People make intricate plans for diets, businesses, or world travel and, well, none of it happens. It’s a pleasant fantasy. If you want results instead of fantasies, the first step is to start executing. According to management guru Peter Drucker, execution starts by mastering your time. In this Better Humans post, Drucker’s time management method is broken down into three steps:
1. Record Your Time
Says Drucker: “Man is ill-equipped to manage his time. Even in total darkness, most people retain their sense of space. But even with the lights on, a few hours in a sealed room render most people incapable of estimating how much time has elapsed. […] If we rely on our memory, therefore, we do not know how time has been spent.”
If you track your time on paper and then plug it into a computer program later, or enter your time throughout the day into your time tracker (like OfficeTime), just make sure that you do it.
2. Diagnose Your Time
Nobody spends their time perfectly, says Drucker:
“I have yet to see a knowledge worker, regardless of rank or station, who could not consign something like a quarter of the demands on his time to the wastepaper basket without anybody’s noticing their disappearance.”
The goal during this step is to figure out where time is being wasted. To help figure it out, Drucker gives two questions we can ask.
Question One: “What would happen if this were not done at all?” If the answer is, Nothing would happen, then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it.”
This is pretty straightforward. If you think something might be useless, take it out and see what happens.
Question Two: “What activities could someone else do better?”
It makes sense to delegate, outsource, automate things that you are less good at so you can do more of what you excel at.
3. Consolidate Your Time
Step two was about finding wasted time and eliminating it. But there’s another way to manage your time: you can reorganize it.
A one-hour block is not the same as ten six-minute blocks. High-level creative work needs around two hours of focus. If you’re always interrupted by meetings (or kids), no real work will happen.
Drucker recommends that we “block off” at least a quarter of our day to do private, focused work:
“Even one-quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done.”
If your work is highly creative (writing, etc.), you might need to block off a lot more.
One Last Thing
This is not one of the things that you just do once in a lifetime. Without periodic attention, we “decay” to our old selves, says Drucker:
“…effective executives have the log run on themselves for three to four weeks at a stretch twice a year or so, on a regular schedule.”