Time management techniques and why they don’t work!

Do you swear by a to-do list? Maybe you have your calendar blocked out to the second with meetings and tasks? Perhaps you shuffle tasks around a Kanban board in the hope of making sense of the week?

If you have a long list of stuff to get done each week (which is almost always the case when you work in a for-purpose organisation), I’m willing to bet that you’ve tried at least one of the following time management techniques…

• The Pomodoro (tomato timer) technique

• Time blocking

• Using the Eisenhower matrix

• 1-3-5

• Task batching

• The 2-minute rule

• Eating that frog!

I’m also willing to bet that for many of you, none of them have worked in the long-term.

If this is the case, read to the end of this blog and make sure you sign up for our free webinar Focus for Impact happening on 27th June!

I’d love to say there is a time management technique out there that will solve all your problems and make it easy to get everything done. Especially if you wear MANY hats in your for-purpose organisation. But, many of us don’t manage to make that new technique stick.

So why don’t these time management techniques work?

It’s because by looking solely at managing time, you are forgetting an important aspect - FOCUS.

The phrase “you’ve got the attention span of a goldfish” used to be said as a joke, but today it might be a reality. In his book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari notes a study of college students which found they could focus on one task for just 65 seconds! Another study found office workers focused on a task for around 3 minutes before getting distracted. An earlier study by Microsoft paints an even worse picture saying that since 2000 when technology use really took off, attention spans have dropped to around 8 seconds - the goldfish’s average is 9 seconds by the way.

What stops us from focusing?

• Distractions - We have so many pings from cellphones, or notifications flashing up on your computer screen, or old-fashioned interruptions like colleagues wandering over for a chat. If you work from home, there are added distractions like the pile of dirty clothes that need to be washed or the lawn that needs mowing. All these things distract us from our core tasks and make it harder to get back on track

• Confusing being busy with being productive -  Have you ever said, “I worked 50 hours this week, and I still didn’t get everything done”? That’s probably because you’ve been doing busy-work, not the things that will move the needle forward. It might feel like you’ve done a lot but if you reviewed your week critically, you might think otherwise.

• Overwhelm and an inability to prioritise - When we have a lot to do (and that happens often in for-purpose organisations) it can be easy to get overwhelmed and hard to know what to focus on first. So we often end up focusing on nothing in particular and not getting the right things done - only fighting the burning fires directly in front of us.

How do you get your focus back?

Stop and make a plan - When you don’t feel like you have enough time, I know it feels counterproductive to take time out to just make a plan. But don’t underestimate the benefits of planning. At Do Good Jobs we set regular meetings to map out our 90-day plans and that helps us know what the broad focus is for the next few months and the more specific tasks we need to do to get there. Can’t make the next 90 days? Focus on the next week or even just the next day to start with.

Prioritise your weekly tasks - Once you have a plan you can set priorities each week. If you struggle to separate important work from busy-work try using the impact priority matrix to clarify how much impact a task will have and how much effort it will take. Then focus on the high impact and low effort ones first! 

Stop multi-tasking - You might think you are being clever doing a bunch of tasks at once, but studies show that we lose up to 80% productivity by multi-tasking. Taking things one at a time is a much better idea.

Limit distractions - Turn off notifications, check your emails only at certain times, block out your calendar with colleagues, go and work somewhere where people can’t hassle you - anything you can do to reduce distractions will help. Just getting an hour a day to focus on priorities and the impact-making things can shift things dramatically.

Deliberately set aside time for deep work - Practice setting aside the busyness and focusing solely on tasks that will move you forward and help you have more impact. You might need to work on this skill for a while to really benefit. Read more about deep work and its benefits here.

Want some help with your focus?

If you are struggling to focus and find yourself getting to the end of each day wondering why you haven’t moved forward even though you’ve spent hours “working”, then I want to help.

I’m running a FREE webinar - Focus For Impact - to help for-purpose people get more out of their day and have more impact. Interested? Register here now to get your name on the list!