Doctor Who doesn’t have to worry about time management but the rest of us do. We have so much to do and so little time to fit it into. We’ve got so much work to do, then we have meetings scheduled, and we have to pick up the kids from school and also fit in that online exercise class, and what about an hour of Ozark on Netflix?
As adults we are always juggling and compromising. We rarely have time to devote ourselves single-mindedly to one thing at a time. So how can we better maximise our productivity, rather than having days when we feel like we are chasing our tails yet don’t really achieve anything?
The sporting analogy would be when athletes went from being amateur, and working full or part-time, to fully professional. In the amateur days, the athletes had so little time that they had to maximise their volume. They may have had 1-2 hours alongside their paid employment to commit to their sport, so they simply had to target the quantity of work they could fit in.
When sports started to turn professional, the immediate reaction was then to fill all this extra time with more volume. What happened? People got injured or burned out.
Over the course of the next decade, coaches and sport scientists realized that it had to be better training, not just more training. The quantity was still extremely high but it had to have quality as the priority.
In the workplace, there are a huge number of demands on our time but we have to recognize that there are multiple ways to fill the 9-5. We should emphasise quality, not quantity, within the working day.
But how?
There’s a few simple workplace tools that we use here at Kinetic. But the most important bit of self-analysis you can do is to make sure you are prioritizing. Don’t try to do everything. Do the things that matter, will have an impact, and will help you to work towards your goals.
If you’re struggling to prioritise, talk to your team members. Set some long and short-term goals. Take a day to do some strategic planning. We can maximise the hours in the day to make it work for us.