Time Management: Get More Work Done by Knowing What Effective Work to Do

Many people are in the same boat when it comes to time management. Time and work feel like they are at odds with one another, creating stress and reducing overall productivity. However, there is a way to make them coexist by focusing on what is important and improving our time management skills. Time management tips are the number one request we get here at Good at Work Club.

Most people think time management is the process of increasing your to-do list and how you manage your time to complete more tasks. However, time management is not about getting more tasks done - it is about knowing what impactful work to do! This article will give you the tools you need to prioritize your to-dos effectively to get the important tasks done first. We will share our favorite tools for increasing your time management skills and learn how to balance urgent priorities with impactful daily tasks. As well as, the time management tips you need to increase your efficiency with scheduling while decreasing procrastination to create time management habits effectively.

Know What You Are Capable of Doing

Knowing what you are capable of is essential to set proper expectations and manage time. It is important that you understand your job tasks and within those tasks, what tasks come easy to you versus the more challenging tasks. You also have to have a strong understanding of how long it takes to complete tasks. If you do not understand your skills and weaknesses you will find yourself over committing, making promises you cannot keep, and under-delivering.

Track your time on tasks by using free tools like Toggl or Boosted to capture the time it takes to complete a task. In as little as a day, you will know exactly how much time it takes to complete specific tasks. You may even be surprised that doing this causes you to spend less time and your efficiency increases as everything measured is improved. Building habits that audit your time spent, measuring productivity, and using your time effectively, could have benefits that outweigh the energy it takes to track them.

Understand Your Priorities

The to-do list never ends. Doing "more" creates stress, overwhelm, and burnout. We will walk through a prioritization framework, but it is important that you understand how your boss measures your performance, as that will always be your number one priority. So pull out that job description or add it to your next one-on-one meeting agenda to track how you are measured by management. Getting crystal clear on the specific activities you are measured on will ensure you do not miss important tasks.

Part of time management is being able to say "no" by delegating or deleting a task. But how do you know what you can say no to or what work has an impact or is effective? For this, we use the Urgent Impact Matrix which is inspired by the Eisenhower Matrix. All work, tasks, and to-do’s fall into one of the quadrants. We adapted the matrix to fit our own time management system. We kept the y-axis as urgency but replaced the x-axis, importance, with impact. Importance felt too subjective and impact is measurable. Now let's break down the quadrants.

Do It - Highly urgent and impactful

Work that falls in the Do It category is anything that takes less than 5 minutes or is related to deadlines or consequences. Consequence-related tasks are how your performance is measured. The Do It quadrant is the tasks that are number 1 priority.

Delegate/Bargain - Low Impact but Urgent

These are tasks that need to be done but do not require your skill or specialty. If you cannot delegate because you do not have a team or employee who reports to you, you can bargain.

Bargaining looks like talking to your manager about how much time it takes to complete it and how little impact it has. Then, ask if it can be automated, systemized, or delegated to an intern or another employee who may be more efficient or have related or similar tasks.

Pro Tip: When you propose to management redelegating this work to a person, who is more skilled at it, or suggesting automation, this saves the team time and increases productivity, thus exhibits forward-thinking and strategic leadership skills.

Time Budget - Highly Impactful but Not Urgent

Time Budgeting is the secret to being in control of your time and creates effective time management. This category is everything remaining on your to-do list that is not time-bound; this includes your professional development and goal-oriented tasks. Professional development is most successful long-term when we prioritize and schedule the time, energy, and task weekly. All of the tasks that land here are scheduled and continually worked on as you manage your time. The benefits of Time Budgeting we will cover in-depth below.

Delete it - Low Impact and Not Urgent

Delete the distractions. This could be social media, tv, gossiping with co-workers, or whatever is distracting you from doing your productive work. Before deleting, take the time to understand the emotional payoff you get from the distractions. Often we find distractions and procrastination are ways our brain is trying to protect us. It is important to take breaks for the sake of your mental health and to protect yourself from stress and burnout. Finding a more meaningful solution to replace the distraction with, will give you the emotional payoff and protection.

We think of distractions or specific activities as junk food. The idea here is not to actually eliminate the distraction but to swap or replace it with a more healthy or productive activity. Here is an example, instead of sitting in front of my fridge at 3 pm scrolling Tiktok for a break I can walk my dogs. Getting outside, walking, bonding with my pets, and breathing fresh air gives me the break and emotional payoff, but in a healthier way.

Using the quadrants above for time management is as simple as paying attention to your time spent. Focus on tasks in the highest impact quadrants. Now you understand how to prioritize your tasks, let's talk about creating a plan and working the plan, a.k.a. Time Budgeting.

Time Budgeting Framework

Out of all the tools, this is our favorite for good time management, it ensures we spend our time being productive. Time Budgeting is a system designed to help prioritize the order of tasks you need to get done. It creates a plan for everything you have to complete.

We practice the time budgeting exercise weekly and track how we manage our time daily. For the initial weekly practice, we prefer to spend our first hour of Monday mornings creating our schedule for the whole week. It is equally as beneficial to schedule your week out the night before. The important thing here is that we are spending time every week on building the habit of creating the plan.

The Time Budgeting Framework consists of seven steps.

1. Brain Dump

2. Break it Down

3. Categorize

4. Schedule the Plan

5. Manage Distractions

6. Work the Plan

7. Maintain the List

Brain Dump

Take pen to paper. Yep, we are doing it old-school style! Now write down everything that must be completed. Yes, even if it is logged in a project management software like Asana. It does not matter if it is due now or later, or how long it will take you to do it. Just write everything you can think of that must be completed.

Break it Down

Now look at each task and assign the amount of time (in minutes) you believe it will take to complete. Review any task that is more than 20 minutes─break these larger tasks into smaller ones. We want every task and sub-task on the list to be 20 minutes or less.

Categorize

We discussed the Impact vs. Urgency tool earlier; run through your timed list and mark to assign a category to every task.

@ - Do it

# - Time Budget (scheduled)

+ - Delegate/Bargain

x- Delete it

Schedule the Plan

Now we move to a paper planner or digital calendar. Review your weekly calendar. How much time each day do you have available for focused work? If your days are back-to-back meetings, you need to talk to your manager about how to better focus your day by opening time for impactful tasks. Hopefully, you have a balance of time requested by others and 40%+ of your time free to manage yourself. If not, find a way to create a reoccurring 2-hour block of focus time each day.

Now anything on your list in the Do It category gets scheduled first. Schedule it like a 30-minute meeting but with no attendees. Name the scheduled event the task title. Once you have scheduled everything in the Do It category, look at the rest of the week and start scheduling up to two hours of anything in the Time Budget categorize. You may only get some things scheduled while others don't make the calendar due to a lack of time. In this case, transfer each of these items to your digital to-do list for now.

Anything in the Delegate/Bargain list needs to be added to your one on one agenda immediately. This way, when your meeting happens later this week, it is already there and doesn’t slip your mind. If you get to make decisions about automating or systematizing then add it to your project management software. Taking immediate action to log and address the stress and lack of productivity, creates good time management and shows effective forward-focused leadership.

Manage Distractions

We are almost ready to start working the plan. Managing distractions is an important time management skill. To increase your focus, you can use tools to block software, tabs, and phone apps. Here is an article with suggested tools. We recommend that you keep a sticky note or small notepad next to your keyboard and phone. As you work your plan, if something pops in your head, instead of disrupting your current workflow, jot it down as a note and come back to it later. Assuming you finish the 20-minute task within the 30-minute block, you will have spare time to review your notes and work them into your Time Budgeting Framework. Make sure you break it down by the time it takes to complete in minutes, categorize it so you understand how it fits with your other priorities. This will help you stay in control of your productivity, focus, and time.

Work the Plan

Now you are ready! Work the plan, show up to each calendar meeting as if someone is there waiting for you. It sounds so simple, but can be the hardest step in the whole process. Doing what we say we will, for ourselves, and doing it consistently, that’s integrity right there! Every person struggles with holding themselves accountable. So be gentle as you work on showing up for yourself, spending time on good time management takes practice so focus on progress instead of perfection.

Maintain the List

Before closing your laptop or walking away from your desk, reflect on your day and if you used your time effectively. Was there anything you were not able to complete, any daily tasks that you need to reschedule? Do you need to move anything around in the week or put it back on the master to-do list? Do not beat yourself up, that is part of the process of effective time management.

One of the benefits of this system is that you now have a map of when you will work on each to-do. So when management asks about a project or task, you can tell them clearly when you will complete it. You will also have a precise way to measure your productivity, the time it takes to accomplish tasks, and your bandwidth or availability to say yes. If management comes to you with more than you can fit in your week, you now have a list to ask what needs to be deprioritized. This is good time management and again exhibiting leadership skills.

Our goal with this article is to give you the tools and advice necessary for effectively managing your time in order to get important work done. When we prioritize tasks by their impact and urgency, it becomes easier to plan our days and weeks accordingly. We hope this article will help you create a more effective strategy for getting real work done, on a regular basis, so that you can spend less time worrying about what needs to be done next. Download the Impact vs Urgency Matrix below and each month you will get additional helpful resources from Good at Work Club!