Time Management 1.0 - Time & Energy Reviews
Yo, wake up to the world stay in charge of your dream
Keep your vision, focus, get wise and largen your cream
Personal Context & Buildup
At pivotal points in life – after losses, realizations or big transitions – I reorient around time. How much has passed, is left and how to be intentional about it. I'm thinking a lot about my next chapter after leaving a company I helped start.
Unequivocally it's the most important resource we have to manage – yet we get buried in our current personal, social, political, professional and financial dilemmas. Life is actually not so short...
...We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it...
– Seneca
How we use the time we have is what makes it feel short. In terms of career, the average person spends 50% of their waking hours in life working. This assumes: 40hr work week and working 50 years from 18 to 68. Don't quote me.
Let's say you're working in more time intensive spaces like startups, finance or consulting. This ratchets up, a lot. I'd say 80% or more of my time post-grad has been focused on work.
I'm not complaining or saying you should reconsider life/quit. My focus was always sports and then my career. Even though I struggle with balance, I've needed to be a part of a team striving for something.
You aren't scared by the commitment to "work" if it's fulfilling some element of your dreams/goals. But The bigger animal to tackle is probably time well spent or life well lived. Tim Urban helped prompt this type of step-back and introspect...
The rest of this will focus on tips to help measure then manager your time better at work. If you're going to spend a majority of your time on earth working you want to maximize productivity and get the most out of it right?
Time Management In Your Job
I wrote a bit about Zone of Genius and maximizing productivity by spending your time and/or your team's time on the right long-run activities...a balance between competence (skills, strengths, talents) and energy (what you want to work on).
Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed
– Peter Drucker
I want to hone in a bit on how you can first start to actually measure/track how you're spending your time. Pete Drucker gives a 3 step framework in The Effective Executive – summarizing some of the basics below.
1. Record it
Drucker recommends recording your time somehow.
Task and to-do lists are not great because they're hopeful. Calendar is gold-standard for understanding how you actually spend your time.
Make sure your calendar is always up to date. Be thoughtful - batch up various activities and be sure to include everything from morning & evening routines to planned breaks and recurring meetings. This helps you be defensive with your time, as well.
Now you're actually recording things and can move it into something like my Time & Energy Review template below.
2. Manage it
Let there be light! Now you can see how you're actually spending time, make observations and see patterns.
You can create categories or buckets and track the cumulative time spent on various activities within management, meetings, execution, planning, top goal, sleep, inboxes (email, slack, memos), etc.
Drucker recommends immediately removing low-value items from your calendar then looking for tasks that can be delegated. This is tough because (a) prioritization is deciding what not to do (b) delegation requires trust.
Lastly Drucker recommends ensuring you're not creating time waste for others. Are you scheduling useless meetings? I have some additional recommendations in my Time & Energy Review template below.
3. Consolidate it
The most effective knowledge workers, especially if you're an exec or leader, have either (1) large swathes of wide-open white space on their calendars and/or (2) recurring, scheduled blocks devoted to what Cal Newport calls Deep Work. It's where the high leverage activities happen - strategy, planning and deep thinking required to generate new ideas/innovations.
Time & Energy Review Template
I think there's a lot of potential to build software that solves a lot of these productivity and management problems :)
For now here are some resources I created. I'll be launching a version of this in Notion as well. Hope they help.
