Core Idea: Time Management

00:00:00.000 | Today I want to do my first core idea video deep dive, I should say my first core idea

00:00:11.940 | deep dive and the topic I want to do it on is time management.

00:00:19.460 | So my goal here is to give a brief summary of my thinking about time management.

00:00:27.440 | And what that's going to consist of is let me define for you what I mean by time management.

00:00:33.180 | Let me give you the three principles in my writing.

00:00:37.900 | And on this podcast, we always talk about that any good time management system should

00:00:42.300 | probably satisfy.

00:00:43.560 | And then I will briefly talk through my particular system, which we can think of as one example

00:00:50.360 | of a time management system that satisfies these principles.

00:00:53.420 | So you can do something else.

00:00:54.420 | So you see what a real, fully fledged time management system that satisfies these principles

00:00:58.500 | look like.

00:00:59.500 | And then I'm going to have a bonus fourth principle I want to talk about, that debatably

00:01:03.780 | is not really about time management, it lives right outside time management, but it's related.

00:01:07.700 | So I'm going to talk about that briefly at the end.

00:01:09.600 | So that is my agenda for this core idea discussion on time management.

00:01:16.140 | So let's start what do I mean by time management for me, at least in the context of this discussion,

00:01:22.600 | I'm thinking about work.

00:01:25.040 | So time management in work, the way you deal with your time outside of work is a little

00:01:29.960 | bit different.

00:01:30.960 | So I'm going to put that aside.

00:01:32.720 | And in the context of work, I'm going to define time management to be whatever philosophy

00:01:39.020 | process systems or rules that you deploy to make decisions about what you're going to

00:01:43.760 | do right now with your time.

00:01:46.640 | How do you figure out it's 1226 on a Friday?

00:01:51.420 | What do I do next?

00:01:54.040 | In the end, that's what a time management system is a way to help you answer that question

00:01:59.120 | in as useful a manner as possible.

00:02:03.280 | Now everyone who works has some sort of time management system they're using.

00:02:09.180 | If you don't know what it's called, if you can't tell me the details of it, if you've

00:02:12.520 | never thought about that, it's just a really bad one, probably, but you still have one

00:02:16.480 | one way or the other, you're making these decisions.

00:02:18.520 | The question is just how do we want to make these decisions?

00:02:21.600 | What is going to work better?

00:02:23.060 | So I'm going to give you the three properties I think any good time management system should

00:02:28.780 | have.

00:02:29.780 | I love alliteration.

00:02:32.500 | Longtime listeners of the podcast know this.

00:02:34.660 | I love C's in my alliteration, as longtime listeners of this podcast know.

00:02:40.360 | So I named the three key properties here with three C's capture, configure, control.

00:02:48.380 | Talk about these each briefly in the abstract and I'll tell you about my system that satisfies

00:02:51.940 | these.

00:02:52.940 | Number one capture.

00:02:54.940 | I believe a good professional time management system needs to have some place in which you

00:03:02.260 | store all the information that's important to making decisions about what you need to

00:03:08.500 | be doing and what you should be doing.

00:03:10.820 | That is trusted.

00:03:11.980 | It's a place that you are going to look at things that go in there will not be forgotten.

00:03:17.100 | These ideas get out of your head and into a system so you're not wasting brain cycles

00:03:21.520 | on trying to remember or keep fresh stuff that you need to do.

00:03:27.260 | Now in the context of tasks, we can give credit to this idea to David Allen.

00:03:32.880 | So David Allen and his seminal post computer time management book and I mean that very

00:03:39.020 | specifically because as I've written about before, time management goes through big evolution.

00:03:43.860 | So post computers, computer networks and email time management went through a big revolution.

00:03:47.580 | And David Allen was there at the beginning.

00:03:50.180 | He had this idea of full capture, where he said all of your tasks should be in a trusted

00:03:54.340 | system that you review regularly, not in your head.

00:03:58.820 | He actually adapted that idea from a previous business thinker named Dean Atchison, unrelated

00:04:06.020 | to President Truman, Secretary of State, same name, different person, who had first developed,

00:04:10.540 | I believe in the 1970s, this notion of full capture and David Allen expanded it.

00:04:14.420 | So that's really the core of this.

00:04:17.900 | David Allen's articulation of full capture said, don't waste mental energy remembering

00:04:23.300 | things, have it in a system so your brain can be clear to actually focus on working.

00:04:28.780 | This also reduces a lot of stress because your brain gets stressed when it's worried

00:04:32.240 | about forgetting things you need to do.

00:04:34.900 | I generalize capture though, beyond what Allen talks about.

00:04:38.780 | In addition to each of your commitments, being somewhere you trust, I want your plans to

00:04:45.540 | also be somewhere you trust.

00:04:47.620 | So any thinking you've done about what you're working on, on all sorts of different timescales,

00:04:53.960 | that should be written down somewhere you trust and review regularly as well.

00:04:57.260 | I think that's often overlooked, but the planning process of what's going on, how do I want

00:05:01.340 | to get my work done?

00:05:02.340 | What needs to be done this semester?

00:05:03.340 | What do I have to get done this week to hit this goal?

00:05:06.180 | That's a really important part of time management.

00:05:08.140 | I don't want that all in your head.

00:05:10.220 | That also gets captured.

00:05:11.780 | All right, second property, configure.

00:05:17.180 | This is a twist that I've become increasingly a loud advocate for, which is care more about

00:05:25.180 | how you actually organize this information that you're capturing.

00:05:29.820 | I think you really need to think through, once I have this information written down

00:05:33.820 | somewhere, where do I put it?

00:05:36.360 | How do I organize it?

00:05:37.900 | Is it in categories?

00:05:39.060 | Is it broken up by role?

00:05:42.580 | Equally important, getting the relevant information consolidated.

00:05:46.700 | I'm really big on this.

00:05:47.740 | So not only do you have a really smart organization for all the stuff on your plate, you're also

00:05:53.780 | gathering in one place all the relevant information.

00:05:57.420 | You're not searching through your email inbox to try to remember what does this mean?

00:06:01.140 | And where are we?

00:06:02.140 | And what do I owe this person?

00:06:03.500 | I'm supposed to get back to Derek about the program codes.

00:06:07.100 | What does that mean?

00:06:08.100 | Let me go through my inbox.

00:06:09.100 | Now all that should be in one place.

00:06:10.620 | So these are our two goals with with organize a that the information is organized well,

00:06:16.900 | where what you want to happen here, what you want to have happen here is that you can very

00:06:20.380 | quickly get the gestalt of what's on your plate, what's do what's not who you're waiting

00:06:24.220 | to hear back from the information is put aside in such a way that it's not just a list with

00:06:27.740 | 100 things and to all the relevant information is there.

00:06:32.620 | Not scrambling around to figure out what I need to know to do this thing.

00:06:36.300 | All the information is there.

00:06:38.060 | All right, control.

00:06:41.740 | The third property of a good prime at the time management system.

00:06:46.380 | Control says instead of being reactive in your decisions about what you want to do with

00:06:52.980 | your time and by reactive, I mean just saying, okay, it's 1223 on Friday.

00:06:58.340 | What do I want to do next?

00:06:59.340 | I don't know.

00:07:00.340 | Let me see what seems relevant.

00:07:01.340 | Let me look at my let me look at my inbox.

00:07:03.860 | We look at Slack.

00:07:06.020 | Maybe I'll look at a to do list and try to choose something off of it.

00:07:09.780 | Control says don't be reactive.

00:07:11.020 | Don't wait till you get to the moment to say what should I do next?

00:07:14.740 | Instead be proactive.

00:07:17.040 | Make a plan for your time in advance that makes the most of the time that you actually

00:07:21.860 | have available.

00:07:22.860 | So you think ahead, you look at the time you have available and you say, what do I want

00:07:27.400 | to do with this?

00:07:29.420 | I'm planning the whole picture at once.

00:07:31.300 | I'm not waiting till the moment to say what happens next.

00:07:35.380 | Now on the podcast, I talk often about doing this control at multiple timescales.

00:07:43.100 | You'll hear me talk about multi-scale planning.

00:07:45.300 | This is where that actually applies.

00:07:46.580 | And what I recommend is that you should be doing this type of planning on three timescales,

00:07:50.740 | quarterly, weekly, daily.

00:07:53.500 | So quarterly, you have a plan for what you want to try to get done that quarter.

00:07:59.660 | What's important?

00:08:00.660 | What are the big projects you're working on?

00:08:02.920 | There could even be daily work that you want to really emphasize like, look, I got to get

00:08:06.360 | my cold calls up.

00:08:08.560 | So every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I spend the first hour doing cold calls, whatever

00:08:11.880 | it is, but you're making this plan for the quarter.

00:08:15.080 | Looking ahead at the quarter, is this a busy quarter, not a big quarter?

00:08:17.900 | What are the big deadlines this quarter?

00:08:19.680 | Is there a huge trade fair halfway through it?

00:08:21.660 | That means the first half of the quarter has to be really focused on preparing for that

00:08:24.600 | trade trade fair.

00:08:25.820 | You're looking at the whole picture of the quarter and at this pretty big granularity

00:08:29.940 | coming up with a plan.

00:08:32.580 | Every week, you then look at that quarterly plan and produce a plan for the week ahead

00:08:38.080 | of you.

00:08:39.080 | Now you're doing weekly planning.

00:08:41.960 | And when you're doing weekly planning, what you really want to do is get a sense of what's

00:08:47.000 | going to happen which day.

00:08:49.380 | And then finally, you get down to the daily scale, where you say, what am I actually doing

00:08:54.440 | during the hours of the day?

00:08:57.260 | So we're in weekly planning, you're looking at what am I going to do the different days

00:09:00.940 | of this week at daily planning, you're saying, here's my day.

00:09:05.260 | I have a meeting here, I have a call here, I have two meetings here, here's a time that's

00:09:07.980 | free, what do I want to do during that time?

00:09:10.060 | So multi scale planning, I think is the right way to think about control.

00:09:14.180 | You're giving your time a job as opposed to asking in the moment, what should I do next?

00:09:19.540 | So I think any good time management system should do capture, configure, control.

00:09:26.260 | Let me talk briefly about my specific instantiation of these properties, what my time management

00:09:32.300 | system looks like at the moment.

00:09:35.380 | So for capture, there is where I actually store the things I need to do.

00:09:42.340 | And I use Trello, which is a task board software system.

00:09:46.980 | So it gives you a visual metaphor for cards on a board arranged vertically in columns,

00:09:52.420 | I use Trello, to keep track of tasks and commitments, and I use Google Docs, to keep track of plans,

00:10:00.980 | the plans I have about various things.

00:10:03.380 | So Trello is where all my tasks are.

00:10:05.540 | Google Docs are where my my plans live.

00:10:08.540 | So that's where in multi scale planning, my quarterly plan lives.

00:10:14.860 | That's where other plans live.

00:10:16.140 | Jesse and I, for example, have a Google Doc where we we have our plans for the podcast,

00:10:22.220 | etc.

00:10:23.220 | Trello for tasks, Google Docs for plans.

00:10:28.660 | In addition to the storage systems, you have to have the capture tool.

00:10:33.180 | So the tools you use to capture things during the day on the fly that will then get later

00:10:37.820 | moved into those storage systems.

00:10:39.540 | Now for me, I use two main ones.

00:10:42.100 | I have my time block planner.

00:10:45.500 | I am in a lucky situation where I was able to design and publish my own planner.

00:10:49.640 | So you can obviously find out more about that at time block planner.com.

00:10:52.860 | But that planner has for every day a page in which you can capture stuff.

00:10:56.820 | So I capture stuff right in that planner.

00:10:59.900 | On my computer, I also have a text file on my desktop.

00:11:03.820 | I call it working memory dot txt.

00:11:07.740 | Because I think of it as like an expansion of my actual working memory.

00:11:12.980 | And I use that when I'm on my computer to capture things, especially when I'm cleaning

00:11:15.860 | out my email.

00:11:17.620 | I can just type much faster than I can write and I capture all sorts of notes in this document.

00:11:22.620 | I work through ideas on the document, it really is like an extension of my working memory.

00:11:26.260 | So a lock gets captured in there.

00:11:27.500 | If I'm in a meeting on zoom, things are popping up I have to do.

00:11:32.100 | I'm writing it probably right there in that working memory dot txt.

00:11:36.180 | At the end of every day, I do a shutdown.

00:11:39.580 | My planner even has a box I checked.

00:11:41.580 | It says shutdown complete that indicates I've done my shutdown.

00:11:44.620 | As part of that shutdown process.

00:11:47.100 | I look through everything in that planner, everything in working memory dot txt.

00:11:50.900 | And I get it into one of those more stable systems goes on the Trello or I update my

00:11:55.340 | Google Doc.

00:11:57.320 | So those things get pushed back down to zero, their temporary tools to capture and then

00:12:02.060 | they get moved into the more stable systems.

00:12:06.580 | The one addendum I should add there is the calendar.

00:12:08.500 | Obviously, some of these things are appointments.

00:12:10.020 | So that goes right to the calendar.

00:12:11.020 | All right, configure.

00:12:12.020 | I mentioned I use Trello for my task.

00:12:17.100 | The way I actually use Trello is I have a separate board for each of my different professional

00:12:21.820 | roles.

00:12:23.820 | I keep a separate board as a writer, a separate board, for example, as a teacher, which I

00:12:30.060 | keep as a separate board as a researcher, etc.

00:12:34.980 | Those are then split up into columns.

00:12:36.540 | There's a few standard columns that every one of these boards have.

00:12:39.860 | I typically have a column where I put tasks on there that's called to be processed.

00:12:44.700 | It's a pretty complicated thing I need to do.

00:12:47.580 | And I don't quite understand all the details of it.

00:12:49.380 | But I don't want to keep track of it in my head.

00:12:50.980 | But also, you know, it's five o'clock and I'm shutting down, I don't have time to spend

00:12:54.300 | 20 minutes figuring out what does this mean?

00:12:57.900 | Like what are the actual actions here.

00:12:59.260 | So I'll just throw that in the to be processed column.

00:13:01.900 | I usually have a column on each of these boards for waiting to hear back from.

00:13:07.740 | So if I've sent someone a note, and I need information from them, and that information

00:13:12.380 | is critical for me to keep making progress, I like to put a card on my Trello board under

00:13:17.820 | waiting to hear back that says, here's what I'm waiting to hear back from.

00:13:20.740 | And here's what I'm going to do once I get that information.

00:13:22.580 | I don't want to remember that in my head.

00:13:25.080 | So I put it on there, I typically have a column for things I'm working on this week.

00:13:28.100 | And I'll typically have a column for if there's specifically persistent initiatives within

00:13:33.540 | that role.

00:13:35.340 | I'll give it its own column.

00:13:36.340 | So I can really quickly see for this thing I'm working on.

00:13:40.820 | What are all the different things that need to be done?

00:13:42.940 | So as a researcher, there might be a column for a paper we're preparing for publication.

00:13:48.140 | In my administrative role at Georgetown, there might be a column for a search committee that

00:13:52.260 | I'm on, here's the relevant tasks.

00:13:56.340 | The time that I really get into and clean this up and look at it and move things around

00:14:00.020 | and check in on it is when I do my weekly plan.

00:14:03.300 | So once a week as part of my commitment to configure, I really go through these systems

00:14:08.600 | and I update it once a week when I'm building my weekly plan is also when I'm reviewing

00:14:14.480 | the Google Docs that capture these other types of plans that are going on and update them

00:14:18.020 | and remind myself what's on them.

00:14:19.340 | So the weekly scale is when I'm really getting my hands dirty throughout the week.

00:14:24.740 | I'm just throwing stuff into here at the end of each day.

00:14:26.700 | But each week I really go in and clean things up.

00:14:29.060 | All right, finally, is control.

00:14:31.780 | I already talked about multi scale planning, I think is the best way to do control, you

00:14:35.620 | could do it other ways.

00:14:36.620 | But I do for me, it's semester instead of quarterly, but semester weekly, daily planning,

00:14:43.140 | semester plans in a Google Doc, weekly plan, I actually type it up in a text document and

00:14:49.540 | print it out.

00:14:50.540 | And I keep it with me in the back of my time block planner.

00:14:53.540 | So that's how and I'll update it and reprint it as I need to throughout the week.

00:14:57.620 | And then for my daily plan, I'm time blocking, like I talked about, here's my day, let me

00:15:02.260 | block off everything on my calendar.

00:15:04.300 | Here's the time that remains, what I want to do during that time.

00:15:07.060 | Well, let me look at my weekly plan to remind myself of what my big picture plan is for

00:15:11.020 | this day.

00:15:12.060 | And then I'm blocking off actual hours of time and saying, here's what I'm doing here,

00:15:15.660 | here's what I'm doing there.

00:15:16.660 | And I fill in all that information, I do that right in my time block planner.

00:15:20.200 | But you can do this in any type of notebook.

00:15:23.180 | There's a whole video at my site, timeblockplanner.com that walks through the details of how time

00:15:27.940 | blocking works.

00:15:28.940 | So that is how I do the daily piece, you put those all together, there's my commitment

00:15:33.660 | to control.

00:15:34.660 | Alright, so stepping back, capture, configure, control, you do those three things, you're

00:15:41.380 | going to be making smart decisions about what you want to be doing with your time professionally.

00:15:48.980 | Now I know people get concerned, they say, well, I might be injecting too much structure

00:15:54.060 | into my life.

00:15:55.060 | And this is going to make my work life more rigid, and I'll be less creative.

00:16:00.300 | I call nonsense and all of that.

00:16:03.280 | Just because you're in control of everything doesn't mean you need to schedule every seven

00:16:08.160 | minutes of your time like a crazy person.

00:16:10.780 | I mean, you can, when you're in control your time, you can now start to make decisions

00:16:14.100 | like Thursday afternoon, starting at 12, I want to do no work, I'm going to go to the

00:16:18.300 | woods and just think about this problem I'm working on.

00:16:22.820 | When you're doing capture, configure control, you could do that with confidence, because

00:16:25.900 | you know what's on your plate, you've cleared out that time, you know, things aren't being

00:16:29.340 | forgotten.

00:16:30.940 | You made sure that you had time on Wednesday to catch up on things people need to hear

00:16:34.260 | about Thursday, because you're in control, you can aim that control at more breaks, more

00:16:39.540 | free time, more creativity, less stress.

00:16:42.960 | You can significantly like a lot of my listeners do reduce the amount of time it takes for

00:16:46.980 | you to get your normal workload done.

00:16:49.580 | Because you're in complete control of things, move it into certain days and keep whole days

00:16:52.860 | free to basically do phantom part time jobs.

00:16:55.220 | There's a lot you can do that makes your life more interesting and creative, and less stressful.

00:17:01.220 | Once you have an intentional way of making these decisions about what do I want to do

00:17:04.460 | next with my time?

00:17:05.460 | All right, now I promised you a bonus property that arguably has to do with time management,

00:17:11.460 | arguably it's something different.

00:17:12.460 | So I'll just mention it briefly.

00:17:14.660 | And that is constrain.

00:17:18.260 | So circling this whole idea is how you figure out what gets on your plate to be managed

00:17:25.540 | in the first place, and how you actually manage that work.

00:17:30.980 | I'm just going to plant the seed here because this is a bigger conversation.

00:17:35.140 | But we need to be very careful about how we decide what we say yes to and what we say

00:17:40.180 | no to.

00:17:41.780 | We would really like to avoid the situation where we have so much work on our plate that

00:17:45.740 | yeah, we can control it and be organized about it, but we still don't have enough time to

00:17:49.260 | get it done.

00:17:50.260 | We want to avoid that situation.

00:17:51.860 | So having clear rules in place about how do I decide what I let on my plate, that's really

00:17:56.940 | important.

00:17:57.940 | Processes is the second thing that I think is really important when it comes to constraining,

00:18:04.460 | you know, figuring out how do I want to do this work?

00:18:08.100 | The stuff I let on my plate, can I put a process in place that will reduce the footprint this

00:18:12.380 | has on my schedule?

00:18:15.660 | There's a lot of different things this can mean.

00:18:17.260 | And again, because we're just seed planting here, I'm just going to very briefly skim

00:18:21.260 | the surface, but there may be automation you're doing here.

00:18:24.500 | You know what, we have to produce this same client report every week.

00:18:29.300 | I don't want to just send emails back and forth and kind of figure it out at the last

00:18:33.100 | minute.

00:18:34.100 | Here is our process for doing it.

00:18:35.100 | And you figure out a whole process.

00:18:36.100 | That's the same thing.

00:18:37.100 | The same things happen at the same times every week.

00:18:39.140 | You can rely on it.

00:18:40.700 | You've taken that burden off of your planning system to have to figure out from scratch

00:18:44.940 | for small questions and back and forth.

00:18:47.140 | You might push that all towards office hours, three days a week for one hour.

00:18:52.620 | Well publicized.

00:18:53.620 | I'm in my office.

00:18:54.620 | Zoom is on.

00:18:56.540 | Come to that office hours.

00:18:57.540 | If you have a small question for me, come to that office hours.

00:18:59.860 | If there's a little bit of information you need, come to that office hours.

00:19:02.700 | If there's something we can figure out in two minutes of back and forth.

00:19:06.860 | And when people bother you with an email or slack, like, Hey, what are we doing again

00:19:10.540 | about this?

00:19:11.540 | Or can explain to me again what this thing means?

00:19:12.860 | Just say, yeah, come to my office hours.

00:19:15.580 | These type of processes are all about reducing what it is that you actually do have to manage

00:19:21.340 | with your capture configure control system.

00:19:23.380 | You want to simplify that simplify what's on your plate, simplify how the things around

00:19:27.100 | your plate are executed.

00:19:28.100 | The easier you can make the planning version of yourself job, the better you're going to

00:19:34.140 | do at your actual job.

00:19:35.540 | All right.

00:19:36.540 | So let me summarize it there.

00:19:38.740 | That is my thinking on this core idea of time management.

00:19:45.420 | [Music]

Core Idea: Time Management

Chapters