What techniques are there for managing my time?

Time-boxing, Pareto Analysis, Fourth Generation, Getting Things Done, the ABC Method – there’s no shortage of grand-sounding, slightly intimidating names for different time-management techniques and programmes. They may sound daunting, but underneath most of them are basic, fairly simple principles.

All of these techniques and tools have one fundamental and centrally important lesson. To work out how to manage your time, they say, you need to stand clear of all the urgent, pressing tasks that besiege you every day. In your normal working environment, swamped by demands from your employer, colleagues, clients or contacts, harassed by deadlines, schedules, phone calls and emails, it is simply impossible to get the clarity and perspective needed to organise your own time according to your own goals. In that situation, your plans for yourself and your time tend to be limited to getting through one pressing task and on to the next.

So the first step towards managing your time is to take a little of it and use it to focus on that task, untroubled by your usual work pressures. Once you’ve found that time, you can get stuck into the next key activity that nearly all time-management gurus insist upon: goal-setting.

Without defining and laying out your own goals, you have no basis on which to organise your time, and that means other people’s goals will probably do the job for you. So rather than shaping the way you use your time to achieve your goals, both long-term and short, you’ll allow your time to be filled by your employer’s goals, or your colleagues’, or by whoever happens to be around from one minute to the next.

You need to sit back and define what your long-term goals are, both at work and beyond, in all the different aspects of your life. If you don’t know what they are and take steps to achieve them, the chances of getting there are pretty slim. You’ll also find that setting yourself goals that come from within you, rather than being imposed from the outside, is extremely motivating. Once you have that list of goals down, you might be surprised by how energetically you move on to the next step towards achieving them.

The next essential move is to make a list of all the things you have to do. Try by starting with a list of all the things you’d like to achieve this year, then breaking them down into a monthly list, then a weekly, then a daily. Then add to that daily list all the other tasks you need to do today, whether or not they are part of longer projects. You’ll end up with, basically, a to-do list.

A to-do list might not seem very exciting. But this is where another crucial time-management technique comes in. Instead of just settling down with your list and trying to get through it from top to bottom, the vital step is to prioritise it.

Looking at each item on the list in turn, try to work out how important it is in terms of achieving your goals. If it helps take you a step towards one of your goals, give it a high priority. If it doesn’t, but it’s still urgent, give it a lower priority. And if it doesn’t take you towards any of your goals and isn’t even particularly urgent, stick it at the bottom.

When you’ve done this, rank the items on the list by priority, from one to whatever. Some experts recommend starting new lists according to rank or using particular formats, but that’s usually unnecessary and only chews up more time. Just putting a number next to each item on the list does the trick.

What you end up with is a prioritised to-do list, which is a very simple but hugely important tool. It lays down all your tasks in accordance with your own clearly defined goals, and forms a basis for organising your time in line with what’s important to you, both at work and beyond.

A prioritised list can make a huge difference to the way you work and live. It makes the important break between what’s urgent and what’s important, ensuring that you spend more time and soon on the important things that may not seem urgent, and less on urgent but unimportant tasks. It shapes your time entirely towards achieving your clear goals. It also helps reduce stress, by turning what can seem like a mountain of tasks into individual pieces, sorted by priority and ready to be dealt with one by one.

The next step is to schedule your tasks. It’s important to be realistic about this, allowing for the many unavoidable demands that are placed upon you, but also making time for your high-priority tasks.

Try doing it at the start of every week. Here’s one simple, practical approach to managing your time at work. Using a diary, notebook or computer, first identify the time you need to do the parts of your job that you absolutely must do to fulfil the basic requirements. Block those times down on your schedule. Then put in time for the work you must do to do a really good job.

Then put in some blocks of unplanned contingency time. Every job has patches of unscheduled interruptions or downtime, and for your time management to be realistic you need to make allowances for them. Even though you can’t predict when such interruptions will occur, allowing time for them lets them become part of your day without knocking everything else out of shape and scuppering your plans entirely.

Approaching your schedule in this way should then leave you with time in which to enter items from your prioritised to-do list, from number 1 down. If there’s no time left, or not enough, then go back through the earlier entries and see if you can’t shave a little time from some or all of them to make way for the things that are most important to you.

Above all, once you’ve made this schedule, do everything you can to stick to it. If you’re realistic and don’t try to schedule everything at once, you can easily come up with a plan that fits into your life and lets you make the best possible use of your time. Your efforts will be directed at what you want to achieve, you will minimise activities that waste your time, and the odds are that you will be able to do your work within the proper hours.