Becoming Better at Managing Your Time

Podcast 244

Becoming more productive and being better at managing your time is not about the hustle culture or squeezing every spare minute out of the day. It needs to be more human than that. That is what we’re looking at this week.

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Episode 244 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 244 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Productivity has a bad name. Many believe it’s about maximising your time doing work, so your company can squeeze the most value out of you without having to pay you more. 

But becoming more productive and better at managing your time is and should never have been, about companies exploiting their workforce. Personal productivity is about building balance into our lives. A life where we can earn a reasonable income and have time to spend with the people we care about without becoming overwhelmed, stressed or burnt out. 

But how can we do that with all the demands on our time? Well, that’s what we will be looking at in this week’s episode. 

Which means, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Ann. Ann asks, Hi Carl, how do I convince my team that becoming more productive is to help them, not just the company? Every time I try to teach them to be more productive or be better with their time, they don’t want to know.

Hi Ann, thank you for your question. 

This is one of the sad things about the work of time management and productivity. For a lot of people, they think it’s all corporate mumbo-jumbo and is designed to “exploit the workers”. 

Now, perhaps in the early days of mass manufacturing, that was the case. Hungry, ambitious factory owners wanted to squeeze every last drop of energy from their workers so they could maximise their profits from their endeavours.

However, we’ve come a long way since then. Today, we are much more aware of the need for adequate rest. Indeed many countries have laws protecting workers from exploitative bosses. The European Union countries have what is called the Working Time Directive which sets limits on the number of hours workers can be asked to work in a week. 

In recent years, we’ve had the hustle culture trend—where if you want to build your own business you need to be pushing 100 hours+ each week. This has been widely advertised by the likes of Elon Musk and Gary Vaynerchuk as a good thing. 

Well, is it? To me that depends. 

In the early days of starting my own business, the business was my total focus. I was working up to eighteen hours a day because I was working two jobs. I had my regular teaching work and in my spare time I was developing my online business. 

The thing is I never felt exhausted or close to burn out because I was loving every minute. I couldn’t wait to start the day and I never wanted the day to end. Sleep, back then was an inconvenience to me. 

But that kind of working is not sustainable in the long-term. 

And that’s the key to this. There will be times when you need to pull out all the stops and work long hours. But that should never be the default position. 

Very much like when we lived an agrarian life. The years went in seasons. The spring time was for planting, the summer was for nurturing and protecting our crops. The autumn was the harvesting of those crops and winter was for relaxation and maintenance. Spring and autumn were our busiest times. During those periods we were working from daybreak to sunset, likely seven days a week. In the summer and winter, we worked less hours. 

Now the way I see productivity and time management is by getting to grip with how we are using our time, we can build balanced and sustainable lives. We have time for our relationships, to take care of our health and to develop our knowledge and skills while working a full-time job. 

It’s not just about our work. Work is a part of our lives, but it is only a part of our lives. 

When you think about it, the average person works forty-hours a week, yet a week has 168 hours. That’s roughly a quarter of our week. What do we do with the other three quarters? 

Becoming better at managing your time and ultimately more productive allows you to complete all your work tasks within those forty hours, so you can enjoy the other 126 hours. That may mean ensuring you get at least seven hours sleep each evening. Taking some time out for exercise to protect your health and for spending quality time with the people that matter to you. That to me is the best reason for getting better at managing time and being more productive. 

But it is more than that. Being more aware of time and what we do with the time helps us to focus more on what is really important to us. 

It’s true at some point, our career will be high up on our list of priorities. Most people want to advance their careers, perhaps they have a goal to become a leader in their organisation, or ultimately to start their own business. There will be times when eight hours a day will not be enough to achieve what you want to achieve. That’s fine, as long as it’s temporary. 

What I find with the most productive people is they make their productive and time management practices a part of who they are. They develop processes that while are flexible to deal with the unexpected, enable them to have the time available for exercise, family and friends. 

I remember reading an article about Cheryl Sandberg a few years ago, that described how her mornings were focused on getting her children ready for school. She ensured there was always time for a family breakfast before her kids headed out to school and she headed to the office. Equally, she made sure she was there when her kids returned from school later in the day. 

It’s her time management and productivity practices that help her to manage her family life as well as her professional life. Any article you read about Cheryl Sandberg will show you where her priorities lay. 

And that’s where your Areas Of Focus step in. It’s these eight areas that inform you where you priorities are. Once you know what your areas of focus are, what they mean to you and what you need to do each week to make sure you are giving sufficient time to them, you can build those activities into your weekly life. 

For instance, keeping fit and healthy is a core area of focus for me. So, I have a two hour block each day for exercise. One my favourite times of the day is the hour my wife and I take Louis for his daily walk. He gets on with his thing and we can talk and laugh. 

While we don’t schedule these walks on a weekly basis, it’s something we do plan each day. 

A couple of questions you can ask your colleagues, Ann, is what is important to them? What would they like to spend more time doing? This moves the narrative away from the word “productivity” to something more interesting. 

Now, you may get answers like spending more time sitting on a beach drinking cocktails. That’s fine, because what you want to do is to connect the notion of better time management and productivity with the idea that by being more intentional with their time, they can build habits and practices that will enable them to do more of the things they want to do. 

Nobody wants to be sitting on a beach with a cocktail in hand worrying about what’s in their inbox. While you might be at the beach, you’re not mentally there. You’re still at work. That’s not a good place to be. 

Having processes and systems in place allows you to completely turn off from work and focus yourself on being present with the things you are doing in the moment. When my wife and I are walking Louis, I’m not thinking about the email I need to respond to or the next YouTube video I will be recording. I am present. 

Time management isn’t really about managing time. You cannot do that because time is a fixed resource. What we can manage is the activity we do in the time we have available. So, the only question we need to answer is what are we going to do with the time we have each day? 

How much sleep do you want to get each day? How much time would you like to spend exercising, socialising, resting and doing your work? This is where creating a calendar and calling it your perfect week helps. 

With your “perfect week” calendar, you start with the things you want to do on a regular basis. For instance, I like to have ninety minutes each day for exercise and an hour a day for walking Louis. I try to get seven hours sleep a night and I like to have an hour at the end of the day for reading and learning. 

So, these are scheduled on my perfect week calendar. In total, I like to have ten and a half hour a day for sleep and my own activities. Eating takes up around two hours a day—I like to cook dinner as it gets me away from the computer screen. So in total I get to spend half my twenty four hours on myself and family. The remaining twelve hours can be given over to work. 

Now as it’s my own business I run, twelve hours is perfect. For me my work is a way to help people which is my biggest motivator. Helping people regain a better relationship with their time so they are spending it doing the things they want to do is my purpose in life. 

That doesn’t mean I do spend twelve hours a day working. Some days I do, others I don’t. For instance, I won’t do any work on a Saturday night. That’s reserved for meeting friends or watching British detective dramas—it’s a hobby of mine to watch these shows trying to work out who did it. 

It’s when we can get to decide what we do with our time that we regain control over our time. Remember our work is twenty-five percent of the week. The remaining seventy-five percent is ours to chose what we want to do. 

I hope that explanation helps you, Ann. I think the secret is to change the way we see time management and productivity. It isn’t just a bout our work. It’s about our life. If we want more time to do things we want to do, we need to manage the activities we do in the time we have available. 

I hope that has helped and thank you for your question.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.