In this post I’m sharing some tips that helped me manage my time better.
Having worked and studied full-time at the same time for a few years, I’ve learned that it’s all about trade-offs. We only have 24 hours in a day. After working for 8 hours, going to school for 6, plus lunch, dinner, commute and so on, life left me with little time to manage that I learned to prioritize.
Recently, in my professional life I felt again that I had too many things to do and not enough time to do them.
Bottom-line: Your life is all about how to best manage the limited time you have.
1. Figure out the time you want to manage
Before trying to manage your time, realize how much time you actually have. If you want to manage your time at work maybe you want to take control of those 8 hours. If you want to manage your free time, find out which time blocks you really have control over.
2. Prioritize for impact
Once you know how much time you have, you can start prioritizing. There are infinite things you can work and progress on. Impact will depend on what you’re trying to achieve. Don’t pick whatever is the easiest or most comfortable.
Do you want to be the most productive for your company? Multiply others’ productivity, work on a project that actually has an impact on the company’s bottom-line.
3. Understand where your time is going
Just like when you’re managing your money, where your mental budget (congrats if you actually budget properly) sometimes differs from your actual spending decisions, your mental time budget will differ from your actual time spending decisions. After you find out what’s the most important thing that you should be doing with your time, understand how your time is actually being spent. You’ll often find a disconnect between the two. If possible add sources to each “distraction”, e.g. jira tickets, emails, slack messages, etc.
4. Find out what you can cut out
Just like cleaning your house, it’s easier to clean if you remove the clutter first.
Focus on finding:
- meetings that you can skip (e.g. FYI meetings - ask for meeting notes)
- recurrent meetings that you can increase the interval (weekly to bi-weekly, bi-weekly to monthly, etc)
- tasks that you can delegate (use your team’s strengths, distribute the load and ownership)
- tasks that feel important at the moment but don’t have a real impact (e.g. refactoring code that’s not being used)
- tasks that you can automate (e.g. manual tasks that you grew accustomed to doing)
5. Find out what you can postpone
If you can’t cut out some tasks, try to postpone them.
E.g. if you’ve just found out a service you depend on will be deprecated soon, don’t be afraid of asking for some time to migrate to a new one, so you can focus on more important tasks first and you don’t have to switch context.
6. Find out when, in the day, you’re most productive
Some people are more productive in the morning, others at night. Schedule deep work on your main tasks for those times.
7. Don’t forget the small things
If you only prioritize the big things, you’ll end up with a lot of small things that will take up your time that still need to be done. E.g. replying to emails, slack messages, PR reviews, etc.
Block some time in your calendar to do those things. If you don’t, you’ll end up doing them in the middle of your deep work sessions.
8. Communicate early if you see something will take longer than expected
If you see that something will take longer than expected, communicate it early so others can plan accordingly. Being afraid of not meeting expectations can lead us to non-prioritized or sloppy work, sometimes even on things that the other party doesn’t have a high priority on.
9. Accept that not everything will be perfect
Perfection is simply not achievable. There are always trade-offs: time, maintainability, performance, ease of use, learning curve, standards, innovation, etc. Figure out what each item’s “perfection” level are, check if you’re ok with the trade-offs and move on.
E.g. A PR that’s not 100% performant in an operation that’s expected to be ran once in a migration script could be ok.
10. Be careful with notifications
Notifications are a huge distraction when in deep work sessions. Turn them off if possible. Async communication should be leveraged as much as possible. Context switching is more expensive than we usually think.