Time Management by the Hour Chapter 7 - Ending The Day

One of the key things about any system please keep us both up to date and continually improving it. This means that there needs to be a feedback mechanism in place. The whole purpose of working on time management is to make sure you are moving towards your goals as efficiently as possible. All of this sounds fine in principle but is full of practical difficulties. How do you measure how well you are using your time let alone analyse it and improve it?

In theory you should start from your goals and work forward from there. But this is something lots of people and indeed organisations find surprisingly hard to do. I remember working for a company once where activity was almost comically unlinked to any particular purpose. It was here that I heard the elegantly laconic joke "Shoot. Aim. Load." It often feels much better to be doing something than thinking about what you should be doing. This often leads to shooting before you have aimed or loaded.

But there is some sense in this approach, even if it isn't always immediately apparent. If you know exactly what you need to do to get where you are going then drawing up a detailed plan of action is the best way to get there. But how often are things so clear? Often you need to get working on something to get the idea of how it all fits together before you can decide what needs to be done. The joke is funny because it conjures up a vision of a guy with a gun helplessly firing off shots at random. I think a better model is a team of  people firing a canon. It takes a few shots to work out the range and capability of what the canon can do. A few shots are going to go astray.

The trick is to build feedback from the results of the first shot into the second until the results are what you want. So the optimum strategy isn't to work out a detailed plan up front. The trick is to get started quickly but analyse what works efficiently and act on what you learn.  I treat each day as an experiment and make sure I am gathering data on how it is going as I go along. I have a notebook which doubles up as a place to keep my to do lists and to make notes on how well things are going and ideas for doing things better.

I will confess that I don't always do this last step. I am often tired at the end of a working day. But my ideal is to analyse and reflect on what I have learnt.  I have two ways of doing this. One is to simply sit and write out what I make of the day. It is often only when I put my thoughts into words that it becomes clear what the next step should be. Freeform writing does have some big advantages. One of those is that it forces you to think. But this is something of a disadvantage as well. It takes a lot of brain power to do it. It also takes a fair bit of brain power to read it back. The alternative is to design a form. I got this idea from those evaluation forms you always get at the ends of course is now a days. I have designed a customer satisfaction form to determine how much I got out of a particular day. I asked some simple questions like how many hours did you work, how many hours did you bill for and what time you finished.

It also asked some soft questions like how satisfying did you find the day? The advantage of this approach is you can see at a glance have a day went. As I say I'm not as fastidious about this habit as I should be. I say that because I get some real benefits from it. It really is the key bit of feedback I get on how well I am doing.

In fact looking back on it I wish I had adopted this much sooner back in the days when I had a manager who was supposed to be giving me feedback. It is quite astonishing how deluded one becomes during a normal working day. As a result of this simple daily review I have discovered for example how important it is to get started early in the morning. I don't know if this is universal or if it just applies to me. But I find it almost impossible to catch up on a poor morning's work by working harder in the afternoon. This is quite useful knowledge because it encourages me to schedule unavoidable time wasting events in the afternoon rather than the morning. It has also give me another goal. I would like to only work in the mornings at some point in the future. Looking at my notes onto a can and cant get done, and how successful my endeavours are, I have discovered that it is quite possible to get as much done as I'm getting done now between the hours of 8 and 2. I can also say that I don't yet have the discipline to be able to do that. In fact I'm still away off of it. But having that as one of my sub goals is very motivating.

The big advantage of taking the time to think things through on paper is it gives you the chance to see the big picture. You can check that your activities are indeed taking you towards your goals and not just keeping you busy. Although procrastination is the biggest waste of time, spending too much time on low value and even no value activities is not far behind. One thing that I find particularly difficult to do is abandon projects I have strayed but that which don't turn out to be doing anything for me. The sunk cost fallacy is strong with me. The trouble is that resolving to finish something when you have started does feel like a virtue. A good anecdote to this is to take the time to think through what the real impact of what you are doing is.

There are a number of formats you can use which can help. One common one is a SWOT analysis where you go through what you are doing and look for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This isn't always applicable but it is good for activities where you are competing for something. So for example if you are chasing a particular promotion you might well ask yourself whether you have the right skills to fill the role. If you weaknesses are so overwhelming it might be better not to invest any time or effort, or indeed emotion, in trying for it.  The conventional way this analysis is carried out is by dividing a sheet of paper into four and noting whatever you can think of into the four categories. It is very powerful as a way of helping decide what you should be doing with your time. I usually convert the conclusions I reach into proper sentences on a second bit of paper as a way of bringing more thought to bear on it, and also making it easier to refer to in the future.

Another tool is the five whys. This is something that comes out of the motor industry. Toyota are renowned for their approach to quality, and one of the tools they use is to investigate problems by tracing them back to their origin. This is done by the simple process of asking 5 questions starting with the word why. So a gear has bY. Why? Because the cogs are fouling. Why are they fouling? Because the tolerance on the machining is too wide. Why was the tolerance set too high? Because the engineer didn't understand statistical process control. Why didn't he understand it? He had never had any training in it. Why not? It wasn't part of the training programme for that level of engineer. Each stage in the process throws up different corrective actions. And you get closer to the fundamental problem.

I find this process to be a very useful and sometimes rather uncomfortable way of probing why I am not achieving as much as I hope to. For example -

Why is my book keeping not up to date? Because I schedule it later in the day when I am tired, and I don't always get to the last items on my list.
Why don't you always get through your schedule? Because I tend to be over optimistic in my scheduling.
Why are you not realistic in your scheduling? Because I have a lot of projects on.
Why do you have so many projects? Because I don't have a way of deciding how many I am able to cope with.
Why don't you have a system for deciding how much you can fit on your plate? Because I have never realised I needed one before.

As this example shows, this process can get you pretty deep pretty quickly. The ideal way it works is if you can also add an action point to address each problem you identify in the process. This isn't always possible, but if it is possible that is a good sign that you are doing it right.

Of course doing this kind of in depth analysis is only possible and indeed desirable relativity rarely. I usually only do it about once a week unless I have something that is particularly troubling me.  But 15 minutes just looking at how well things went in general is rarely time wasted. It can highlight minute things that might be done better. For example I once realised I was spending time quite often looking for my pencil sharpener. I put two pencil sharpeners on my shopping list and now have one in all three rooms I use them in. Not an earth shaking productivity gain, but certainly the removal of an annoyance. Things like this build up gradually over time to improve your general productivity. You don't notice much difference on a day to day basis but it mounts up. It is worth remembering that if you don't take conscious action to build productivity natural inertia will do the exact opposite. You will find that you settle into a comfortable low energy state. As a manager I from time to time monitored  what people reporting to me got up to. I was absolutely astounded at just how creative some people were at finding non productive ways to use their time. Chatting and socialising were as you might expect the big deals. But things like trips to the stationery cupboard, searching for reference material and crafting emails of genuine literary merit and copying them to a wide and hopefully appreciative audience also soaked up time in enormous quantities. The most scary statistic was how long people took on reports. Hours vanished in return for unreadable and indeed unread paragraphs.

I find that reviewing what I have done is a good way  of making sure I don't end up wasting time the same way twice .I keep notes during the day of what I am getting up to and any thoughts I have.

But the details of how it is done is perhaps not as important as the philosophy behind the process. The idea is to review what progress you have made and look for ways to make more in the future.