Is Time Management outdated?
I can’t help but feel that there is always way too much to do and too little time. The amount of books that have been written on the subject indicate its not just my problem. (Here’s a short list of 100+ books curated by BookAuthority.com). Adding further to my misery is the fact that the list of things that I want to do keeps getting longer while the time and energy I have seems to shrink.
In my quest to address my temporal sorrows, I have attended time management courses, watched a ton of Youtube videos, and yes, read many books but there are two quotes from Tim Ferriss; who is one of my favorite authors, podcasters, and human beings; that I end up returning to time and time again. In fact, for a long time, I had written these down on sticky notes and made them a permanent feature of my working desk.
They are:
“What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.”
“Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions”.
Now, folks who know Tim Ferriss just by his book titles such as “The 4-hour workweek”, “The 4-hour Body” and “The 4-hour Chef” may mistakenly assume that he is some sort of productivity hacker which his sets of “5 tips to solve woe X” but in fact, his books are deeply thoughtful especially “The 4-hour workweek”. It talks about lifestyle design and working smart to achieve it (pretty cool right? he was a pioneer of a subject that has aged fabulously). In a recent podcast, Cal Newport revisited the 4-hour workweek with Tim Ferriss where they go into lengths discussing many aspects of this wonderful book — listening to these two intellectual giants is great!
Coming back to the quotes — they do deal with productivity but not getting things done faster or the art of speed reading two different pages simultaneously (True Story). Time management is not a goal in itself. Doing things faster may not always result in desirable outcomes. Time management and Prioritization should always be done in context of a long term strategy / plan / goal.
Before you start asking yourself how to fill your days, before you start jotting down to-do-lists, I think it helps to think about some basic questions:
- What’s important to you?
- What do you want to achieve? What will those outcomes look like?
- What’s the timeframe in which you want to achieve these outcomes?
While you are thinking about these questions, remember that where you spend your time and money reflects your values. If you will be spending your time on the achievement of some outcome — you better think about whether that outcome reflects your values.
Also remember the 80/20 principle:
The 80–20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, used mostly in business and economics, states that 80% of outcomes results from 20% of causes.
Thinking long and hard about what your values are, what you want to accomplish and how to do it will result in a list of projects. These projects could be career or work related (generating financial gain), relationships related (generating social gain), or health and fitness related.
Prioritization Methods
Once you have a list of projects, how do you prioritize? A good methodology is as follows:
- Assign a weight to the different outcomes of the project (between 1- 5 or 1–10)
- Sum up the projects’ scores
- Order rank the projects
The different outcomes from the projects (depending on its nature) could be:
- The impact they would have in your life or the life of a loved one
- The skills you would be able to learn
- How easily you think you can finish the project
- The financial gain it will generate
- The level of joy you would feel after finishing the project
Another very famous tool is the Eisenhower Matrix or the Eisenhower box. Apparently, the tools is derived from the following saying:
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important, the urgent are not important. And the important are not urgent.”
― U.S. President Eisenhower
Section 1: Tasks with clear deadlines and significant consequences if not completed in a timely fashion.
Section 2: Tasks with no set deadline but that bring you closer to your long-term goals
Section 3: Tasks that need to get done, but don’t need your expertise in order to be completed
Section 4: Tasks that distract you from your preferred course, and don’t add any measurable value.
Once you create an Eisenhower matrix for yourself, remember this:
- Spending too much time in Section 1 tasks means you are firefighting all the time and it may be that you have not addressed tasks in Section 2 till it is too late
- Section 2 tasks are sometimes the most important tasks — these are tasks that either have a deadline far into the future or there is no enforced deadline but they are important nonetheless e.g. taking care of your health! Watch this amazing Ted Talk by Tim Urban to explore this further.
- Section 3 These are tasks that should either be delegated or if that’s not possible, relegated to a fixed time slot in your calendar e.g. Emails
- Section 4 These are time wasters and should be brought first to the chopping block.
In conclusion, I will say that always think about what you want to do before you start putting in your calendar and to-do list and revisit this list often because we grow, our work transforms, the world grows. Time is the most valuable resource we own and it should be used to create a rewarding life.
Further Reading
The Seven Habits of Highly effective People — Stephen R. Covey
The 4-hour workweek — Tim Ferriss
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity — David Allen
