What separates time management success from failure?

You don’t manage time. You manage priorities.

That’s a warning from high-profile business coach John Spence.

“Once you get very clear about what’s important to you and what you truly value, it becomes straightforward how you use your time,” he writes on his blog. “When you know what’s important to you, what you’re trying to accomplish in your life, what you truly value, then you simply must have the courage to say ‘No’ to anything that does not match your vision of your ideal life.”

After that, it’s a matter of practice, time and organization, he says. Keep tasks all in one place, in your calendar or database management system; update it often; and back it up, so you’re not afraid you’ll lose the list. Then focus solely on the item at hand.

Executive coach Dan Rockwell echoes him, saying time cannot be managed, influenced, or domesticated: “The second hand ignores you. It never negotiates.” He says the biggest mistake we make in organizing ourselves is frantically cramming too much into our schedule. “Chaos is ineffective. Pandemonium eventually becomes apathy,” he writes on his blog. The second biggest mistake is underestimating the time a task will take, out of inexperience or arrogance.

Just as buying a new set of knives and high-end kitchen equipment won’t make you a five-star chef, grabbing the latest time management trick won’t make you effective in organizing yourself, warns Erich C. Dierdorff, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at DePaul University in Chicago. His research found that three particular skills separate time management success from failure:

• Awareness: Thinking realistically about your time by understanding it is a limited resource
• Arrangement: Designing and organizing your goals, plans, schedules and tasks to effectively use time
• Adaptation: Monitoring your use of time while performing activities, including adjusting to interruptions or changing priorities

Examining the results from more than 1,200 people who participated in a 30-minute microsimulation designed to objectively assess time-management skills, he found all three skills mattered equally for performance. So if like most people you obsess solely about improving your scheduling and planning – arrangement skills – you are ignoring two-thirds of the competencies needed to effectively manage time.

People struggled the most with awareness and adaptation skills. He recommends building an accurate awareness of your current proficiency at time management. There are online microsimulations available but also you can seek feedback from peers and supervisors.

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Identify and prioritize the skill you need to improve. “Although this sounds obvious, the key point here is to avoid self-improvement that is an ‘inch deep, but a mile wide,’ where efforts are spread too thin across too many needs. It is best to prioritize your skill development, focusing on the most pressing skill need first and then moving on to the next,” he advises.

He urges you to treat time like money. Break your typical day into three to four time slots and over the course of a week rank those slots from your most to least productive. Instead of focusing on how much time you have left toward a project deadline, record how much you have spent.

For improving your adaptation skills, he suggests:

• Habit stacking: Tie your time management behaviours to other habits, such as tracking your daily progress every night when you sit down for dinner, for example.
• Use short bursts of effort: When tasks seem overwhelming, which can lead to procrastination, commit to a 15- to 20-minute full-steam attack on the item.
• Experiment with time trackers and other apps: But make sure the gain exceeds the time spent using the app.
• Create contingency plans: Think about best- and worst-case scenarios as you outline possible outcomes of your plans.
• Reduce time wasters: Create do-not-disturb time slots and block social media sites during critical work time.

In short, manage time, not priorities; don’t jam too much into your schedule; and build your probably-underused awareness and adaptation skills.

Quick hits

• Movement sharpens our minds: A Stanford University study found that students came up with more creative ideas when walking around campus rather than sitting in a classroom.
• “How much notice would you need to give your current employer?” If you hear that question in a job interview, it’s a green flag – a sign they are very interested in you, observes HR consultant Amy Elrod-Lahti. If the interview feels like a conversation, that’s also a positive sign, as is being shown the workplace and introduced to potential colleagues.
• Over the course of your career, 70 per cent of your learning and development will be on the job during the normal flow of work, suggests consultant Wally Bock. Seek out assignments, experiences and jobs that will help you develop the skills you need for career success.
• Slow down when making the main point in a presentation or sales pitch. Trainer Nick Miller notes people comprehend spoken words, particularly new concepts, slower than we can speak them and our main job is to ensure they firmly grasp the point.
• Atomic Habits author James Clear sets out these three steps to exceptional results: Do less – stop dividing your attention. Do it right now. Do it the right way, making sure acting quickly doesn’t turn into acting carelessly.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He and Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.

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