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In Seasons of Love, a song from the musical Rent, we are advised that a year has 525,600 minutes and we need to make the most of that time. It’s one of business writer Peter Economy’s favourite musicals and he feels too many of us let too many of those precious minutes – there are only about 950 non-sleeping minutes in a day – slip away with sloppy time management.
“Time is scarce and finite, and once it has passed it is gone forever. Every moment represents an opportunity to get one step closer to our goals, to learn and grow and, perhaps, to make the world a little better place for us all,” he writes in Wait, You Need it When?!?.
He recommends five prime strategies to harness that time profitably:
- Ruthless prioritization: Focus on the most important things and say no to everything else. “Of all the ways to get more time from your time, I think this is the best one,” he stresses.
- Break down large complex tasks into smaller steps: This helps overcome the feeling of being overwhelmed and the urge to procrastinate, helping you maintain control. Take big projects and break them down into component parts and focus on each component, one at a time.
- Schedule time-blocking activities: Assign tasks or a set of activities to specific blocks of time in your calendar. “Segmenting out windows of time for certain activities and tasks creates a deliberate structure and cadence to your day, which can help you work more effectively and eliminate many opportunities for distraction,” he says.
- Cultivate mindfulness and self-awareness: Be alert to your thoughts, feelings and behaviour – and how you can shape them to make better use of those 525,600 minutes. Which patterns and habits stand in your way? How might you change them?
- Be fluid and flexible: You work with other people and face competing demands for your attention, time and energy. You must be willing to shift your focus and pivot in response to an ever-changing environment or because others people’s priorities and needs are changing.
That list combines tactics and techniques with mindset. Both are required to be more effective. “Perhaps the most important shift you can make is to start thinking of time as a resource, a means to an end, rather than as a limitation, constraint or even a problem,” he writes.
A key technique, of course, is the to-do list. He highlights the importance of when you create that list. He argues the best time is the end of each workday, when everything is still fresh in your mind and you can figure out priorities. Another good time is Sunday night, before you start the work week, when you can reflect on the overall shape of the coming days (and minutes).
He combines those approaches. Every weeknight he writes down a to-do list in his notebook for the next day. On Friday, at the end of the week, he makes his to-do list for the following Monday. Sure, he often works off and on throughout the weekend, but if he finishes one of the Monday tasks beforehand then it’s a bonus – a motivating head start for that week.
That can be supplemented by using the Eisenhower Matrix, following the former general and U.S. president’s habit of determining the importance and urgency of the items before him and trying to steer away from the urgent but unimportant and not miss the important but not urgent matters.
Mr. Economy warns it’s also easy to overestimate the urgency of items that don’t have immediate deadline but just feel important. Similarly we underestimate the importance of some tasks – he cites fitness – that don’t have a deadline but must be tackled.
In developing your goals, he urges you to make them emotional. If you set goals based on what you think is rational – sticking to logic and calculation – you will be aiming too low. Instead, connect them to your deepest values, passions and hopes.
“When goals are infused with feelings of significance, they become a wellspring of sustainable motivation and commitment,” he says.
Quick hits
- Bill Gates popularized the notion of Think Weeks – taking time away from the normal routine to ponder the big issues driving your work. You don’t have to be a CEO to carve out such special time nor need it be a full week. Venture capitalist Sahil Bloom suggests you can condense it into one to two hours set aside for reflection, a full day, or two to four days. Indeed, even if you can do a week, he recommends starting with just a couple of hours, planned carefully.
- Leadership consultant Al Dea believes in a constantly changing workplace a key differentiator among people will be their ability to develop earned insight. He defines it as “the distinct point of view you develop about your discipline through lived experience, deep curiosity and reflection, a hard-won perspective you can’t get from consuming more content or asking AI for answers.”
- Executive coach Dan Rockwell says potential is an unfulfilled promise. High-potential people who don’t fulfill that promise and grow end up spinning their wheels.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.