6 Time Management Tips To Avoid Too Much Work In Progress
One of the best secrets of time management seems to be too simplistic but is to know what to finish and what to leave undone. Most people struggle with starting things that pop up and seem urgent, and not being able to finish them because… guess what? Something even more urgent came up.
That’s how you end up the day tired and frustrated, asking yourself what happened with your day that nothing really got done. The reality is that you most probably did work hard, but you did not complete much. That is, you started working on various things, but they are all still on your to-do list, waiting to be concluded, a.k.a work in progress (WIP). You start emails that you never send or start an analysis that you never finish. What’s wrong?
Some of the reasons why it is hard to finish tasks:
- Getting distracted by notifications, breaks, or social media
- Multitasking, starting more “urgent tasks” as soon as they appear, prompted by emails, slack messages, or your manager’s last-minute request
- Second guessing yourself: when trying to do it “perfect” you can spend hours to complete a task, fearful that it is never good enough
- Following a pre-set calendar or lists of tasks that are not realistic enough
There are six ways to avoid this in the future:
1) Time-box or allot a specific time for each activity and book it on your calendar so that you know how much time you need to spend on it and you overwork out of perfectionism. You can also use the Pomodoro technique or run a timer every time you start a task to remind yourself to focus on it for a specific period of time.
3) Accept what you have done; perfection is the enemy of action. Author James Clear says, “If I have to write an article every Tuesday, it doesn’t matter how good or how bad I feel about the article; I try to do my best but stick to the schedule anyway. Sometimes it is just that you are too hard on yourself.” Stop procrastinating and get back to action.
3) Get to “done”: Make sure you check it off your list completely by being aware of all the steps that the task requires. Avoid “almost finished” activities like an email written but not sent. They fill your calendar with no impact on results. Do not start the next task until you finish what you are working on. If the task is too long to finish, divide it into smaller chunks that can get done. Use a personal Kanban or any tools like Sunsama to help you get more focus, one task at a time.
4) Learn to identify what is urgent and what is not. What kind of messages can be read later in the day? What kind of tasks/requests can wait? Are the due dates defined and visible?
5) Have a daily planning routine. Plan your day every morning, or the previous night, to have a more clear idea of how many meetings you have during the day, and how much time is left for you to actually get your work done. Sometimes you have a long list of activities to be done, which is not realistic because it doesn’t consider the time you are in meetings. That’s probably the reason for your frustrations! Define a smaller list of “things to get done today” that seems more realistic and have a separate backlog list in case you get to have some extra time to move forward with more tasks.
6) Divide and conquer: if you can’t plan your day, at least divide your hours into three categories: meeting/team time, work time, and task-hunting time. It will help you get more focus and clarity on what needs to get done and when.
Unfortunately, most of our frustrations are simply created by our own minds. Pushing yourself to accomplish an unrealistic workload, and trying to make it all perfect and faster than anyone won’t help you in the long term. Setting realistic expectations, defining slots of time by type f tasks, and avoiding multitasking will help you save time and get more done with less.
