Sense, Statistics and Productivity… Part 4

Welcome to part 4 of my Time & Motion series, I could have just written one really, really long blog but I thought it would be better to write a series where I could focus in a more in-depth way on the individual questions you need to ask yourself whilst doing the study on your own business. If you want to read the previous blogs you’ll find them on the main blog page.

This blog focusses on time management and how you arrange your time, your tasks and downtime in the most optimum (and most healthy) way for you and your business.

Before I start, it’s my chance to give you another top tip for carrying out your own study…

Look at what’s really happening, not what you imagine is happening – if I asked you to sit down now and write down everything you do on a weekly basis you’d be able to get a lot of it on paper but it wouldn’t be 100% accurate – you’d have tasks missing, things you don’t realise you do or that you do as a matter of routine. That’s why when carrying out one of these reviews it’s key that you actually write down everything as you’re doing it so that you can be sure you’re getting the most accurate summary of your workload in order to find areas for improvement.

So, when it comes to looking at how you manage your time and what you do, whilst carrying out your Time & Motion study, ask yourself these questions:

·       Think about your downtime – do you build in breaks, do you build in flex and how do you manage curveballs?

·       Think about your time management – how do you make sure everything gets done, how do you keep on top of things, are you missing things or letting stuff fall through the cracks?

Think about your downtime…

I know it sounds counter intuitive but one thing you should have built in at the start of the review process is the downtime you want to have. It’s really easy to overwork but that only results in burn out and stress which is never a good thing.  It’s taken me 7 years to actually take a holiday where I put an out of office on and the only reason I did so was because I came to the realisation when I got covid recently. I was really unwell for a week and couldn’t work – even slightly – for the whole time. I know that part of the reason I was so ill was because I never take a break and I think my body/emotions just gave up and took advantage of the down time but it’s also because I want to take more time for myself and my family in my week.

When I carried out my own Time & Motion study I built in a more realistic working day with a sensible finish time and – in theory – ruled out the weekends. I will never be perfect and I will always have a tendency to overwork and take on too much but I am trying to make sure I look after myself a bit better in future.

Think about your time management…

Time management is one of my favourite topics and everyone has their own way of taking a busy list or a busy day and making it manageable but if your time management technique is best described as “dealing with whatever happens” or “fire-fighting” then I am 100% confident that investing time and effort into changing the way you work will make huge time savings for your straight away.

Like everything, time management is a scale of options – on one end of the scale you have the humble list and on the other end of the scale you have the really hardcore techniques like only answering emails for an hour of every day and logging all interruptions. The trick is to find the  system that works for you and I don’t believe these are mutually exclusive… try things out and find the way that works best for you.