Productivity tips that will help you get more done, in less time.

Step 2 – Building better time management habits

So, your to do list is ready to go, and you want to get started. Great! Knowing where to start is the next hurdle to becoming a time-management master.

By now, your to-do list should look something like this.

Task Description	Estimated Time	Priority	Tools and Resources Needed	Do you have everything you need to get the job done?	Status
Pay Monthly Bills	30 Minutes	Urgent	Laptop & Bill Folder	Yes	Done
Check Bank Statement	30 Minutes	Important	Laptop and Bank Statement	Yes	Done
Pick up Groceries for Dinner	60 Minutes	Important	Car	Yes
Walk the dog	30 Minutes	Important	Dog	Yes	Done
Make doctor’s appointment	5 Minutes	Urgent		Yes
Wash the curtains	90 Minutes	Optional	Washing machine, detergent	NO
Clean the car	60 Minutes	Optional	Car wash	Yes
Mow the lawn.	30 Minutes	Optional	Lawn mower, fuel	No

Working out what you can do and what you can’t do.

Just because a task needs to be done it doesn’t mean that it can be done. The next step is to identify what you can do and what you can’t do. You will see in our list below that we are missing a few critical things to get some of these jobs done.

Task Description	Estimated Time	Priority	Tools and Resources Needed	Do you have everything you need to get the job done?	What you need?
Pay Monthly Bills	30 Minutes	Urgent	Laptop & Bill Folder	Yes
Check Bank Statement	30 Minutes	Important	Laptop and Bank Statement	Yes
Pick up Groceries for Dinner	60 Minutes	Important	Car	Yes
Walk the dog	30 Minutes	Important	Dog	Yes
Make doctor’s appointment	5 Minutes	Urgent	Phone	Yes
Wash the curtains	90 Minutes	Optional	Washing machine, detergent	NO	Detergent
Clean the car	60 Minutes	Optional	Car wash	Yes
Mow the lawn.	30 Minutes	Optional	Lawn mower & petrol	No	Petrol

As you can see, we do need to mow the lawn and wash the curtains, but we can’t do either of those things until we have petrol and laundry detergent. We can also see that we are needing to pick up groceries for dinner, so that’s an opportunity for us to get our missing items without having to add additional trips to the list.

The lesson here, is that you can gain a lot of time back in your day, by doing things efficiently, and to do this, you need to understand what you need to get each task done.

An inefficient person who does not use these tips might find that they are making multiple trips out to the grocery store, because they were not organised enough to understand what they needed to get the jobs done. If those two trips each took 30 minutes, then that’s a whole hour in our day wasted when we could have spent that time getting another task completed such as cleaning the car.

Prioritisation

The next thing is to prioritise your tasks from most important to least important. A good rule of thumb when categorising your tasks into Urgent, Important and Optional is to think about the impact of not getting it done. Urgent tasks are the ones that have a deadline and have the potential to cause a negative impact if the task isn’t completed on time or have other high-risk factors.

Things that fall into the urgent category may include paying bills on time, making doctors’ appointments, getting the kids to school on time or emergency repairs.

So, now that we have understood what tasks CAN be done, and which ones are the most important, our list has been reorganised to look like this. It is also a great idea to get into the habit of colour coding your lists, so you can quickly and easily see what is most important and what you should focus on.

Task Description	Estimated Time	Priority	Tools and Resources Needed	Do you have everything you need to get the job done?	What you need?
Pay Monthly Bills	30 Minutes	Urgent	Laptop & Bill Folder	Yes
Make doctor’s appointment	5 Minutes	Urgent	Phone	Yes
Check Bank Statement	30 Minutes	Important	Laptop and Bank Statement	Yes
Pick up Groceries for Dinner	60 Minutes	Important	Car	Yes
Walk the dog	30 Minutes	Important	Dog	Yes
Clean the car	60 Minutes	Optional	Car wash	Yes
Wash the curtains	90 Minutes	Optional	Washing machine, detergent	NO	Detergent
Mow the lawn.	30 Minutes	Optional	Lawn mower & petrol	No	Petrol

The most highly productive people are the ones that get important jobs done first, and prioritise other jobs based on the time they will take, how much time they have available and whether they have everything they need at hand to get the job done.

Take the list above for example. The two most important things that I needed to get done in my day were to pay the monthly bills and to make a doctor’s appointment. Based on the list, I would be aiming to get the biggest jobs that are urgent completed first, followed by the important jobs biggest to smallest, and then the optional jobs again biggest to smallest. The reason for this, is that it is very easy to avoid doing things that are going to take a lot of time, in favour of ticking off a larger number of smaller tasks. Whilst its fine to do that, you may end up realising that the big job that you keep avoiding becomes even more critical.

As an example, if we chose to put off sitting down and paying the monthly bills in favour of getting more tasks done, then we could end up being late with payments and attracting late fees or dishonour fees. That can be a huge cost that is completely avoidable. The lesson here is that a task is usually critical, because of the potential it has to cause harm if left incomplete.

Automate what can be automated

There are so many things we can do to make our lives easier and more efficient. My advice is for any tasks that need doing every day, week or even every month think about a way you can automate that process, or at least part of it to make it easier.

In the list above, there are a couple of things that could be automated, and some that just can’t.

Paying bills for example is something that is easy to automate. You can call your billers and set up direct debits so they do the heavy lifting, and all you need to worry about is reconciling the transactions at the end of the month, which is something that you are doing anyway.

Another task that could be automated or significantly improved in terms of time would be grocery shopping or picking up laundry detergent and fuel so you can wash the curtains and mow the lawn. Most major supermarkets offer online shopping, free delivery over a certain amount and can promise same day delivery if you order by 12.00pm.

Another option might be to do a weekly shop for everything you need for dinners rather than making it an everyday task. Huge amounts of time can be saved when we think about the most efficient way to get the job done.

In this case, your task might change from “pick up groceries for dinner” to “order grocery delivery online”. This might change the status of the task to urgent, as there is now a hard timeline that this needs to be done by, to ensure same day delivery.

Hopefully these articles have been helpful! Time management is a learned skill and one that is achievable for anyone. It really comes down to how well you understand what you need to do, how urgent those tasks are and what you might need to get the job done.

Once you have these three key pieces of information, it becomes easier to start getting things done more efficiently and becoming your own time management master!

Missed Part 1? Manage Your Time Like a Boss – Part 1

Bernie Kyne
Mortgage Consultant
0400141757
bernie.kyne@mortgage-express.com.au

Manage Your Time Like a Boss – Part 2