1. Unclear goals
If you have clear goals for your home life and your work then you know where you’re going and you will be much more likely to do the things you need to get you there. If you don’t have clear goals you will end up letting others control your life: you’ll be reactive rather than driving things.
So the answer is to sit for half an hour and write down your goals – keeping them in your head is not enough. They can be a mixture of big and small, a mixture of enjoy and achieve, and a mixture of have do and be.
2. Putting urgent before important
Urgent tasks shout for our attention, and it’s tempting to get them all out of the way first, but if you try to do this you will never finish them, so you’ll never get around to the non-urgent but important things in life. Then you won’t make progress towards your personal goals and after a while you’ll feel frustrated.
The answer is to start by keeping a list of important tasks to be done, and then plan half an hour into every day (actually put it in your diary) for working on important tasks. Also, mix urgent and important tasks during your day so you get some of each done.
3. Keeping things in your head instead of writing everything down
If you keep anything at all in your head it will block your creativity. Ideally you would focus fully on the task in hand with no distracting thoughts of what needs to be done in the future.
As well as blocking your creativity, keeping things in your memory will mean that you forget some of them from time to time, and even a small failure rate is unacceptable where customers (and bosses) are concerned.
So free your mind and set up a system where you can write everything down. For this I recommend a master list of the big projects, a daily list just for today, and a diary for time-fixed tasks and appointments.
4. Mixing master and daily lists
Ideally you would have a master list of all the big tasks you plan to do at some point, even though the exact time when you’ll do them isn’t known yet.
You would also have a daily jobs to do list, with a maximum of ten items on it. (Any more and you won’t do them). This list helps you focus during your day, and should include some small parts of big important projects as well as the urgent tasks you need to get done today.
A common mistake is to have one list with all of the above on it, which results in you cherry-picking the easy tasks and leaving the big ones, and then the list gets messy and unmanageable and you get depressed because you never tackle the big tasks.
If you keep the lists separate you will have a tidy master list and a doable daily list, and you can gradually move parts of the master tasks across onto the daily list when time allows.
5. Jobs to do list not done every day
You should have a jobs to do list every day. Most people only write these when things are out of control, and then, once it has worked and they have caught up, they discontinue it again.
The result is that half the time they are out of control, and, more importantly, they don’t ever get around to the important tasks, only the urgent ones.
If you write the list every day, ideally written the evening before, you can fill any space on the list (on quieter days) with jobs that are important rather than urgent. This will encourage you to nibble into those big projects that you really want or need to do.
6. Filling up your diary completely
If you book appointments into the next available slot, without any gaps, you will have a full diary by the time you reach each day. This will result in you running late for your appointments, because extra things always crop up, and you may even have to cancel some appointments.
Much better to keep some free space in your diary every day for things that come up. This means you need to say no to appointments BEFORE your diary is completely full, not after. Remember, you’re not lying when you say you have no time available, because that spare time in your diary will be used up on the things that are cropping up on the day.
Appointments can always wait till the next day – indeed they would have to if the day was full, so push them into the next day anyway.
7. Worrying too much about being liked – leading to not saying no
We all want to be liked, but in the end you have to look after number one as well. If you let guilt, or fear of others’ disapproval, push you into saying yes to things you don’t want to do then your life can get filled up with things that don’t make you happy.
Saying no is important if you are to maintain control of your life. And you’ll probably find that saying no doesn’t make people think any less of you – this is an unfounded fear.
8. Letting procrastination exist in your life
Procrastination is easy to allow to become a habit, but it comes with a large cost because it’s the important but non-urgent tasks that are affected, and they are the ones that would add most value if you were to do them.
So it’s important to develop an ability to notice that you are putting things off and then to have strategies to get yourself to do those tasks. It’s an internal battle between your conscious and subconscious mind, and tricks like doing just the first part, booking a time in your diary, or bribing yourself with chocolate, can help you to win the battle.
9. Being a perfectionist
If you allow a habit to develop where you take longer than a task deserves, because you want to make it perfect, then you end up being obsessed with the small details which aren’t important, and you’ll then neglect the things that matter in your life.
Therefore it’s important to realise that you are doing this and that it’s not productive, and to set time limits, allocating time according to importance, and to tell yourself that letting it go as it is won’t kill you, in fact probably nobody will even notice.
Suddenly you’ll have more time for the things that really matter – and you might even be less annoying to work with!
10. Trying to fit too much in
Going faster and faster isn’t what time management is about. You’ll never finish everything, so you just end up going faster and faster and then never smelling the roses. The answer is to force yourself to take some leisure time, maybe go for a walk, or sit in the sun, or take some exercise.
Also rather than planning to arrive with seconds to spare, plan on arriving really early so you have less stress and get some time at the far end to think or chat to people. Maybe this is what life is really about?
- Listen to the Evolve to Succeed podcast with Chris here.