21 Time Management tips that are NOT obvious

Time Management is not common sense, it’s quite tricky when you start to investigate it.  Here are some thoughts….

1. Underlying good time management are two key skills (and they ARE learnable) – Self Discipline and Assertiveness
2. These both come from having clear goals for personal and work. Without clear goals you can’t be self disciplined or assertive.
3. Procrastination is a battle between the conscious and subconscious parts of your brain, so in order to beat it you have to use the conscious to play tricks on the subconscious, for example “I’ll just do the first part of the job”, or “Once I’ve done that job I’ll have some chocolate”
4. You need TWO jobs lists – a big master list of everything and a small daily list of what you’ll do today.  Combining them, or having just one, won’t work.
5. You should have a daily list every day – even when you think it’s not needed, i.e. when you don’t have anything urgent that needs doing. That’s when you can put some important things on it
6. Your jobs-to-do list should be not be written first thing when you come in to work, or when you get up – you should write it the night before. Gives you closure on your working day, and clears your brain ready for the evening and sleep.
7. If you write down your personal goals they are MUCH more likely to come true – for two reasons I don’t have time to go into here. And yet most people never do this!
8. Goals need to be written down – keeping them in your head is nowhere near as effective.
9. Efficiency is not enough – you also need goals and interpersonal skills – like for example saying no.
10. Your ‘drivers’ are controlling you all the time – things like Hurry Up and Be Perfect and Please Others are controlling 80% of your behaviour!
11. Don’t fill up your diary completely – say no before it’s full. Otherwise you won’t be able to cope with un expected tasks (which usually form at least 50% of our days).
12. Working longer hours doesn’t work – in fact working long hours means you’ve failed! If you do it regularly you just end up pacing yourself for a longer day, and producing less per hour, so the total achieved remains the same.
13. Urgent and important are not the same. If something is important it doesn’t mean it’s urgent – in fact it probably isn’t.  If something is urgent it doesn’t mean it’s important – in fact it probably isn’t.
14. Your jobs to do list will gradually become less and less fun if you pick the most fun jobs to do first. So you have to deliberately pick jobs that aren’t fun from your list, every now and then,
15. Small things can be important. So importance is not only to do with the size of the job.
16. A “Must do” task, like buying food, can still be unimportant. Just because you have to do it doesn’t mean it’s important. Importance is about about how long you spend on it – do you want to spend longer in order to do it better?
17. If you find yourself in Box 1 (urgent AND important) it means you’ve failed. Box 1 jobs always start out in Box 3 (important but not yet urgent) and should ideally be dealt with there.
18. It is important to have a feeling of achievement from outside of your work. Many people’s plan is to enjoy themselves outside work and to achieve stuff at work, but ideally achievement wouldn’t be restricted to work.
19. Faster is not always good.
20. Better is not always good – it’s possible to do unimportant things too well. This is because doing something really well means you don’t have time to do something else, something that could add more value in total.
21. A life plan which is to retire early is not a good life plan. (More about this another time!)