Success E-Letter Vol. 5/3 Winter '05
13 Tips for Time Management from the Inside Out
Nina Ham, CPCC, LCSW
Why 13, you may ask? The arbitrariness of the number is intended to invite you to add to or delete from the list of tips, since the main point of this article is that managing your time effectively is a very individual matter. We each have our own unique biorhythms. If you are a career searcher or transitioning from employed to self-employed, you’re creating your own structure for each day. Learning when and how we are best able to do a given task requires tuning in, sometimes with micro-receptors, to our own physical and emotional cycles.
What follows is a simple but sure-fire scheme for managing your biorhythmic ebbs and flows to make most effective use of your workday. By learning to recognize the three types of mental/physical/emotional energy, you can then identify where those time zones typically occur in your day. You’ll also learn some tips for allocating tasks to those time zones to make you optimally productive. All you need is Post-Its or highlighter pens in at least 3 colors, and a sheet of paper divided into the days and hours of your typical work week.
What are the 3 time zones?
Peak Time – when you’re at your best. Early morning? Late night?
Good for creative tasks – writing, product development – or detail work.Transition Time – the time in between two activities that use different
types of energy.Garbage Time - end-of-the-day or low-energy times; times when your attention is divided or distracted.
Color them in!
Use different colors Post-Its or highlighter pens to designate the different time zones: for instance, yellow for Garbage, green for Transition, pink for Peak. Take a sheet of paper and mark off days of week (Monday –Friday). For a week, to track your particular energy biorhythm patterns, create time bands in your day and your week that correspond to your energy fluctuations and place the appropriate color in each. For instance, the first two hours of Monday morning, while you’re getting back into work mode, may be colored green as a Transition time. Continue to track your energy patterns throughout the week.
Once you’ve identified where the time zones fall in your day and week, you can decide what activities are best done when. This can be based on recurring tasks or types of tasks. For instance, you probably need to respond to email daily. Is that best done in Peak hours or Garbage hours, or some of each?
Here are some tips for using each time zone most effectively.
Peak Times
1. Watch the clock: how long does your Peak time energy last?
2. What are the signals that it’s ending (e.g. can’t think of a word; second guessing)?
3. If you seem to have more demands for Peak time than Peak time, try giving just 15 minutes every day to 4 or 5 projects. You may find you actually get more done than if you spent one hour on one of them.
4. Identify tasks for Garbage time
Transition times
The need for Transition time in your day is often difficult to detect. Have you ever noticed how welcome the time driving across town can be, after attending a networking event and on the way to your desk to complete a current project? Or the 15 minutes “wasted time” playing computer solitaire before you make a follow-up call to a prospect?
5. Where in your day does “wasting time” actually provide a transition between one task and another? How can you be more purposeful about transitioning?6. Where do you seem to need transition times? Changing from one task to another? Changing from one mode to another (e.g. interactive to solitary, or creative to analytical).
7. Try any of these as good Transitional activities:
walk the dog
take a shower
return some phone calls
answer email
empty email inbox
unload the dishwasher8. DOODLE! Just pencil and paper, nothing fancy. You can do it anywhere, and the mindless eye-hand activity is often remarkably effective for clearing mental channels, changing gears.
Garbage time
9. Save some items to do that are fun.
10. Don’t wait to create a list of “to do’s” for Garbage time when you’re already there. Have a list ready.
11. Plan next day’s activities while you’re tired. It may help you prune items that don’t really need doing.
12. Identify tasks or activities that energize you. Consider caffeine!
13. Open the backlogged mail, or give yourself a foot massage, while you’re waiting on hold for the service rep or tech support.
Remember, this list is just to get you started! Now you can begin to ask
the question, What is the natural cycle of my energy during the day, and how
can I work with it in order to make the best use of my time? Make your own
lists, be creative, have fun with it! Time is a precious resource, so investing
some heightened attention to your biorhythmic patterns can pay large dividends.