Choosing to Manage Your Time

Key Concept
Your surroundings have an impact on your habits – both positive and negative. If you want to change the way you act, take steps to shape your environment in a way that makes your desired behavior as easy as possible.

Action Step
Take a brief survey of your work environment and move anything that could be a potential distraction.

Is it easy for you to focus when you sit at your desk?

Is there anything physically between you and your phone?

What do you see when you open your computer?

Are all pop-up notifications turned OFF (Gmail, Slack, SNS)?

Is your inbox organized? How about your desktop?

Caution
Don’t use this process as a means of procrastinating! Set a timer and stick to 5 minutes. Spending several hours organizing your files or scrubbing your desk is not a good outcome for this exercise.

Key Concept
Before you can make changes, you need to step back and review what is going on. The more honest and realistic you are, the easier it will be for you to design meaningful actions.

Action Step
Follow the process outlined by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits and make a list of all your daily habits. Once you have them all written down, score them as positive, negative or neutral.

Here are the scoring guidelines recommended by James Clear: “If you’re still having trouble determining how to rate a particular habit, here is a question I like to use: ‘Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?’ Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired identity are typically bad.”

Review your list, then set it aside for later in the week.

Caution
Try to remain as neutral as possible when reflecting on your list. The goal here is self-knowledge, not critique.

Key Concept
Before you do anything, take a moment to think about the most important thing that must be done today (and must be done by you). Do that thing. 

Action Step
Take a few minutes to reflect, then write down the one thing you are going to achieve today and assign a time for getting it done.

Hold yourself accountable for getting this thing done; no excuses.

Take a look at your schedule and plan a specific time to complete that task.

Protect your own priorities just as highly as you would time spent with a client or colleague. If you wouldn’t check email or take non-urgent phone calls in the middle of a client meeting, then don’t allow those interruptions to derail the focus you’ve set for yourself either.

After completing your “must-do” item for the day, take a moment to consciously choose what to focus on next.

If you’re struggling to identify the most important activity, make your best choice and then run it by your team leader / manager for another perspective.

Caution
Don’t choose the easiest, fastest, or most urgent task as your priority if it’s not the most important.

Key Concept
Declare your intentions and be as specific as possible. The more clear you are with yourself, the easier it will be to follow through.

Action Step
Reflect on what helped or hindered your ability to get Day 3’s priority accomplished. Compare that to the habits scorecard you made on Day 2 and look for clear patterns in how you are managing your time. Decide on one or two positive habits that facilitate “good” time management and write out your plan.

For example: “I will do X, at Y time and Z place.”

It might help to come up with plans for how to overcome your most disruptive negative habits: “when A happens, instead of B, I will do C.”

Consider creating a habit that will facilitate one of your larger goals.

If you’re someone who struggles with spending too much time scrolling your inbox, writing interview notes or drafting emails then maybe your habit can be “start a timer / write down the time every time I begin (doing that thing you struggle with) and take note of the time again when I am done.”

If you’re a visual person who wants to spend more time on the phone, maybe your habit can be “make a tally mark on my call tracker every time I connect to someone on the phone” or commit to using the paper clip strategy.

Aim for habits that take 2 minutes or less, as you are more likely to stick with them if they’re easy to complete.

Caution
Your desired habit should be realistic enough that you can actually do it, but significant enough to move you toward achieving your goals. Since the focus here is on time management, emphasize actives that will make the most efficient use of your time. And don’t just think about it, really write it down.

Key Concepts
What gets measured gets done and “what you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while” – Gretchen Rubin.

Action Step
Now that you’ve reflected on your environment and your habits, practiced setting a single daily priority, and made purposeful choices about the behavior you want to cultivate, the final step is to decide how you are going to hold yourself accountable.

Set up a simple habit tracker – it can be in Google Sheets, on a piece of graph paper, or in an app like coach.me.

Before going home each day ask yourself if you have followed through on the behaviors you identified Day 4.

If not, take a minute to ask yourself why. If there’s an adjustment you can make to help you be more successfully tomorrow, do it.

After updating your habit tracker, take 1 minute to set yourself up for success tomorrow.

Review your environment and clear distractions.

Set up visual reminders of the positive habits you are trying to reinforce.

Caution
It will happen that you miss a day here or there, but try not to miss 2 days in a row, since that will inadvertently become your new habit.

If you complete the 5 days, I’d love to hear about your experience! You can get in contact with me on LinkedIn.

Continued Reading: To help your team understand how best to work with you learn more about how you can use Attuned’s Intrinsic Motivator Slack Icons to facilitate communication.