How to get time on your side: time management strategies for work

Mick Jagger may sing about time being on his side, but he doesn’t have an office job. Time management is crucial in business. In order to do your job effectively, you have to schedule time for phone calls, collaborate more efficiently with colleagues in various silos, and even schedule time off so you don’t flame out from stress and start belting, “I can’t get no satisfaction!”

The good news: Time management is not as difficult as you might think. It all boils down to developing the right habits, deciding which activities require your immediate attention, and scheduling time to accomplish your goals. Start by taking five minutes to read about some proven strategies and adopt the ones that resonate with your lifestyle.

Task sorting by importance and urgency

Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and the Allied Forces Supreme Commander during World War II before serving two terms as the U.S. President, knew a thing or two about prioritizing work and making decisions. His concept, which later became known as the Eisenhower Matrix, involved sorting to-do items by urgency and importance into four boxes:

• Box 1: Important and urgent tasks that demand your immediate attention—high-priority issues to complete ASAP
• Box 2: Important, but not time-sensitive tasks, to schedule for later—generally long-term projects to work on once your box 1 is empty or to put on your calendar
• Box 3: Not important, but urgent tasks to delegate—anything with a deadline that doesn’t require your expertise and can be assigned to someone else
• Box 4: Not important, not urgent; tasks to delete—time-wasters to skip altogether or do when you need a brief break if you find they relieve stress

Time blocking knits you into the zone

In knitting, blocking refers to a method of stretching and shaping a finished piece to reach the dimensions needed in the original design, or to make two pieces the same size, or make your stitches look more even.

In football, zone blocking is a technique that is a simple and effective scheme to create lanes for running plays.

In business, time blocking is one of the time management strategies that enables you to focus on the tasks that need to be done, temporarily silencing the twin siren calls of social media and email.

Time blocking has you divide the day into blocks of time and stick to the blocked out tasks for each time period. You stay in your zone and open up that lane—um, spreadsheet.

In practice, you might work on a marketing proposal from 8 to 10 a.m., then check and respond to emails and Slack messages for an hour, spend a well-earned half-hour on social media—it’s still important for the company pages to stay current (yes, you can slip in a cat video for comic relief)—followed by a lively lunch with your knitting circle at a new café you’ve been wanting to try. Two successful time blocking sessions, and the day’s only half over! And you haven’t had to wear a helmet or kneepads. Well done, you.

Time boxing keeps you in the ring

Another time management technique that borrows from sports is time boxing. Like its close cousin time blocking, time boxing creates space for you to do deep work on just one project for a fixed period of time—the box you’ve set aside for it. This might be a recurring, long-term project, such as expanding ways to support business growth for small business customers. It’s an ongoing assignment, and dedicated time boxing each week without interruption enables you to focus on a specific area for enhancement during each session.

You focus on one specific subject or project for a set time period, which might be 30 minutes or several hours. However, when that timer rings, you’re finished until next time. Time boxing is especially useful for deadline-focused, resource-intensive work, and you can schedule the time boxes to allot you sufficient time to accomplish what needs to happen before the deadline.

Time management skills from the 19th century

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, is a time management technique named after the nineteenth-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that most of the land in his home country (80 percent) was owned by approximately 20 percent of the population. This truth was extrapolated to a global scale a century later, when the United Nations Development Program reported that roughly 20 percent of the world’s population owned 80 percent of the wealth.

In business, the 80/20 rule means 80 percent of your results typically come from only 20 percent of your efforts. When it comes to productivity and time management, following the 80/20 rule may allow you to identify which tasks will net the biggest rewards. For example, you may want to eliminate a number of unproductive meetings so the meetings you hold are more effective, prioritize projects using time blocking and time boxing to focus on critical areas as needed, and nurture the client relationships that will yield 80 percent of your profitable results.

DND: the modern way to shut your office door

In times past, when you needed to be head down and focused on meeting a deadline, you’d likely ask the department administrative assistant to hold your calls and shut your office door so you could concentrate.

Today, it’s much more challenging to be unreachable and undistractible. But you can turn your business phone into a time management device by silencing all calls, text messages and app notifications. Do Not Disturb (DND) can be a hard option to choose if you’re accustomed to being in continuous contact with business and personal contacts alike, but take heart—it’s temporary. Think of it as your incentive to churn out a stellar report ahead of deadline.

This is your brain on creativity

One of the best time management strategies that creatives and inventors have used down through the ages is switching gears. We’ve all heard about people who attempted to solve a thorny problem for days (or years), finally released their focus and found the answer came to them in a dream, or in the shower, or on a nature hike. This happens because various parts of the brain all play a role in creativity and imagination, much like a work group that breaks into smaller segments to, yes, brainstorm.

Our brains are neuroplastic. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to rewire itself—which is how people who’ve had a traumatic brain injury are often able to recover. The brain simply creates a new pathway.

So if you’ve been working on something analytical for a while, perhaps in a time block, and your mind feels fried, break out the knitting or dive into the fourth box of your Eisenhower Matrix. And if you enjoy knitting with wool and needles, your brows won’t need to knit together in frustration because you’re in overtime on an unsolvable problem.

With these time management tools in your business toolbox, you’ll get time on your side.