If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late – Reid Hoffman
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The year was 2008; I was standing before my classmates, pursuing our Master’s in Systems. We were pursuing a Part-Time MBA, which required us to go to college in the evening from 6:45 pm to 9:15 pm, and sometimes it went until 10:00 pm IST.
Seven of us had been given an assignment: read “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey and present it to the class.
Seven people, seven habits, one person explains one habit which makes our lives easier. “Why easier?” you ask.
We were all experienced professionals, so we didn’t interfere with each other’s methodologies. It was also my group’s golden rule: split the work so that everyone has their own independent task. When required, we used to discuss, but the tasks were split logically.
Coming back to Stephen Covey, I was tasked with explaining “Time Management.” So I explained the thought process and spent time explaining the quadrant: Urgent | Not Urgent and Important | Not Important. I won’t spend time explaining the logical and highly relevant time management framework; you can get more details about it here: https://www.franklincovey.com/blog/manage-your-time-and-energy-effectively/
My question is simple: Is time management purely about managing your priorities?
Think about it: what if you had Hermione’s time turner or the time stone of Dr. Strange? Would your life become easier? We would all love to have something magical to help us, wouldn’t we now?
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It’s more than what meets the eye:
Time Management is not purely about dividing all tasks into the four quadrants. It’s much more than what meets the eye. Think about what I mentioned earlier: “one person explains one habit which makes our lives easier.”
“How is this important?” you wonder.
Because that’s how we saved time by avoiding unnecessary meetings (quadrant 03), as each of us had their own tasks.
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How do you manage time?
I get asked this question a lot: how do you manage multiple tasks/activities at once? My answer is simple: I don’t.
There is nothing like multitasking, unless you are God or use a multithreaded computer program. It is difficult to do two things at once; you can be on two calls from different devices, but your mind will always be focused on the more important one.
The solution lies in the point I just made: “Focus on the more important one.”
When I am teaching on weekends, I am completely focused on the task at hand: “Teaching!”
When I am working, I am completely focused on my Job and have stopped thinking about my teaching assignment. When I write or record a course, I focus fully on that.
In short, it is practically impossible to multitask, because even if you complete 2 tasks in an hour, you would logically split the time. More than illogical, it might be funny if you do one task for a min and then the second task the next minute. Even if you have to switch between tasks, your mind needs time to reset, reprocess, and then pick up the new task, which in itself takes time.
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Is there a way by which you can improve the way you work?
Has this question ever crossed your mind: “Can I do this task differently?”
Let me give you an example of my early corporate days. I had 3 months of experience, and I was given a task that, in hindsight, no experienced person would probably want to do. My task was simple: every Monday, I would receive a comma-delimited text file that I needed to convert to a specific format and upload to the mainframe.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But you have to remember, the year is 2003; people were using Excel 97, and, above all, everyone’s favorite, there was no AI. It took me five days to format the file for the first time, but over the next few weeks, the time was reduced to 3 days.
Great, isn’t it? Initially yes, but long-term not quite great. Why? Because there is still room for improvement. So, after a couple of months, I decided to write a program to automate the manual formatting I was doing. Over time, I developed a complete process from it that anyone could run without much reliance on me. It was an aha moment for me because what used to take me days to complete could now be done in minutes, and I could take up other interesting work items.
The gist is that you need to constantly think about improving the work you do, especially repetitive tasks.
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The Chair That Holds You Back
Now, did you notice one sentence I mentioned above, “anyone could run without much reliance on me.”
People run away after hearing this statement because, in general, we think that if things depend on us, only then will we progress. If you want to make progress, you need to solve multiple problems, and to do that, you need to create bandwidth for yourself. Hence, you must make the process independent of you.
Believe me, if I had created too much of a dependency on myself, I would have been glued to my office chair and never have been able to complete my Master’s.
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The Power of Time Boxing
I have so many tasks jotted down in my mind, and there are times when I say, “let’s create a new course,” and then I tell myself, “no, no, let’s write a book in a new genre.”
I am sure this happens to many of us. But let me tell you what I have learned over the years. As mentioned at the start of this blog, I completed my Part-Time MBA, which was three years compared to a two-year Full-Time MBA. I was very clear about one thing: unless there is an emergency, I will leave the office between 5:30 and 6:00 pm so I can attend my evening lectures.
I have self-published 8 books and created 7 Udemy courses over the past 7 years. To do this, I have boxed my work and, in many ways, my day, week, and year.
“What do I mean by that?”
Well, until last year, the first 6 months I focused on creating new courses, and the second half of the year was spent completing a book. Additionally, my week is logically divided into parts, with teaching taking up the weekend, writing and recording taking up late evenings, and a full-time job during the day.
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If you have followed me this far, you would probably realize that time management is not purely about managing time. You need to train your mind to improve the way you work constantly, make people independent of you, learn to time-box, focus on one thing at a time, and, above all, set deadlines for yourself.
What will differentiate you from others is how you train your mind to make the most of the twenty-four hours everyone has. Ultimately, it’s all about managing your mind to create more bandwidth for yourself.
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