Monthly Archives: March 2011

You have defined your goals, assessed where your time is currently being spent and identified time wasting habits.

Harvest Time

You now have all the information you need to use your time more effectively.

Review your activity log.

• Look for time-eating habits.
• Look for tasks you could delegate.
• Look for tasks that don’t contribute to your goals. If they take up more than 5% of your time, rewrite your goals or get rid of those tasks.
• Look for duplicated work. If several people handle the same emails or attend the same meetings, consider if this is an effective use of time.
• Look for individual tasks that you are spending a lot of time on. Are you completing them to an unnecessarily high standard? Are you spending too much time on them to avoid another task?
• Look at how much time you spend reading emails. Minimize it with good email practices.
• Look for time spent in ineffective meetings. Ineffective meetings should generally be dropped.
• Look for time spent travelling. Could you use an efficient alternative such as audio or desktop conferencing?

You may find you simply have too much work to do or too many goals. If so, you may need to drop some goals, reschedule them or find imaginative ways to delegate more of your current work.

Re-assess regularly by re-reviewing your activity logs, and checking your progress.

Following these processes can generate hours of extra time every week.

Brought to you by the team behind Qlockwork time tracking for Outlook.

You have now defined your goals and you know where your time is being spent.

Your next step is to review your activities and find out what your personal time-eating habits are. If you can break those habits, you can make more time for yourself.

Identifying Your Time-Eating Habits

A time-eating habit is a pattern of behavior that wastes your time or distracts you from your goals.

Below are some of the most common time-eating habits. You can review your activity logs to find out if one of these habits affects you.

• Procrastination.
• Over-helpfulness.
• Distraction by email.
• Under-delegation.
• Doing ineffective tasks.
• Stopping and starting on tasks.
• Not focusing on critical goals.

If you identify a time-eating habit, you need to break it. Concentrate on breaking one habit at a time, or you will become overwhelmed. Read on to find out how to spot and break these patterns.

Procrastination

Symptoms

You have an important task that intimidates you and that you are putting off.

Your activity log may contain too many secondary or wish tasks, because you are avoiding one of your critical tasks.

Take action

Avoidance won’t make it any easier, so you’re going to have to bite the bullet and start the job that intimidates you.

Here are some ways you could approach it.

• Write down what you are trying to achieve. It may seem more approachable on paper than in your head.
• Break a big job down into smaller, manageable chunks.
• Get someone else involved. A second viewpoint may make the task less intimidating.
• If you don’t have the right skills, sign up for a course or in-house training.
• Get started on an easy part. Once you have made a start, it will be easier to continue.

If you still need help, a professional coach or an encouraging colleague can help motivate you.

Over-Helpfulness

Symptoms

You never say “no” when someone asks you for help. Much of your time is spent on tasks that help other people achieve their goals, but don’t help you achieve yours.

Take action

A common time-eating habit is to sideline your own tasks in order to help other people.

Helping out often makes you popular and it can make you indispensable in your current position. However, it doesn’t help you achieve your professional goals. You can keep helping out but, if possible, try to spend less than 10% of your time on it.

Here are some practical ways to cut down.

• Value your own work and goals. Make sure the goals you set for yourself are genuinely important to you. Regularly review them – it’s your responsibility to meet them.
• If someone asks you for help, rather than taking on the job on youself, offer training, advice and feedback on their results. At first, this may take longer than doing it yourself, but it will save time in the longer term.

Distraction By Email

Symptoms

In your activity log, email-reading is one of your biggest overall activities and you read emails throughout the day.

Take action

Email can be very distracting, particularly if you let new incoming mails break your concentration.

Here are some ways to use email more effectively

• If possible, review new emails only at set times; for example, first thing, after lunch and at the end of the day.
• Turn off email notifications. Email notifications tempt you to stop your productive work and open your inbox. (To turn off Outlook notifications go to Tools->Options and on the Preferences tab click the “Email Options” button. Now click the “Advanced Email Options” button. Ensure the 4 options in the section entitled “when new items arrive in my inbox” are unticked.)

You can train your team in more effective email communication. Here are some guidelines.

• Keep emails as short and targeted as possible. For example, don’t write a long email for a wide audience, break it up into several short emails, targeted and sent to smaller groups.
• Recipients shouldn’t need to open an email to find out what it’s about – the subject should tell them. “About our meeting” is a bad subject. “About next Monday’s meeting on the sales figures” is much better.
• Every email should have a clear “call to action” – recipients should know exactly what they are expected to do. A good call to action might be, “I need you to read this email and answer the four questions today”. If there are different calls to action for different recipients, consider sending separate emails.
• Be clear what “cc” means on emails. Recipients can interpret “cc” as meaning anything from “read this email immediately” to “maybe read this email someday”. If a recipient must perform an action (even reading the email) it is usually better to include them on the “to” line.
• Email is not an efficient means of instant communication. To contact someone urgently, use an instant messaging client or the phone.

An excellent guideline is: write emails for the maximum convenience of the recipient.

Under-Delegation

Symptoms

Your activity log contains tasks that a subordinate could do, with the right training.

Take action

Delegation is the process of transfering your work to someone whose time is less valuable. You may have to train someone before they can take on your tasks and complete them to the required standard.

For each activity in your log, consider:

• Is there a subordinate or someone less busy who could do this task?
• If they can’t do it now, could I train them to do it?

Look for a task you spend more than 30 minutes on, per week. If you could train someone less valuable to do it, then train them and delegate it.

Below are some common concerns that can lead to under-delegation.

• It would take longer to train someone than to do it myself. In the short-term that’s almost certainly correct, but in the long term you’ll have more time and better staff.
• Someone else won’t do it as well as me. That’s probably true. However, is the high quality you achieve really necessary? Could you do something more worthwhile with that time?
• I know should delegate this task, but I enjoy it. If you delegate a fun job, it will make your staff happier and more willing to take on dull jobs.
• The task keeps me in touch with my staff. Instead of doing the task yourself, ask your delegate to brief you regularly on their progress. That way you can remain in touch with the task, while giving your delegate extra support, training and feedback.
• My team is too busy to take on extra work. In the short term, you may want to take pressure off your team by doing some of their work yourself. However, that won’t improve the long-term situation. Instead, spend the time looking for ways to reduce their work load. You could recruit new staff, improve training or change processes and workflows.

Doing Ineffective Tasks

Symptoms

There are tasks in your activity log that don’t pay off – they don’t help you achieve your goals.

Take action

An excellent way to free up time is to drop ineffective activities.

• An activity should be dropped if it doesn’t help you achieve a goal. For each of your activities consider: if I dropped this task and used the time on something more critical, would I be better off?
• Meetings with few or no results are a very ineffective use of your time. Only attend meetings with agendas, assigned actions and results. Most other meetings are pointless.

Stopping and Starting on Tasks

Symptoms

Your activity log contains lots of very short tasks and you frequently switch away from tasks without completing them.

Take action

Studies show a broken task takes 30% longer than a task you complete in one go.

If you are constantly being interrupted and forced to move from task to task, try to identify the root cause and reduce its impact.

For example, if you are constantly interrupted by questions, set aside specific times for answering non-urgent questions. Request that outside those times, people interrupt you only for urgent issues.

Not Focusing on Critical Goals

Symptoms

You spend considerable time on secondary and wish goals and not enough on your critical goals.

Take action

Keep your goal list up to date and review it regularly. At the start of each task, consider the goal you are working towards. If it isn’t critical, are you giving the task too high a priority? Can you defer or drop it? Also, don’t complete a non-critical task to a higher standard than absolutely necessary.

You could consider limiting non-critical tasks to certain days or times. For example, you could restrict non-critical tasks to Fridays.

In the final part of the guide, we’ll talk about how to get time back for yourself.

From the team behind Qlockwork time tracking software for Outlook and Windows

From the team behind Qlockwork time tracking for Outlook.

In part 1 we saw how to define your goals, but you need to know where your time is currently being spent. To find out, you will need to keep an Activity Log.

You can build an activity log by hand or you can use a tool like Qlockwork to keep an activity log for you.

 Classifying Your Activities

To understand your time use, you need to classify each of the activities in your activity log by the type of goal they helped you achieve: “critical”, “supportive” or “wish”. Not all of your activities will match one of your defined goals, so you’ll need two further categories: “personal” for non-work activities and “other” to cover any activities that are work-related but don’t contribute to your goals.

Below, you will find out how to classify the data in your Qlockwork log. 

Classifying Your Qlockwork Activity Log

If you use Qlockwork (and there’s a free trial so it needn’t cost anything) then in your Qlockwork calendar, you have a record of all the activities you did on your PC.

To classify your day, follow Steps 1-4. 

Step 1: Open an activity item

Open the first activity of your day by double-clicking on it from the Qlockwork calendar view.

In the activity above, a Word document called “QWAdvisorGuide” was worked on.

Step 2: Classify the activity

Decide if the activity should be classified as critical, supportive, wish, personal or other.

Now pick your chosen value from the Project dropdown.

In the case above, if the activity was part of achieving a critical goal, you would choose the project “Critical”.

Step 3: Move on to the next activity

Click on the down arrow to move to the next activity of your day.

In the picture below , the down arrow is highlighted and you can see its tooltip (“Next Item”). You’ll be asked if you want to save your changes. Click “Yes”.

The next activity will then appear. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have classified all your activities.

Step 4: Check you have classified all your activities

When your day is completely classified, it will look something like this

Fast Classification

It should take ten to fifteen minutes to classify your whole day following steps 1 to 4. You can speed the process up by setting rules to automatically classify your activities or by classifying several activities in one go, or choosing projects from the project dropdown in the list view.

Interpreting Your Day

Now that you have your whole day classified, you can find out how you spent your time.

Go to the Qlockwork menu and select “Create Report”. Choose to report “by project” on the day you have just classified. Now hit OK to generate the report.

Your aim is to spend on average:

• 70% of your time on critical tasks
• 20% of your time on supportive tasks
• less than 10% of your time on your combined: wish tasks, personal tasks and other tasks.

 In the next part of the guide, we’ll talk about how to identify activities that are wasting your time.

From the team behind Qlockwork time tracking software for Outlook and Windows

These posts are a guide to helping improve your time management. They cover:

• Setting goals (this page)
• Self-assessment using Qlockwork (next day)
• Bad habits and how to overcome them (next day)
• Harvesting time. (last day)

Setting Goals

Goals are the foundation of time management. They help you decide what to do, then keep you focused on doing it. Good goals are SMART:

• Specific and written down.
• Measurable, so you can judge your progress.
• Achievable.
• Relevant and important to you, your team and your company.
• Time-limited with dates and milestones

Your goals should cover everything you do including day-to-day chores. For example, “I’m never more than 2 weeks behind on my paperwork” is a goal.

Always define measurable outcomes, so you can check your progress. A goal of “return calls promptly” is hard to measure. If your goal is “return all customer calls within 2 days” you can measure your progress much more easily.

As part of measuring your progress, you need to set achievable dates for your goals. For ongoing goals, you can set regular dates like “at the end of every month”.

Example goals

These are Peter Shaw’s goals. Peter is a salesman at Office A1, an office equipment company in London. Office A1 is about to launch a new product called FileIT.

Peter’s goals

• I’ve met my sales targets for this quarter. By 31st March
• I’ve personally visited my top 25 customers. By 30th April
• All my customer invoices for last quarter are paid. By 28th February
• My Sales Manager is up-to-date on all my accounts. By 1st of every month
• I’m trained and ready to sell Qlockwork Central when it launches. By 15th April
• I’ve promoted Qlockwork Central  to my existing customers. By 15th May
• I’ve put together a Qlockwork Central  mailshot campaign. By 15th June
• I’ve got a faster laptop. By 31st March
• I’m less than 2 weeks behind on my invoicing and paperwork. By 1st of every month
• I’ve improved the graphics in my product presentation. By 28th February
• I’ve written a press release promoting Qlockwork Central. By 15th April

Peter’s goals are great. He has written them down and they are very specific. They are important to him, he can measure his progress and they are achievable.

Classifying Your Goals

Now you need to classify your goals. Goals fall into three categories:

• Critical: these must be achieved. Meeting customer commitments or sales targets, for example.
• Supportive: you can live without these, but they would help you meet critical goals in the future
• Wish: these would make life better, but aren’t really necessary.

In the real world, you won’t always be able to achieve every goal. Knowing which are critical, supportive or wish will help you prioritize.

An example of classifying goals

Peter classifies all his goals into critical, supportive and wish.

Critical goals

• I’ve met my sales targets for this quarter. By 31st March
• All my customer invoices for last quarter are paid. By 28th February
• I’m trained and ready to sell Qlockwork Central  when it launches. By 15th April
• I’ve promoted Qlockwork Central  to my existing customers. By 15th May
• I’ve written a press release promoting Qlockwork Central . By 15th April
• I’ve put together a Qlockwork Central  mailshot campaign. By 15th June

Supportive goals

• I’ve personally visited my top 25 customers. By 30th April
• My Sales Manager is up-to-date on all my accounts. By 1st of every month
• I’m less than 2 weeks behind on my invoicing and paperwork. By 1st of every month
• I’ve improved the graphics in my product presentation. By 28th February

Wish goals

• I’ve got a faster laptop. By 31st March

Allocating Your Time

Your aim is to spend on average:

• 70% of your time on critical tasks
• 20% of your time on supportive tasks
• less than 10% of your time on your combined: wish tasks, personal tasks and other tasks.

In the next blog post in this series, we’ll look at Self-assessment using Qlockwork or a similar time tracking tool.