How to Improve Your Time Management Techniques

American society glorifies busy. We celebrate full calendars and encourage people to take calls and answer emails on vacation. It’s not healthy. Today, the glorification of busyness is so entrenched in the culture; it’s challenging to be different from your peers.

Time management is a tricky thing. You can rationalize how you spend your time. I read a quote from Susan Wojcicki in Emily Chang’s Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley.

“When I’m in the office, I am really, really focused and I’m prioritizing,” she told me. “I can’t stay there until midnight. I can’t work weekends.” Because of the time pressure, she says, she isn’t tempted to waste the company’s time on problematic projects. “Let’s just forget about all those other things that are growing slowly; they’re not going anywhere. I don’t have time for that. I’m gonna focus on the big ideas, and we’re gonna get them done now,” Wojcicki told me.

This quote referred to when Wojcicki worked at Google in the early days (she’s now CEO of YouTube). This quote inspires! Why wouldn’t you spend your time focusing on what matters, what generates revenue, and what makes the customers and business successful? Time management is all about prioritizing. How you prioritize is up to you, but you can only have one priority – not ten priorities, as the word implies. When you prioritize family, then you make concessions in other areas. If you prioritize your career, you also make concessions. Sometimes compromise happens. There’s constant balancing and re-balancing.

Time management is all about maximizing what you do in the time you have to do it. Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted. When you have multiple things competing for your time and attention, you must focus your efforts on what will deliver the biggest bang. Otherwise, tasks and to-do lists will stretch out and take much longer than intended.

In your work, the way to focus is to allocate time for the item on your calendar, then create an order of importance. I like to set my work priority list by time-sensitive matters, impact on clients or teammates, and prep work for other calls. Additionally, I prioritize my family, my health, and my happiness above work. Your priorities will look different from others. Remember to avoid comparing yourself and your choices to others.

Once you identify how you want to prioritize, success is a matter of sticking to your guns and getting it done. Turn off your phone or disable notifications to accomplish your tasks or goals. It takes practice. Some days will be better than others, but time management will help you live a practical, healthy, well-balanced life.