Manage Your Time, Not Tasks.

This week, why managing your time is better than managing tasks. 

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Script | 357

Hello, and welcome to episode 356 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 is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where astronaut Ken Mattingley, played by Gary Sinese, is trying to find a way to power up the Command Service Module to bring the three in danger astronauts through the earth’s atmosphere and safely back to earth. 

All they had to play with was 16 amps; that’s it. Sixteen amps isn’t enough to boil a kettle. And we’re talking about life support systems and navigation that was critical to bring Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise back to earth safely.

In the scene, we see Ken Mattingley testing every switch in every possible combination so they do not exceed 16 amps . It’s painstaking; it takes a lot of time, but eventually, they devise a sequence that the astronauts can use to power up the command service module within the 16-amp limit.

We know that Apollo 13 landed, or splashed down, safely to earth after five days.

Each day, you, too, are dealing with a similar situation. You have a limited resource—time—and that’s it. You get the same 24 hours every day that everybody else gets. How you use that time is entirely up to you.

The problem is you don’t have 24 hours because some critical life support measures require some of that time, including sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, that will have a subsequent effect on your performance that day; you won’t be operating at your most productive. 

This is one of the reasons why it is crucial to have a plan. No flight ever takes off without a flight plan. They know precisely how much weight they are carrying. They can estimate to some degree of accuracy the weight of the passengers, and they know precisely where they’re going and what weather conditions to expect.

Yet many people start their day without a plan; they turn up at work and email messages. Bosses, customers, and colleagues dictate what they do all day, and they end up exhausted, having felt they’ve done nothing important at all. And that will be very true. Well, not important to them. 

This week’s question is about getting control of your time. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Tina. Tina asks, Hi Carl, I am swamped with all the stuff I have to do at work and home. It’s never-ending and I don’t have time to do it all. Do you have any tips on getting control of everything?

Hi Tina, thank you for your question. 

There’s an issue when we focus on everything that we have to do. We forget that ultimately, whether we can or cannot do something will come back to time. Time is the limiting factor. 

There are other resources—money, ability, energy, etc but if you have all those resources, and you don’t have time, it’s not going to get done. 

Things get even more messy when we consider that as humans we are terrible at estimating how long something will take to do. There are too many variables. 

For instance, as I am writing this script, my wife is messaging me and Louis, my little dog, is looking at me expectantly, hoping I will give him his evening chewy stick early. 

When I began writing, I thought it would take me a couple of hours, I’ve already spent an hour on it and I am nowhere near finishing it. 

One place to start is to allocate what you have to do by when you will do it. This helps to reduce your daily lists which in turn reduces that sense of overwhelm. 

I recommend starting with a simple folder structure of:

This Week

Next Week

This Month

Next Month

Long-Term and on Hold. 

When something new comes in, ask yourself: What is it? What do I need to do and when can I do it? 

The questions what is it and what do I need to do will help you to classify the task. 

Classifying a task is helpful because it will allow you to group similar tasks together. 

For example, if you walk into your living room and notice the windows are looking dirty, you may decide to create a task to clean the windows. 

The next question is when will you do it? The best time to do this kind of task is when you do your other cleaning. 

Grouping similar tasks together work to prevent procrastination. 

When I was growing up, my grandmothers and my mother all had what they called “cleaning days”. This was a day, once a week when they did the big clean. Vacuuming, dusting and laundry. It was a non-negotiable part of their week. 

And if you think about it, you don’t pop out to the supermarket to buy food individually. It’s not like you run out of broccoli and go to the supermarket to buy only broccoli. You would add broccoli to your shopping list and buy it when you do your grocery shopping. 

Well, we can adopt the same principle here. 

Like most people, I get email every day. The problem is, you and I have no idea how many emails we will get. It’s a random number. This makes it practically impossible to know before the day starts what you will need to do. 

However, what you can do is have a set amount of time to deal with your actionable email each day. 

I have a process. Before the day starts I clear my inbox, filtering out the stuff I don’t need and archiving things I may need. The actionable email goes into an Action This Day folder in my email app and later in the day I dedicate an hour for clearing that folder. 

I have my Action This Day folder set up so the oldest email is at the top of the list and I start there. It doesn’t matter if I have fifty or eighty actionable emails. I give myself an hour work on it and once the hour is up I stop. 

I repeat this every day, so my emails are not backlogging. Most days I can clear them all, some days I cannot. But as I always begin with the oldest email, nobody will be waiting more than 24 hours for a reply. 

This means it really doesn’t matter how many messages I get each day. While I can’t predict how many I will get each day, I have been able to pin down how long I spend on it each day (around an hour and twenty minutes) and that’s it. 

Another thing you can do is to default all new tasks to next week, not this week. It’s tempting to throw everything into this week, but if everything goes into this week, you’re going to be swamped. 

Much of what we are asked to do doesn’t need to be done straight away. It can wait. The advantage of waiting is many things end up sorting themselves out. 

There’s a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yikzak Shamir, who would take every letter, memo and document he received and put it on a pile on a side table. He wouldn’t look at it for a week or ten days. 

When he did go through the pile, he found 90% of what he was being asked to sort out had sorted itself out and the remaining 10% needed his attention. 

Of course, today not touching something for a week to ten days might not be practical, but it does highlight another issue we find ourselves in—rushing to do something that if left alone will sort itself out. 

The final piece of this puzzle, is how you organise your day. This is where your calendar takes priority and where the time limit comes to play. 

We have twenty-four hours. From that we need to sleep, eat and take care of our personal hygiene. That’s going to take up around nine to ten hours of your day. So, in reality you have around fourteen hours to play with. 

Where will you do your most important work? This is where your calendar comes in. 

Most of us have meetings and often we have no control over when those will be. However, what you can do is block your calendar for doing your most important work. 

For example, you could protect two hours in the morning for doing your critical work. And then an hour in the afternoon for dealing with your communications—the action this day folder. 

That’s only three hours. If you’re working a typical eight hour day, that still leaves you with five hours for meetings snd other stuff that may need to be done. 

If you can consistently follow that practice, you’ll soon see a lot of that work that’s piling up getting done. 

One thing to keep in mind is the work will never stop. 

There’s a story that on Queen Elizabeth’s final day, she still had to deal with her official documents and messages. It’s likely you will too. Stuff to do will never stop coming. 

All you have are your resources and of those time is the most limited. The question is—how much time are you will to give to those tasks? 

So, Tina, the best advice I can give you is to sort your tasks by when you will do them. This week, next week, later this month or next month. 

From there, categorise your tasks into the type of work involved. That could be Writing time, communications, admin, chores etc. 

Then. Look at your calendar and see where you can protect time for doing that work. 

And that’s it. If you are consistent in following your calendar, you will find the right things are getting done on time and you’ll feel a lot less frazzled and overwhelmed. 

Thank you, Tina for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.