lot of great stuff: http://prof.so/)

The very idea that I should attempt to write about time management will doubtless evoke a certain amount of hilarity among family, friends and colleagues. Perhaps however, because it does not come naturally and because I am constantly fighting the good fight to gain control of my time, my reflections might be of value to hard pressed scientists and engineers. I can certainly say what has worked for me and what has not worked, or more accurately what I have not been successful in implementing, which amounts to much the same thing.
I have read the books and even taken a course. In each case the amount I learnt was limited, there was a vast quantity of general ‘guff’ for every nugget of useable guidance. That being said, what is useful may to a certain extent be personal and I have probably filtered out material that would be of value to people with different work patterns and personalities. Please read what follows with that in mind. The best advice has come from mentors and people who know me well. Frankly, I am grateful for any assistance.

Do the important things rather than simply the urgent ones. The first rule of time management and almost certainly the most difficult to adhere to. Pretty obviously the urgent things are URGENT and we all, I assume, want to minimise embarrassment and avoid exposure of our inefficiency. The best advice on this matter was dispensed by a London cab driver, we were discussing the difficulties of driving in London: ‘I stopped stressing out, mate, when I realised it was the guy in the back who was in a hurry’. So, precisely, urgent for whom, urgent for you or urgent for them? If urgent for them, for a good reason or not? The important stuff is usually the longer-term, transformational projects, things that make the difference. Prioritising trivia is not going to take you where you want to go.

Triage incoming work. This is basically ‘classic’ time management with a bit of GTD (Getting Things Done) thrown in. Quite a few items fall in the ‘only touch once’ category: read and respond as rapidly as possible. Other items are ‘one-offs’ that might take perhaps 15-30 minutes of work: set them aside and handle them in a timetabled ‘review period’ (perhaps at the end of each day), try and clear this list weekly, setting aside time for this clear up. Big tasks should be identified as projects: break these down into a list of immediate actions, chip away at them on a regular basis, move the projects on action by action, keep the projects live by identifying new actions. Keep action and to-do lists in a good software tool. Record actions and commitments even minor ones. It is very easy in a meeting to agree to an action, if you do not record it it will either be forgotten or, worse, join the mental backlog, drifting in and out of consciousness and contributing to worry and stress.

At some points in time there will be more to do than can be humanly accomplished. In this case ruthlessly drop stuff on the floor. There, you will not hear a time management guru tell you that. Sometimes you have to say ‘enough’ and put some work out of sight and mind. Forget it and move on. Quite often ‘good enough’ is just that – good enough. This goes particularly for decision making. A sub-optimal course of action taken quickly and decisively is usually much better than the ‘best’ decision based on a complete analysis but infinitely delayed. Again, the time management principle here is ‘keep rolling’.

On occasion work items will fall into a psychological ‘black hole’. Relatively minor work items are endlessly put off or consigned to the bottom of the list. You have to confront this behaviour and acknowledge to yourself the reasons for it. Usually once the crunch point has been reached the task will prove relatively painless to accomplish and the mental anguish will have proved unnecessary. Despite this you owe it to yourself to reflect on the experience and understand how it can be avoided in the future.

Many days contain potentially ‘dead’ time. Time spent in transit, waiting, or otherwise in limbo. Much of this time can be scavenged and put to productive use. Reading, making calls, emailing and so on. Often the best use of such time is however, thinking. This actually requires a conscious effort in order to turn ones mind to a problem, stare blankly into mid-air and let an idea take wing. Strangely, thinking time rarely features in the time management canon but is the seed of creativity.

If the seed of creativity is time to think, then the subsequent growth of creative ideas is the product of ‘connected time’. That is the time needed for sustained intellectual work and, overworking a metaphor, to ground the ideas that took flight above. You will need some of this connected time and it will need to be prised out of a busy schedule. My experience suggests that the greatest enemy here is yourself. The temptation to engage with trivia as a displacement activity can be overwhelming and the misleading sense that you are somehow engaged productively is particularly dangerous. Here there is nothing to be done, no shortcuts, and no strategy except determination.

It is important to know your unproductive time. I am least effective in mid-afternoon and most effective at the beginning of the day, I can do good quality concentrated work in the evenings up to about 11pm after which my effectiveness diminishes drastically. I now know this and, though I struggle to achieve it, I prefer to use my best times for the sort of work that most benefits from the use of that time. Less important work can be assigned to lesser quality time.

Get a good PA and hand over control of your diary. Let them manage your office, travel and day to day organisational tasks. I realise that this advice is not accessible to everybody but using whatever office and personal support is available to the maximum extent possible is a highly effective strategy. Many people make ineffective use of such personal support because they are unprepared to invest the time necessary to get the most from it. Learn from your PA, they will have the experience and, critically, the objectivity to assist you.

On the journey home each evening remind yourself of what you did, not what you did not do. This is the most important psychological requirement for ensuring that you manage time rather than time managing you.

Do not read blogs and above all do not write them.