Mastering Time Management Through Effective Planning

How flexible are you? That’s what we’re looking at this week. 

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Script | 363

Hello, and welcome to episode 363 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.

You may have heard this week that my Time Sector System is five years old. And to celebrate, I updated the whole course. 

Now, before I start to update a course, I go into Evernote and review all the comments I have collected from students and see if there are any common issues or difficulties that I could improve or explain better. 

The Time Sector System works. It’s based on timeless principles that have been used by some of the most productive people who have ever lived. As with all solid principles, there needs to be a degree of flexibility to accommodate the different ways we all work and the type of work we do.

The way authors, for example, will protect three to four hours a day for writing might not be practical for a customer support assistant or a manager managing a team of twenty salespeople. Similarly, an architect will work differently from a doctor in an emergency room. 

Yet, there are still some timeless principles that work no matter what role you have. 

For example, it doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have the time to do it. Makes sense, right? 

I could decide to write my next book today. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is finding the time to write the book. I’m not sure how many hours I spent writing Your Time, Your Way, but from the first day I sat down to begin writing the first draft to when it was published in May last year, it was three years and I know every week, I spend at least ten hours on it— so roughly 2,000 hours. 

Given that each week only has 168 hours, it would not be possible to write a book in a week. 

One of the most productive companies I worked for was an advertising agency in Korea. The manager, Patrick, was smart. He realised that for his team to get the campaigns completed on time, he had to protect the time of his copywriters and graphic designers. They needed quiet, undisturbed time to do their work. 

Yet the account managers and social media planners needed to be talking with each other and external companies to arrange space for the billboards, and media companies. 

The account managers and planners generally had a meeting with each other each day. 

The creative team only had two meetings per week. The Monday planning meeting where they planned out the work to be completed that week and the Friday morning team meeting where everything was discussed. 

This meant the creatives (as they were called) had the quiet time to focus on their work. 

In the four years I worked with that team, I never recall a time where they missed a deadline or even felt under pressure to complete a campaign. I’m sure there were occasions when they were under pressure—clients can be very demanding—but it was never noticeable. 

What made this team so productive was that each person knew the objectives for the week. They knew what needed to be finished and ensured that they had the space and time to get on and complete the work. Patrick, as the boss, protected the time of his team. 

He knew if he was constantly asking his creatives for updates, he would be slowing them down. He trusted his team and they trusted him. If they had a difficulty, or discovered that a piece of work would take longer to complete than initially anticipated, they could go to Patrick and tell him. 

This comes back to something I learned from Brian Tracy—one of the world’s best self-development teachers—that if you want to be successful at anything, you first need to establish what you need to do to be successful at it. 

Once you know that, you can dedicate enough time to doing that and eliminating everything else. 

There’s the famous advice that Warren Buffett gives about managing your work. Write down the twenty-five things you feel you should do, then put a star next to the five most important, delete the rest and focus all your time and effort on completing those five. 

So, where does flexibility come into this?

Well, if you have an overflowing inbox with emails and messages piling up by the hour, you are constantly interrupted by people asking you questions about this and that, and you have no idea what needs to be completed this week, you lose all flexibility. 

There’s too much for your brain to decide what to work on next. You’re overloaded and stress and anxiety will freeze you—slowing you down even further. 

Take a copywriter working for Patrick. She knew what needed to be completed that week—it was agreed at the Monday meeting—and she had the freedom and flexibility to get on and do the work in her own way. 

And that all came down to knowing from the beginning of the week what was required. Next week wasn’t important. That could be discussed at the Friday meeting. 

And that’s one of the strongest concepts of the Time Sector System. Only focus on what needs to be done this week and not worry about next week until you do your weekly planning session at the end of the week. 

We need to be flexible enough to modify things for the way we work. One aspect of the Time Sector System I recommend is working with projects. 

Task managers, or todo lists, are not the best places to manage projects. Projects are information hubs. There’s likely to be emails, plans, meetings, deadlines and what is called conditional tasks—where something cannot be completed until something else is completed first.

Then there’s likely to be files and documents being worked on which need to be accessed from time to time. 

Projects are best managed in your notes apps. Notes apps have greater flexibility to store all this information. You can also create checklists which do not remove completed tasks which makes it easier to quickly see what has been completed and what remains to be done. 

I recommend that you add a single task in your task manager saying “Work on project X” and connect that task to your project note. Some people mentioned that this seems cumbersome if the task is simply to follow up with someone. 

I agree, and in these situations, I would suggest adding the follow-up task to your task manager.

Be flexible. 

Similarly, some projects are simple and easy to do. I have a project right now to get the terrace outside the office ready for the spring. When I come to do that project, the most effective way to complete it would be to schedule an afternoon on my calendar to go outside with the jet washer and get on and do it. 

I do not need to create a project note for this. I just need to find some time on my calendar. This “project” doesn’t even need to be on my task list. It’s two or three hours protected on my calendar when it’s not raining. 

The principle to work from, is if something needs doing, then it will require time. So the questions is when will you do it? 

Once you know what needs to be done, and are clear about what the desired outcome is, and you know when you will do it, the how will largely take care of itself. And it’s how flexibility is your best friend. 

Another area where I found people struggle is with the daily planning session. Daily planning is a critical part of being more focused and productive. When you have a plan for the day, you more likely to get the right things done. With no plan, you’ll end up drifting through the day doing this and that and getting caught up in everyone else’s crises and urgencies. 

But not accomplishing very much. 

Daily planning is five to ten minutes at the end of the day, deciding what you need to do the next day. Doing it the evening before allows you to let go of the day so you can relax and enjoy the evening. 

Sounds simple, right?

So why do so many people struggle to do it? Exhaustion. They are exhausted at the end of the day and cannot bring themselves to do it, so it doesn’t get done. 

And guess what happens the next day? They drift and get caught up in everyone else’s work. And what does that do to them? It leaves them exhausted at the end of the day. 

However, some people are early birds and like to wake up early. If you are an early bird, planning in the morning before the day begins works perfectly well. 

This is another example of being flexible. Work to the way you work. 

I remember when I used to wake up at 5:00 am (I did that for 18 months), and I would plan my day as part of my morning routine. It was only when waking up at 5:00 am became unsustainable after my coaching programme grew and I needed to be doing coaching sessions late into the evening that I stopped and started doing my daily planning in the evening after I finished my coaching sessions. 

Different circumstances require different approaches, yet the principles remain. Plan your week so you know what’s important at a higher level, then give yourself five to ten minutes to adjust your plan each day to allow for the unknowns that will inevitably have come in as the week progresses. 

Protect time for doing your important work. If you need to prepare a proposal for an important client and you know it will require three to four hours to complete, then protect that time on your calendar and don’t let anyone steal it from you. 

If you allow someone steal that time from you and you find yourself under enormous time pressure at the end of the week, whose fault is that? 

There was something I once heard Brian Tracy say and that was “take responsibility”. He was talking in terms of your life—take responsibility for your life. You can easily adopt that same approach for your time. Take responsibility for it. Be ruthless, yet flexible when you need to be so you can get your important work done. 

I’m reminded of the East Asian saying: “be like bamboo”. It’s strong, yet flexible enough to adapt to the wind, the snow and the rain and still not break. That should be your approach to your management of time. Be strong—say no when necessary—yet be flexible enough to adapt to the conditions. 

I hope you found this helpful. Thank you for listening. 

Don’t forget, if you want to build a time management system like bamboo, then the new Time Sector System course is now available. The link is in the show notes. And if you are already enrolled, this is a free update for you and it’s waiting for you in your Learning Centre dashboard. 

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