My guide to managing time, energy and focus.
How I’m planning to use my time this year and avoiding the busy being busy trap.
Ok, so have you populated your diary yet for the year?
“What, that’s impossible” I hear you say!
Yeah, I also heard you say how busy you were last year. “So Busy”, “crazy busy”…
I always thought this is going to be a long article; there’s a lot that can be said so let’s see how I do without wasting your time reading it.
I’m going to share my complete guide for planning the year ahead, managing your time and focusing your energy. This is my guide, the way I do it that works for me. It may not work for you, that’s fine. When I follow this guide with my coaching clients, I always get a nuanced and personalized outcome.
I’m drawing inspiration from this quote: “There’s so many people working so hard but achieving so little” – Andy Grove.
This quote sums up the conversations I have had so often before. We feel exhausted at the end of the week, but have nothing to show for it. That is one of the reasons why I almost always begin my coaching conversations with clients and Peer Boards members (link) asking what their “wins” of the past week were. The question emphasizes the need to take stock of wins and achievements. In a coaching relationship it shows momentum, which builds confidence and motivation. It is also a real world KPI process that keeps us on track.
A quick caveat, this is not an isolated conversation, but a step within our Business Builders Blueprint™. Taken in isolation you’ll still be able to take some value out of this process.
But first we must shift our mind into gear to engage the machinery behind this system.
If you want to manage your time better, achieve more and improve your business and change your life keep reading. If you don’t, or you already have your own good system just skip to the bottom and forward this to that “unorganised” friend or colleague you know. Ooops. Hopefully they skim over this last sentence and are not offended.
I am not naturally organised.
I have known this for a long time. As a result, have tried dozens of tips, tricks, apps and hacks to manage my time and be more productive. This is only system that has worked consistently well for me over. What I have learnt, is that for me to be carefree, I need to operate within clear boundaries.
Structure and discipline give me freedom.
Mindset
Alright so here are some regular responses I hear from business owners who are not managing their time:
“In my industry it is impossible to plan your time 100%”
What about 20%? Can you plan one day a week or just 1.5 hours a day, and stick to it? Let the plan start there. Just make sure that what you are doing in that 20% planned time that has the highest impact on your business.
And even if the saying, ‘no plan survives the first bullet’ is true, remember we’re not at war.
And you CAN plan for chaos.
Keep open space in your diary for unexpected stuff, like Monday Morning Madness and F*-Up Fridays. Leave open space for disruption. This allows you flexibility.
“I’m too busy to plan”
Uh huh. And how will the situation change in the new year? This sounds like an excuse to avoid some sort of discomfort.
If you are ‘too busy now’ the only time that will change is when your customers leave you for your competition because you are not getting the work delivered.
It doesn’t magically get better.
And I get it, running a business can be hectic. Without being flippant, sarcastic or judgemental, there is something this excuse is being used to avoid. I’ve had one-on-one coaching conversations (link) that peeled away the onion layers to shine a light on the real stumbling block.
“Things are changing all the time”
What you allow will continue. I’m willing to bet that most of these ‘changing things’ are within your control to manage and handle. My question here is what boundaries have you set for yourself, your customers and your staff? This framework that I share below, will only work if you set clear and resolute boundaries.
Here’s my key ‘mindset shifts’ that must be in place to make this framework work
- I don’t move meetings. Once they are in the diary, there must be a damn good reason to move them (like being sick, I don’t want your germies thank you). When I do, it is to one of my ‘planned open times’. I was less good at this in the last year, and I often ended up playing Tetris (see rule 5).
- Never cancel a meeting. Unless the world is actually going to be collapsing, we never cancel – we reschedule for the next day or latest next week. If you can’t do that then go ahead with the meeting. When you get into the habit of cancelling meetings that (are important but you don’t like), it becomes a disease that rots your performance. Go back to rule 1.
- Schedule your own work as self-appointments. Deep work, 90-180 minutes a day are appointments with yourself. honour them like you would honour a meeting with a customer. If you’re skipping these, I smell the smoking embers that will turn into firefighting later.
- Become religious about your time. Some activities must be sacred, with 10-foot walls around them.
- Allow yourself some grace. It’s taken me some time to perfect my diary, and as life and business changes I learn from mistakes and make tweaks. 80% right is good enough.
You can find a lot of reasons and excuses to not manage your diary, but to sum up my mindset around coaching time management I love leaning on the concept of Possibility:
“If it is possible to do this, what will it allow you or, free you up, to do?”
Skill set
All right. Mindset is in gear. Time to drop the clutch and learn some serious skills at driving this diary management thing.
First of my top 3 skills:
- Learn to say “No”
Remember those big sacred walls you identified. Being unable to say ‘No’ is like leaving a ladder behind and switching off the electric fence. “No” is a full sentence.
I love that quip. Just say no.
Ok be polite, “No, thank you”. My young son is really good at saying “no” – we’re teaching him manners.
Identifying your Critical Success Factors (below) will also help you know what to say ‘no’ to.
Here’s another thought – it is a skill to recognise that someone else’s poor planning shouldn’t be your urgency. You must protect your boundaries and teach others, sometimes the hard way, to take accountability for their own poor planning.
- Identify your high energy time zone.
I was working with one of my members around this issue, identifying high and low energy states and figured out the best time to do deep work, when to go to gym and when she hit a second wind. Generally, we’re best at doing our deep, undistracted work when we have high energy. For some this is morning, for others afternoon. There is some fascinating research into cortisol levels, your circadian rhythm and how it affects productivity.
The lesson here is that time management is more about energy management then ticking boxes. With the same client, we discovered that her ‘in-office’ days are often filled with people distractions, so we scheduled meetings on those days. Her WFH days were for deep work until lunchtime and then after gym, more interactive work again.
When you’re choosing a time slots for an appointment, think about how it fits in your energy zone, is this actually a good time to have it, or will it cause friction?
- Automate, Delegate, Delete to ADD time to your life
Automate the mundane and repetitive. I’m not going to repeat that.
Delegation becomes a superpower to managing time and energy. Identify the work that should not be done at your pay grade and assign it to someone else. Identify low impact work within your area of accountability that you can delegate.
Delete the garbage work that is diluting your focus, not adding value to your life or business. Knowing what not to do is arguably more important than knowing what to do.
These are skills to be remembered, refined and reviewed on a regular basis. Any one of these done well will make a noticeable difference in managing your time. There is one more thing that you need to learn. Or Unlearn.
And that is using paper diaries.
The framework I outline below works best on digital. Sorry, but paper diaries just don’t work as well, you’ll soon see why. I use a blank paper diary for making notes, but any to-do list or appointment goes into ONE digital diary for personal and business tasks that I can access from my phone. For me this was about removing friction. I still have miss haps – missed or late appointments, sometimes even arriving way too early, but these are few and far between and usually because I haven’t followed my own system for double checking.
Activity
The method that works best for managing my time is Time Blocking. Now that you’re armed with some mindset and skills I’ll walk you through my process for blocking off intentional time in my diary for the important things in my business and life.
The idea is to create “the perfect week” in our diary, filling up the time with jobs, tasks or meetings with ourselves, our team and or clients as appointments, and repeat that to fill a month and then a year.
Grab a pen and a notebook.
- Make a list of your top 3-5 critical success factors (CSF). These will help you identify what to say no to and what to leverage for best results.
These are the areas of your life and business that you need focus on for you to be a “success” in this year. Assign Colour codes to your CSFs. Every appointment that you put in the calendar must be colour coded to a CSF.
- Think about your perfect day. Make a list of the appointments you need to do almost every day. They must be related to your CSFs, and don’t forget the ‘maintenance’ tasks like checking email.
- Think about a perfect week. Make a list of the things you need to do at least once, at most twice a week. They must be related to your CSFs. Reviews and planning sessions fit nicely here.
- Think about your perfect month. Make a list of the things you need to do at least once, at most twice a month. They must be related to your CSFs, ops meetings, or financial reviews might fit here.
- Think about your perfect Year. Make a list of the things you need to do at least once or twice a year or quarter. They must be related to your CSFs (hint, remember school holidays)
Now at this point there is usually a little bit of jiggling and negotiation as you decide that something needs to be done more, or less often.
In the spirit of the principle, open your digital calendar to a blank month. I do this planning around about now and plan for a financial year March to Feb. Use the Appointment Recurrence options set the repeat options for as long as you think appropriate.
- Start with the Yearly appointments, imagine you’re filling the proverbial jar with the big boulders first.
- Then do the monthly appointments and repeat for 12 months. Adjust any that clash with Yearly appointments.
- After that the real fun begins. Plan your weekly appointments that happen once or twice a week. Review and adjust any that clash with appointments you’ve already set. Remember open space for chaos!
- Fill in the daily appointments. Rinse & repeat as above.
- Review the whole year (you see why this wont work on a paper diary). Be ruthless with the appointments you’ve set. Cut them out if they aren’t;
- related to your CSF’s.
- representing daily, weekly, monthly systems that help you reach your goals.
I’m not saying, plan every 5 minutes of the day – you certainly can and I know there’s folk who do. Working with my clients, I’ve always found what does work for them. And now one last final bonus step (definitely do this last, after double checking public holidays, learn from my mistake).
- Invite your teams to all the team meetings, clients to all client meetings and your AI notetaker.
What you’ll end up with is a diary that is already planned out for the year, representing your most important priorities, scheduled according to when you have the most energy.
“If you don’t manage your diary, someone or something will do it for you.” ~ some wise guy, with a beard most probably.
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If you want to learn more about hosting a workshop on this topic or simply have a conversation over coffee about it, feel free to send me a message.
You can contact me via email or call +27 78-804-2347
Coach Colin at the Alternative Board
I guide Overwhelmed and Frustrated Business Owners and their Management Team from Chaos to Clarity & Control using the Business Builders Blueprint™ to Improve their Business & Change their Lives.
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