Time management, a structured approach does help!

Can u relate to this?

During my mentoring session for the upcoming leaders in my organisation, I was asked a specific question on how I manage my time and multitask effectively. That question made me sit up and think, as besides my day (and night) job as General Manager with my current organisation, I’m also a keyboardist with Agam and we play gigs pretty regularly. I keep pinching myself that last year we played 53 gigs across many cities in India and not to forget our first international gig in Singapore.

My mind map

In this article I will specifically focus on time management@ work, where I deal with 200-300 emails a day and a handful of them need my attention and response (direct or delegated). Given that I’m an Engineer @ heart, I’m going to explain my mind map with a tint of tech colour.

I generally don’t like unfinished tasks in my Inbox and I love closures. If I receive an email with specific Asks, it is likely that you will get a response immediately with an answer or the ETA for the answer.

I begin my day by prowling through my Inbox (all unread emails starting from most recent) and segregate them broadly as emails that are synchronous and asynchronous. In my mind, important or urgent emails need immediate attention/response and hence synchronous (immediate response). If I have a conclusive answer (example, the task is already completed), I generally respond immediately and take it to a closure. If I don’t have a conclusive answer, I respond with an ETA for the answer immediately and move the task to an asynchronous (deferred response) priority queue. A priority queue is a list of tasks stored that can be retrieved in an order of priority and is different from a “normal” queue, which is “first-in-first-out”.

Taking a leaf out of Stephen Covey’s prioritisation quadrants (see below), i generally categorise the list of tasks to be completed as

1. Important & Urgent (example: A customer/revenue impacting HotFix that needs to go live immediately)
2. Important & Not Urgent (example: Addressing systemic issues that are piling up your tech debt every day)
3. Not important & Urgent (example: Being part of a meeting just for the sake of it)
4. Not important & Not Urgent - Self explanatory
5. Delegate - Tasks that can be delegated to others
6. Watch - Tasks that (either delegated or something that you are interested in) you want to just keep an eye on

Stephen Covey’s prioritisation quadrants - Courtesy businessballs.com

Once the tasks are categorised into Queues, it is important to

1. Prioritise the Important and Urgent tasks within each Queue
2. Monitor the queue (I typically review the queue in the morning and in the evening)
3. Adjust ETAs and set expectations
4. Respond (communicate) if a Task reaches completion or there is a likelihood of breach of its ETA
5. Drain the Queue

Anti patterns to watch out for

1. If the size of WatchQueue is unusually high, it could mean that your span of control is very large OR you haven’t empowered your team well enough OR you don’t have trusted lieutenants OR you may be micro managing
2. If the size of the DelegateQueue is unusually high, it could mean that you may be hands off OR your team members are not empowered or capable enough to be exposed directly
3. If the size of Important & Urgent Queue is very high, it could mean that there are systemic issues that needs to be addressed immediately
4. If the size of Important & Not Urgent Queue is very high, it could mean that you are doing the rights things, but as a cautionary note check if the business is doing fine and if the delivery velocity is continuing to be high.
5. If the size of Not Important & Urgent Queue is very high, it may be likely that there is lack of focus OR many layers of red tape in the system
6. If the size of Not Important & Not Urgent Queue is very high, it may be a good idea to look for a new role or a new job ☺
7. In general if the Queue sizes are very high, may be you are overcommitting and it is time for you to start saying NO.
8. If the same Task recursively crops up every now and then, it is likely that you are addressing the symptoms and not the root cause.

At times tasks tend to jump to a different Queue altogether and they may require different degree of attention that what was originally planned. But the attitude should be prioritise or delegate and take them to Closure and keep your TODO Inbox as minimal as possible. Remember that a non empty queue would mean that either you are waiting for something from someone or someone is waiting for something from you.

This model should be fairly generic for any tasks (not just for email) and it helped me to devote my time on the right set of priorities. Though it is not one size fits all, it may just work for you too.

Cheers and Happy managing your tasks effectively!