Time and Task Management

You want to create value in your job, your career and your life. Value, specifically, business value, is about getting stuff done.

In this first section of our course, I’ll discuss time management, what it is, and discuss discipline, governance, and constraints. You’ll also complete an assignment on identifying your priorities.

Time management is really a myth. You cannot manage time, but only what we do with time. The big question is are you managing the things that take up our time and energy?

In this lectures let’s discuss getting things done. We’ll talk about you prioritizing activities, activity types, and the effort given in ratio to results received.

What type of work and tasks are you completing? Are you doing the same activity over and over? Or are you doing activities that vary all the time? The types of activities that you complete will affect how effectively you can manage time – but you can still manage the time you.

In this lecture we’ll discuss the types of activities and how they affect our abilities to control our time and schedule.

Constraints are things that limit our options. We all have constraints, but the biggest common constraint is time. No one gets 25 hours a day, we all get just 24. Of those 24 you have commitments to family, sleep, and other obligations. Within the time we sell we want to maximize what we can accomplish to increase our value. This is managing constraints.

Time management is really about self-discipline. Self-discipline means that you can control your choices, limit distractions, and eliminate non-value add activities. These non-value-added activities often rob people from getting things done on time, create stress and anxiety, and can affect your overall performance.

I’ll also discuss governance in this lecture – that’s you following the rules of your organization. You can also have self-governance, which are rules that you create for yourself to follow.

Great job finishing this first section in our conversation on time management. You’re making progress towards taking control over your time and schedule. In this lectures I’ll do a quick recap of what’s been covered so far in our time and task management course.

In this section we’re going to dig into the strategies to help you get things done. We’ll cover:

•  Pareto’s Principle
•  Tomorrow’s List Today
•  Be Unavailable!
•  Pomodoro Technique
•  Assignment: Trying the Pomodoro Technique
•  1-3-5 Technique

In this lecture we’ll discuss the Pareto Principle and how it affects your scheduling of work. It’s about prioritizing and focusing on the most important approaches to task management.

The best approach to time management that I can offer is this: create and prioritize a list of goals for tomorrow at the end of each work day. You’ll have a good plan at the end of the day of what you’re going to achieve tomorrow, and you’ll start the day fresh already knowing what you have to accomplish.

Sometimes you must be unavailable to get stuff done. I don’t mean that you hide and avoid work, but rather you reserve time for your tasks. While we all want to give of ourselves and help others, if that’s all we did we’d never get our assignments and obligations done. There’s only one of you – and you have to manage you!

The Pomodoro Technique is a great time management approach that I use on longer, day-long chunks of work (like creating this course). It’s all about timeboxing your day – something software developers do, but on longer chunks of time than what we’ll need to accomplish.

Let’s knock this one out right now.

If you’re a football fan you might have heard of the 1-3-5 technique for how players line up around the center. Well, that’s not what we’re discussing in this lecture. This is a time management technique to help you create (and accomplish) goals for each day. It’s a great way to identify and prioritize what you need to accomplish each day.

Great job finishing up this section! We talked about lots of things:

• Pareto’s Principle
• Tomorrow’s List Today
• Be Unavailable!
• Pomodoro Technique
• Assignment: Trying the Pomodoro Technique
• 1-3-5 Technique

Time sucks are the pesky activities that suck away your time: email, Facebook, Instagram, and all those cool web sites you love. They are also things like chit-chat, folks that pop by to check in on things, meetings and other parts of office life that distract us from getting things done.

In this section I’ll share some strategies to combat these negative things. 

Do you have a budget for your household? For your projects? Of course! But time is more precious than money, yet so many of us don’t budget our time.

The secret to getting things done is to create a time budget – and that’s what I’ll discuss in this lecture.

A WOT meeting is a meeting that’s a Waste of Time. Nobody likes to go to meetings with no purpose, plan, or result. Meetings can be a huge time suck – and if you’re running the meeting you want to take steps to make the meeting valuable.

And if you’re invited to the meeting? I’ll discuss that aspect too.

You are accountable for your time. What you agree to do with your time, how you spend your time, will equate to stress, happiness, and getting your tasks and assignments done. In this lecture, I’ll dive into how to guard your time from all the attacks that try to steal our time away from us.

You cannot multitask. Multitask is the myth that you can successfully do two things at once: you cannot. You can’t:

• Work on a report and email
• Build an Excel doc and talk on the phone
• Text and be present in a meeting

Let’s dive in and do just this one thing.

In this lecture I’ll share with you one of my favorite time management analogies. We’ll talk about the big stuff, the little stuff, and then everything else. We’ll want to tackle the big stuff first, of course. Ready? Let’s go!

We covered quite a bit in this section. Great job on finishing the material. Here’s what we covered:

• Budget your time – track like money
• Why I hate meetings
• Take care of you first
• There is no such thing as multitasking
• Take care of the rocks first
• Assignment: Track your time

You’ve made good use of your time! You’re almost to the end of the course. In this last section we’ll cover some lessons learned from others to help you better manage your tasks and time.

In this section I’ll discuss:

• Brook’s Law: Mythical Man Month
• Parkinson’s Law
• Create Duration Estimates
• Control What You Can
• Assignment: Get Organized
• Course wrap

While it seems that adding more people to a task or project is a good idea to speed things up, it can often have the inverse effect. In this lecture I’ll discuss Brook’s Law of the Mythical Man Month. 

Parkinson’s Law says that work will expand to fill the time allotted to it. So, if you say the task will take eight hours to complete, it’ll magically take eight hours. This is true even if you pad the task a little bit in case of errors. It’s like the day before you go on vacation, you can get tons done. But the day you get back it takes all day to do just a few emails.

When you’re managing a project or doing a big stack of work people often want to know how long will it take to finish. In this lecture I’ll discuss some different strategies for creating more accurate estimates. This is important stuff!

Often when I consult I hear people tell me that things just seem out of control. They appear to have little control over their day: assignments, meetings, operational duties, and their life. The truth is we all have some control over our time – and the choices we do with our time.

In this lecture we’ll explore how to control what you can control – and tamp down the chaos that often creeps into our lives.

You did it! Great job finishing this course on time management. In this lecture I’ll do a quick recap of what we’ve discussed, what you’ve learned, and what you’ll want to do next. Let’s go!