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| Written By Jenn Schoemer, Product Development Specialist at Rockton Software |
Time: For years—there are times I still struggle with this—I would come into work and create a laundry list of all the To-Do’s that I wanted to accomplish in a day. Each day, I would leave feeling as if I hadn’t accomplished anything because I still had remaining items on my To-Do list. The next day, I would go through the same routine, but I had to carry over the tasks from the prior day and so on and so on. By the time I left on Friday, I was exhausted. I felt like I did a lot, yet there were still a number of things remaining on my To-Do list, leaving me feeling like I had failed to accomplish anything.
It makes sense that if someone kept this up week after week, they would become ‘To-Do List paralyzed,’ coming into work staring at pages and pages of To-Dos and not knowing where to begin.
I never took the enough time to evaluate a project and break it down into smaller tasks. Something needed to be done . . . I just added it to the list. How do people expect to be productive if they don’t spend the time up front understanding what a project all includes? Heck—in our industry, what about getting products out the door?
How can we manage our time and get things out on time if we don’t spend a little time up front planning?
A few years ago, I attended a Steven Covey’s ‘FOCUS – Achieving your highest priorities’ seminar. There were two major takeaways for me from the seminar.
The first was how to only schedule projects for 50% of your work day. REALLY?! What about the other 4 hours of my day? It never dawned on me I really don’t have a full 8 hours to work on just projects or tasks. With the lists I was creating, when was I expecting to answer customer questions, read email, finish my projects or sharpen the saw (another Covey reference for those of you Covey lovers)?
The second was to break projects into tasks.
These both seem like pretty elementary concepts, right? Then why do so many of us not use them? I’m convinced it’s because we first have to slow down, review our list, prioritize our list, and plan when to work on those task before we can even get started with the actual work.
So I gave it a try. I grabbed my current To-Do list, made a master list, prioritized it by due dates, and then started breaking larger projects into smaller tasks. I would then use this master list to pull from during my daily planning.
Each morning I would review my calendar, subtract out meeting/appointment times, and then multiple by 50% to get the actual time I had to allocate to projects.
Example: 8 day – 2hr meeting * 50% = 3 hours left for project time.
So in this example, I knew I would have three hours to devote to working on a project.
I found it extremely rewarding and motivating to be able to walk away at the end of the day with an empty To-Do list. No more ‘To-Do List paralyzed’ equaled higher productivity.
I’ve recently found the same to be true when managing larger tasks and other peoples’ time. In general, if the person or people are only working on one given project, I’ve found six hours of work time per day to be a good rule of thumb. Assuming you did the prep work and detailed out the tasks of a given project, you could use the same type of formula to estimate when a project will be finished; Or the other way around, what can we realistically get accomplish by a given date?
So when is the last time you stopped to create a realistic and manageable plan? What are some of your tips and tricks for managing your own and your team’s work time?
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