a)plan coaching

Prioritization & Time Management

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to help you learn some of a)plan’s best practices for time management and strategies for prioritizing your time effectively to accomplish your most important tasks.

Managing Time

We all get the same 24 hours in a day! One might argue that you can’t manage time. However, you can manage what you do with your time. Thus, rather than managing time, we manage our behavior or actions with the time that we have. This is our choice, and time management coaching can provide valuable insights into how best to use that time.

“Our choice is not to manage time exactly. If you make it from sunrise to sunset, you don’t get more hours. How you use your time is what matters! We’re making choices every day that reflect what we think is most important. Let’s consider what choices we’re making.” – a)plan coach Brianna Freiheit

What Does Time Mean to You?

  • Time is money: For most, every time the clock ticks, money is either gained or lost. How does that then shape your behavior?
  • Time is fleeting: There isn’t enough of it. “There aren’t enough hours in the day.” This often determines how we act. We put more things on the to-do list than we are able to do, and then we blame it on time. Is it time? Or is it what we’re doing with it?
  • Time is a gift: We cherish it. We respect it. We appreciate that we give it away as a choice. We don’t get it back, so we’re careful with it.

How you view time will determine how you use time. Oftentimes we look back on our week and say, “I was so busy and stressed this week but I feel like I didn’t get anything done!”. Effective time management coaching can help address this by focusing on prioritizing what’s truly important. Being busy is not the same as being accomplished. Time cannot be managed – it is our use of time that we have to manage, so we have to prioritize.

Prioritizing Your Time

Prioritizing is a key component of effective time management coaching. It means using our available resources (time) for the highest & best use to achieve our mission.

Questions to consider:

  • How to decide what gets done?
  • By whom?
  • By when?
  • How important is this relative to other priorities? Not everything can be an A+ priority!

If you are a manager and/or lead a team in some way, you must use your time well and prioritize so staff are able to do the same. Planning is essential to ensure work gets done, roles are clear, and people can stay on-task. Effective time management coaching helps leaders be strategic about where efforts go.

Identify Your “Big Rocks”

One best practice for prioritization and time management, which is credited to Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is to identify your highest priorities or “big rocks.”

The Rocks in a Jar Analogy
  • Big Rocks: Your highest priorities.
  • Pebbles: Medium priorities.
  • Sand: Low priorities.

As you can see in this image, if you put the sand in first, then the pebbles, there’s no room for the big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, the pebbles will fit around them, and the sand will then fit around the pebbles and big rocks.

Let’s Prioritize Our Rocks
  1. Write out your big rocks.
  2. Describe the small things that prevent you from completing the big and medium rocks, i.e. What is your sand?
  3. What’s one thing you can do differently to prioritize the big rocks?
  4. What needs to stop?  What sand do you need to eliminate from your schedule? What do you need to say “no” to?

Time management coaching can assist with these steps to refine prioritization skills.

Managing Actions & Behaviors

The Eisenhower Matrix

Another good time management strategy that can dramatically reduce stress and increase productivity is the Eisenhower Matrix, developed by former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It supports you in prioritizing tasks by urgency and importance, and sorting out those less urgent or important tasks. This results in four quadrants with different work strategies:

  1. Q1 – Important and Urgent: These tasks include work projects with deadlines, last-minute requests, and emergencies. This category is where most of us spend the majority of our time.
  2. Q2 – Important but Not Urgent: These tasks are often related to self-care or relaxation, playtime, flow (a.k.a. free time), exercise, and personal goals. Although these tasks are not urgent, accomplishing them can be beneficial for our health and mindset.
  3. Q3 – Urgent but Not Important: These tasks include busy work such as responding to emails and phone calls. You can often delegate these tasks to someone else, so you aren’t spending the majority of your time on tasks that aren’t important!
  4. Q4 – Not Urgent and Not Important: These are random tasks that often decrease productivity, such as excessive social media and TV use. It’s important to have downtime that isn’t focused only on accomplishing tasks, but try not to spend the majority of your time on these activities.

If you follow this and get clear on urgency vs. importance, you’ll become more of a master of your choices and more productive overall.

Implementing Your Ideal Schedule

The third tip for prioritization and time management is to begin to implement your ideal schedule. Block time on your schedule for your big rocks, set recurring appointments, and treat these “appointments” with as much importance as any other meeting. Color code your schedule with big rocks in different colors, such as green for work, yellow for self-care, purple for friends, and pink for family.

Planning Your Ideal Schedule
Reflection Questions
  1. Compare your ideal schedule with your actual schedule.
  2. What did you do differently in scheduling your big rocks?
  3. Where do you feel stuck around implementing your ideal schedule?

Time management coaching often focuses on planning, as preparation can make the difference between meeting or missing goals.

Planning 101: “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail”
  • What needs to be accomplished?
  • When is the deadline?
  • What are the elements that make up the end result?
  • How much time is needed for each element?
  • Have I scheduled the time I need?
  • Who else do I need to involve?
  • Do they know?

How can you help and support those on your team with this system? How can you more effectively communicate with others on your team what’s important but not urgent and tasks that have greater urgency/priority? These time management coaching questions can help you to plan effectively.

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Summary: Optimizing Your Time

  • Clarify priorities (big rocks).
  • Identify what’s urgent vs. important.
  • Learn to say “No!”.
  • Delegate and outsource.
  • Time block scheduling.
  • Prioritize self-care and personal time.

By taking the time to identify and prioritize your big rocks, design your ideal schedule, and compare it with your actual schedule, you can effectively manage your time and ensure that your most important tasks are accomplished. Working with a time management coach can help you achieve your goals and lead a more balanced, productive life.

A 2017 study by the University of Georgia with a global sample of 250,000 men found that men are struggling to balance work and family obligations as much as women, but they feel less able to talk about the issue. 

Perhaps part of the problem with our dialog about balancing children and career is that men are being left out of the conversation. 

However, with dual-income households becoming the norm, men are increasingly required to make sacrifices to accommodate their wives’ careers and help with child-rearing in ways like never before. With women ascendant in the career world, “an increasing number of men are less successful than their wives, in terms of income or job title.”

A New York Times article by Delia Ephron states, “To me, having it all — if one wants to define it at all — is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up. Like an eclipse.”

We can’t have it ALL but most people can have a lot more of what we want than we think we can.

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