Two immutable laws of time management

“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.”

That is possibly one of Stephen Covey’s most famous quotes. It’s at the heart of almost all time management and productivity advice today. It addresses one of the biggest challenges today—the cycle of focusing on the urgent at the expense of working on the important. If you focus on the urgent, all you get is more urgent stuff. If you focus on the important, you reduce the urgent stuff. 

It’s all about priorities, and that’s what we’re looking at today. 

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Script | 387

Hello, and welcome to episode 387 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show. 

There are two natural laws of time management and productivity that, for one reason or another, are frequently forgotten, and yet they are immutable and permanent, and you or I cannot change them.

They are:

You can only do one thing at a time, and anything you do requires time. 

When you understand this and internalise it, you can create a solid time management and productivity system based on your needs and what you consider important. 

This doesn’t change at any time in your life. When we are young and dependent on our parents, these natural laws still hold true. 

These laws are still then when we retire from the workforce and perhaps gain a little more agency over our time. You can take the time to landscape your garden and travel the world, yet you cannot do both simultaneously. 

Even if you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to hire a landscape gardener to do the bulk of the heavy lifting for you, you will still need time to plan what you want done and find the right landscaper. 

What this means is every day you have a puzzle to solve. What to do with the time you have available that day. 

And the secret to getting good at solving this daily puzzle is to know what your priorities are. And that is where a little foresight and thought can help you quickly make the right decisions. 

And that neatly brings us to this week’s question, which means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. 

This week’s question comes from Mel. Mel asks, Hi Carl, I’ve followed you for some time now and would love to know your thoughts on prioritising your day. I have family commitments and work full-time, and I often struggle to fit everything in. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Mel, Thank you for your question. 

I must confess it took me many years to understand these natural laws. Like most people, I felt I could get anything done on time, that I had plenty of time to fit in more meetings, accept more demands on my time, and still have time to spend with my family and friends. 

Yet, I never managed to accept more meetings and requests, meet my commitments, and spend quality time with the people I cared about. 

I found myself working until 2:00 am most days and starting earlier and earlier each day to keep my promises. 

And, like most people, I thought all I needed to do was to find another productivity tool. A new app would surely solve my time problems. 

This was at the height of the “hustle culture” trend ten to fifteen years ago. It was all about working more and more hours. I fell into the trap of believing that to be successful, all I had to do was throw more hours at the problem. 

Well, that didn’t work out. All that happened was I felt tired all day, and my productivity fell like a brick. 

It felt good to work until one or two in the morning. I felt I was doing what I needed to do to be successful. Yet, I conveniently forgot I was having to take naps throughout the day, and when I was awake, I procrastinated like I was in the Olympic procrastination final. 

And all those new tools I was constantly downloading, looking for the Holy Grail of productivity apps, meant I had tasks, events and information all over the place, which required a lot of wasted time trying to find where I had put the latest world-changing idea. 

What I was doing was violating the laws of time. 

You can only do one thing at a time, and everything you do requires time. 

The lightbulb moment was realising that I had a limited amount of time each day, which meant that if I was to get the most important things done each day, I needed to know the most important things. 

Here’s what’s important to you.

The promises you make to other people, particularly those you make to the people closest to you. 

And it doesn’t matter who you are. Anything you promise you will do for another person becomes a priority. 

On a personal level, this means if you promise your daughter that you will take her to the theme park on Sunday, you don’t look for ways to get out of it because your boss asked you to finish a report and have it on her desk Monday at 8:30 am. 

You take your daughter to the theme park, and you negotiate with your boss. If your boss won’t negotiate, you find a way to finish the report before Sunday, so when you do take your daughter to the theme park, you are 100% committed and present. 

Meetings you have committed to are a promise. It’s a promise that you will be in a given place at a specific time. Once you have confirmed the meeting, you’re committed and, except for exceptional circumstances—illness, for example—you turn up on time. 

When you treat your promises as a commitment you cannot break, you start to see that your time is limited. 

It’s limited because no matter what, you get twenty-four hours a day, and that’s it. 

Now, it’s a little more complicated than that. We are human beings, and an inconvenient truth about being human is that we need a certain amount of sleep each day to perform. Without enough sleep, you will discover what I discovered when I was all in on the hustle culture: Your productivity drops significantly. 

You might think you are working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Yet, your output will have dropped, and your results will only be as if you have been working eight to ten hours. 

There are other factors too. A poor diet and a lack of movement will also significantly lower your performance and overall productivity. 

In the end, when you think you can fit everything in and continue to say yes to every request, “Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash”, as Stinger said to Maverick in the movie Top Gun. 

You will quickly find you’re making promises you cannot keep because you’re constantly tired, not in the mood and letting the people around you down. 

Prioritising your day starts with you. The first thirty minutes of the day should be focused on you and the things you enjoy. That could be a freshly brewed cup of tea, ten minutes of meditation, a few light stretches, or a few moments writing your thoughts down in a journal. 

I know many of you may have young kids; if they are waking up with you, could you engage in some quiet activities that involve them? Perhaps you could sit quietly together and read a real book or do some light exercise together. 

Next, come your confirmed appointments. When are they, and where do you need to be? These appointments give you structure to your day. You’ve committed to them, so you are now obliged to turn up on time. 

Then comes your core work—the work you are employed to do. What is that, and what does that look like at a task level? In other words, what does doing the work you were employed to do look like?

Finally, from a work perspective, comes everything else. The work you volunteered for, the emails and admin and any other non-core work activities you may have said yes to. 

One way to look at your day is how your grandparents would have seen their days. There’s work time and then there’s home time.

When at work, your priorities are your work promises and commitments. When at home, your priorities are your family and friends. 

As Jim Rohn said:

"When you work, work; when you play, play. Don't play at work, and don't work at play. Make best use of your time"

A simple philosophy and one that works superbly well today. 

I’ve found that a simple daily planning sequence helps people to focus on the right things at the right time. 

First, review your appointments for the day. This gives you a good idea of your available time for everything else.

Second, look at your list of tasks for today and curate it based on how much time you have left after your meetings. It’s no good thinking you will get ten or more tasks done today if you have seven hours of meetings. That won’t happen. 

Yet, on days when you have one or two meetings, you can schedule more tasks. 

Finally, prioritise the list of tasks. For non-core work tasks, you can prioritise based on time sensitivity and your promises. 

If you told a client or colleague you would complete the work they asked you to do by Friday, and today is Thursday, that task would be your priority. You made a promise, and your integrity is at stake. If you fail to meet the deadline, you don’t keep your promise, your client or colleague has every right to question your integrity and reliability. 

One more idea you could adopt, Mel, is to think elimination, not accumulation. 

It’s easier today to collect stuff than it’s ever been. We see something online we’d like to buy and send the link to our task managers. Someone recommends a book, send it to your task manager. 

This results in a task manager stuffed with promises you’ve made to other people and random items you’ve seen online that you found attractive. It’s the Magpie Complex—attracted to shiny objects. (Although that’s apparently not scientifically true. Magpies are not naturally drawn to shiny objects.)

By all means, collect these items if you wish to, but when you process your task manager’s inbox, you move low-value items somewhere else. For example, things you’d like to buy can be moved to a purchase list in your notes app. 

Then, create a task that reminds you to review the list once a week. I do this every Saturday as part of my admin time. I’m relaxed, have no meetings, and the house is quiet. I can review those lists and decide whether to buy something from the list or eliminate items. 

The goal is to keep your task manager clean and tight, showing only what matters and eliminating the things that don’t. 

This has the advantage of making your daily planning faster and easier. You don’t need to go through a long list of random stuff to find the essential tasks for the day. Your only decision is, “Will I have time to do that today?”

So, there you go, Mel. Be aware of things you’ve promised others—they will always be your priority. Ensure you have enough time protected for your core work and eliminate, don’t accumulate. 

I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. 

And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.