Penelope Trunk has ten great tips to get it done better

There’s a great post on time management over at Brazen Careerist, and reading it has got me thinking about my own process (as I have a tendency to do).

The article outlines “10 tips for time management in a multitasking world,” and though they are all very good tips I don’t think they all are practical. For example, not having email open all day and checking it only on a schedule works in only so many cases. The people I work with expect email to be open all day. Hell, they expect you to have a blackberry so you can read (and maybe even respond to) email while eating lunch with that cute red head you’ve had your eye on. That isn’t necessarily the best way, so I agree with the productivity gurus that, ideally, you should not have email open all day. However, career gurus will know that, depending upon where you work, it can be suicide. You have to consider your environment and generally accepted expectations. If your management expects you to have email open all day, you better do it and find a way to deal with it. You could, of course, change management’s expectations, but until you do that you have to meet them or suffer the consequences.

Step two is to admit multitasking is bad. Ok, I admit it; sort of. I admit it can be bad. Every one has an ability to multitask without loosing productivity; it’s a matter of to what degree. About a year ago I experimented with this. I would spend a couple of days not multitasking and tracking my results, then another couple of days tackling only a few tasks at once and again tracking my results, so on and so forth. Repeating this cycle over a period of time gave me some solid data on my productivity. I found that just as everyone has a most productive time of the day, they also have a most productive level of activity; a multitasking threshold, if you will. For me it’s about eight tasks: a few IM conversations, one or two email threads, a working text file, some document editing and an ongoing conversation with my team. Anything less and I spend too much time on trivial perfectionist tasks when I should be moving on; anything more and I begin to feel overwhelmed, I loose my train of thought, and become less productive.

The last one I somewhat disagree with is step three - do the most important thing first. There’s some good and bad to this. On the up side, if you start with the most important task you are much more likely to come back to it later after inevitable interruptions. On the down side, it can take some time to get those engines revved. I’m not at my best in the first couple of hours of the day, it takes some time to get a good flow going. When I’m working at my peak is when I should tackle the most critical tasks. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that people have a most productive time of the day, and a certain ability to create and maintain flow.

The most critical component to productivity and time management is personal preference. Do what works for you. There are general practices to use as a guide, but if one or ten don’t seem to be working try something different. Don’t be afraid to do something completely counter to the expert advice if that is what makes you more productive.

11 December 2006 | productivity | Comments