The Time Management Secret I Wish Everyone Knew About

What are your priorities today? What about tomorrow? Do you even know? 

This week, I’m sharing a simple switch you can make that will make prioritising your work almost automatic… Almost.

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Script | 415

Hello, and welcome to episode 415 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

How do you decide what to do and when? Do you operate a FIFO methodology (First In, First Out) or is it something more nuanced than that? 

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that almost everyone has too much to do and too little time to do it. That’s perhaps the reason you are listening to this podcast. 

It’s further complicated by the scope of what we are asked to do. Today, we have Slack or Teams messages that somehow cut through our defences and turn into long, time-consuming “chats” about a minor issue on a project that isn’t due to be completed for another six months, preventing us from doing the rather more important work we had planned to do that day. 

Then there is email, treated slightly less urgently than instant messages, but it can again destroy our focus, leaving us distracted and unable to finish the work we need or want to complete. 

Every day is a challenge. What to do, what is the most urgent, and what is the most important thing you can do today? And if you can work on the most important thing, will you have enough time to do it? If not, would it be better to do something else? 

Agh! It’s enough to drive anyone around the bend. And it’s not isolated. Every day we have to go through the same decision-making process. It’s exhausting and stressful (Is this the right thing to work on, or should I respond to that email I just received from my colleague?) and can lead to a prioritisation freeze and activity addiction, where looking busy is more important than doing work that matters.

This week’s question is about ideas for solving these challenges, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, What are your thoughts on organising work into categorised FIFO-style lists, adjusted for priority, and then using time blocks to work through them without expecting every block to result in a fully completed task unless there’s a real deadline attached.

Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question. 

I think you are on the right lines with your ideas there. 

Let me give you an example of this working. 

I teach a method called Inbox Zero 2.0 for managing emails. This method has two parts. The first is to clear the inbox. This is about speed, and all you are doing is filtering out the informational emails that don’t need any action, except to archive them and moving any actionable emails to a folder called “Action This Day”.

Later in the day, you go into that folder and try to clear it. 

Now, the ‘secret sauce’ of this method is that the emails in your Action This Day folder are in reverse order. The oldest ones are at the top, and the newest ones are at the bottom of the list. 

(You can do this from the folders’ settings in Outlook and Apple Mail. I’ve never been able to find a way to do this in Gmail) 

This means, when you come to ‘clear’ the Action This Day folder, you start at the top and work your way down. You try to clear it every day, but often that’s not possible; sometimes there are too many in there. 

However, because you start with the oldest, the remaining emails, the ones you were unable to get to, will likely have only recently come in, so the urgency is less than the ones you did respond to. 

Now, occasionally, an email that recently came in needs to be responded to that day. Here, you would “adjust for priority”, as you aptly call it, Benjamin and respond to these out of their natural order. 

It’s a system that has worked for years, never letting me down. Because I spend at least 20 minutes a day on my actionable emails, my emails rarely back up; my inbox is cleared every day, and nobody needs to wait more than 24 hours for a response. 

Now, you mentioned doing as much work as you can within the time blocks you set. That is exactly how to do it. 

This is also where many people go wrong with time blocking. Time blocking isn’t about squeezing in a specific amount of work within the time you have set. That’s never going to be possible. 

You see, there are too many variables acting on us each day. The first is that you have no idea what emergencies will happen in the middle of a time block. 

I’ve worked in offices where I settle down to write an important contract only to be interrupted by a fire alarm that took more than an hour to have the building declared safe. Rare, but does happen. 

More common are the interruptions from our colleagues. We just do not know for sure that something more urgent will pop up when we are trying to complete a planned piece of work. 

However, that does not mean time blocking doesn’t work. It does. 

It does because it allows us to organise our days by what matters most. 

For example, if you are a lawyer who needs time each day to prepare or review contracts, blocking two hours each day for this work ensures you always have time to do this important work. 

Blocking time for it means no one in your office can steal that time from you. It’s like you have an appointment with yourself each day to do your most important work. 

If you do not, for whatever reason, complete as much as you would have liked to, it’s okay, because you can pick it up again in your next blocked time slot. 

This is more about consistency than time blocking. If you consistently turn up and do the work, you’re never going to be far behind and are unlikely to have any significant backlogs. 

Yet if you don’t protect your time, it’ll be stolen. 

Not blocking time for doing your most important work is like parking your car in a high-crime area and leaving your wallet on the passenger seat with the windows wide open. There’s a good chance your wallet won’t be there when you get back to your car. 

Time blocking gets a bad reputation because people erroneously think it’s about blocking your entire day with activities. No. That’s not time blocking. That’s masochism. 

Time blocking your whole day wouldn’t work anyway. A traffic jam, a distraught colleague, a micromanaging boss, or a fire alarm would ruin your day, and then you’d waste time trying to reschedule everything.

Time booking works when you use it lightly. 

Look at it this way:

You build each day around a few critical blocks of time. For instance, two hours of deep solo work where you get on and write the reports, prepare the presentation, or sort out an issue that’s been dragging on for weeks. 

Then there’s likely to be time required for responding to all the messages you get each day. I doubt anyone can escape that deluge, but ignoring it will just create bigger and bigger problems further down the line. 

So perhaps you set aside an hour for dealing with your communications and any low-value admin. (Another area that can backlog pretty quickly if you’re not staying on top of it.)

That’s just two blocks, consisting of a total of three hours. Yet it’s three hours, which, if followed consistently, would keep you on top of your critical work and prevent backlogs in the areas most susceptible to them. 

Three hours that would reduce your stress, lower your anxiety, and put you ahead of 97% of your colleagues.

This does not guarantee you will always be on top of your work. As Baz Luhrmann’s 1990s hit says:

 “Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind… the race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.”

But what will guarantee you stay ahead is being consistent with it. 

When you start each day, ask yourself: where’s my focus time and where’s my comms and admin time? 

You mentioned categorising your tasks, and that’s a great idea too, Benjamin. Not all work is equal, and sometimes a deadline will need us to adjust our priorities. 

Now, categorising your work can be a minefield if you are inclined to overcomplicate things. This should be avoided. 

Think of it this way: When a pilot prepares for a trans-Pacific flight, there are just three categories. Pre-flight, in-flight and landing. 

Each of those categories has distinct types of tasks to be completed. 

For us, knowledge workers, it really comes down to a few simple categories. For example, there are four that almost everyone will have (including airline pilots):

Communications

Admin

Planning 

And chores

Chores are always there. We all occasionally have to pick up a prescription, make a dentist’s or doctor’s appointment or take our kids to ballet, football or cricket practice. 

Beyond these four, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A lecturer at a university may have student affairs, lectures and research as categories. 

A salesperson may have prospecting, follow-ups and proposal writing.

My advice is to keep your categories to no more than eight and make them as general as possible. 

For example, with the lecturer, student affairs could include grading papers, setting exams, writing references and arranging for one or more of your students to participate in a work experience programme. 

Once you have your categories, you have a way to prioritise your work. 

Again, this will depend on your work. For me, my most important priority each day is my content category. I create content every day. It could be this podcast, a blog post or a YouTube video. 

For a salesperson, the most important category may be prospecting, because without a steady supply of potential customers, everything else will eventually dry up. 

This now helps you with what you will do in your time blocks. For me, 9:30 am to 11:30 am is my content creation time. It is blocked on my calendar, and everyone knows not to disturb me during that time—including my wife! 

The salesperson may choose 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm as their prospecting time, and that, again, would be protected as a time block on their calendar each day. 

The idea is to match your most important categories with time blocks on your calendar. 

This is how time-based productivity works. It works on the time available to do your work. Not everything has to be done today or even this week or month. 

When you’re processing your work inbox, you decide what you need to do with something, then choose the best time to do it. 

There will be other factors to take into account, such as the deadline, who’s asking you to do something and so on. But ultimately, you are deciding when to work on a particular category. 

This is the opposite of the more traditional task-based systems that treat every task as individually important and as something that must be done ASAP. 

That way is unsustainable, as I am sure many of you have found out. It creates huge lists of stuff that may or may not need to be done, which just overwhelms you. You cannot do everything at once or even this week. 

If you want to learn more about time-based productivity, I have added a link to a blog post I wrote about it in the show notes. 

And just a heads up. The next Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming soon. On Fridays the 15 and 22nd May, 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two weeks. 

If your calendar is swamped with meetings and commitments, that leaves you with no room to do the work these meetings are generating. If you find your inboxes are overflowing with tasks and messages, and you cannot see a way out of it all, then this is the workshop for you

This workshop will teach you, in a live setting, how to move from an unsustainable, task-based system to a more sustainable, time-based one, along with many other lessons to help you get control of your calendar and all those inboxes. 

I will put the details in the show notes so you can learn more about how this workshop will help you. (Oh, and a warning, be prepared for some homework if you join us) 

I do hope you will be able to join me. 

Thank you, Benjamin, for your question. I hope this has been helpful. 

And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.