Introduction
Rich and poor, young and old, we all face the same problem: time (or rather lack thereof). Time is against us, we only have a finite amount. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner, an executive leader, or a hard-working team member; if you’re reading this it means you could stand to gain some extra time during the workday to accomplish your goals. Obviously, we can’t “make more time”, so what we are referring to is freeing ourselves up from “busy work”, re-work due to mistakes, frustration, and overwhelm. To do so, we have to become more efficient and selective about how we choose to use the time we have. Here are 6 tricks and strategies you can implement to do just that.
1. Organize your space
I want to start off with a story to highlight the difference an organized space can make, so stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this. When I was growing up, I used to help my dad work on our family vehicle in our garage. Mind you, my dad was not a mechanic, but working on cars combined two things he liked: working with his hands, and saving money!
We had a 2-car garage, but there were so many things stored in there, I can’t recall a time that 2 cars were ever parked in it at the same time. My dad had tools and materials everywhere. As you can imagine, it was my job to find tools and hand them to him when he asked for them, and of course “point the flashlight”.
As my siblings and I grew older, we began to accumulate more and more vehicles, thus the amount of time my dad and I spent “playing mechanic” began to increase. What happened next? My dad made the most important discovery in our careers as amateur auto mechanics. He made us members at the “hobby shop” at our local Air Force base.
The hobby shop was a military building outfitted with everything a local auto mechanic business would have, and more. They had more tools and bays than we could have ever used. Everything had its place, everything was clean, and you could quickly identify when something was incorrect or missing. This new environment was a game-changer for us.
We were able to achieve a lot more, but in much less time than before. Not only that, but we were able to eliminate a lot of the frustration and headaches we had been experiencing when we were operating out of our messy garage. The experience was still work, but it almost became enjoyable (even at 0700 on a Saturday). I will always cherish the memories of our time together in the hobby shop; not so much our garage though.
I tell this story to highlight the difference an organized space can make. It isn’t just for efficiency and being able to save a little more time with every movement, but being organized can have a great impact on your quality of life. Now, extrapolate my part-time hobby shop example to your full time job. Imagine the time and frustrations you can forego. Although they may be small and seem insignificant, let’s call them what they are: miniature wastes of time. Sure it may only be a second or two here, and a minute or two there, but as you start to add them up they turn into hours and even days over time!
A long time ago, Toyota realized these so-called “insignificant” inefficiencies were creating waste, and that’s why they came up with 5S. For those that do not know, 5S refers to five terms (originally in Japanese beginning with an S sound). These 5 words describe workplace practices conducive to visual control and lean production. Translated into English, they are: Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain.
The purpose of 5S methodology is to:
create standards that reveal problems
support the basic stability needed to sustain incremental gains
reduce waste in all forms
build a disciplined workplace where teams focus on value-creating work
nurture the essential sense of shared purpose
If your workstation organization “system” isn’t helping you and you’re constantly overwhelmed and frustrated, give it a 5S makeover and see how things change. You will likely experience an immediate impact and perhaps you will begin to 5S your spaces beyond work; such as in your home life, it’s that powerful!
2. Prioritize your work projects
There are many opinions out there about how one should prioritize their work projects. The consensus is to list all the projects or tasks and arrange them by urgency, importance, or business value. The method I have found to be the most effective is arranging all projects/tasks on a priority matrix according to importance and urgency.
The definitions of what constitutes importance will vary from firm to firm. Harvard Business Review defines importance as having to do with: “... probability of success, impact (outcome or leading indicators), competitive advantage, value alignment, cost, risk, or must-have versus nice-to-have.”
Urgency can be defined in varied time frames as well. For example, high urgency could mean by end of day, medium could be in 24 hours, and low could be by end of week/month, etc. Side note: urgent tasks must be accompanied by the consequence for not achieving them within their deadline if they are to be considered truly urgent.
Once defined, urgency becomes the x-axis on the matrix and importance, the y-axis. The more urgent the task or project, the further it should be listed to the right on the x-axis. Likewise, the more important the task or project, the higher it would land on the y-axis. The most important and urgent items are the ones you’d want to handle first (furthest to the top-right on the matrix). Items that are important but not urgent, should be “scheduled for later”. And urgent items that are not important, can be delegated. If an item is neither important nor urgent, we need to ask ourselves if we should even be doing it at this time.
3. Delegate
Delegation is key to prioritizing and executing our projects and tasks. Without proper delegation, you end up doing everything yourself. If you are inundated with all the “busy work”, it becomes nearly impossible to focus on high-level strategy. In other words, you are not working ON the business if you are spending all your time working IN the business.
Your team should handle all the day-to-day activities. If you’ve delegated properly, you’ve identified the right person for the work, communicated your expectations clearly, and have given them the resources they need to be successful. They need to feel empowered to use their creativity which allows them to take ownership.
Effective delegation saves you time in the present, but also by doing it well, you are promoting your team members’ professional development. Developing your team is a great investment that will save you even more time in the long run. Afterall, so much time is wasted when employees are turning-over.
New candidates have to be sourced, vetted, and brought up to speed through training. It’s much better for all involved if you take the time to develop your current team members if you’re hoping to save some serious time. As teams are developed they make fewer mistakes, and become more cohesive and efficient. At that point, “making more time at work” is no longer limited to the desires of the owner, it becomes your company culture.
4. Block out time
Blocking out time is an effective way to focus on the task at hand to get it knocked out and off your plate. This sounds completely backwards to anyone who thinks “having the ability to multitask” is a valued job skill and requirement.
Multitasking as it turns out isn’t a good thing. If you want to take a deeper dive into exactly why, check out this article from Forbes based on research conducted at Stanford University. Now that we’ve established that multitasking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it means we have to choose our highest priority and execute.
If you’ve been skimming this list of 6 Tricks to Make More Time at Work, you might have missed what we talked about in number 2, “Prioritize your work projects”. Blocking out time applies to the most important tasks and projects only. If items are both important and urgent, you would block out some uninterrupted time as soon as possible to address these high priority issues. You can also block out future time for items that we said are important but not urgent, because those fall under the “scheduled for later” category.
The best way to block out time for items that fall into the “schedule for later” category is to literally create an event on your company’s shared calendar. Be sure to give yourself enough time (with a limit), and add a buffer in case it takes longer than expected. It’s best to mark yourself as “busy” or “unavailable” during that time block as well. Sure, team members may still interrupt you during your blocked out time, but at least now they must ask themselves if their issue can wait or if it is truly an emergency.
By blocking out time, you can limit interruptions. By limiting interruptions, you will be more likely to complete each of your tasks or projects. As your projects and tasks are completed, you are on the path away from having things stack up in the queue, which translates to reduced overwhelm and yes, more time.
5. Avoid unnecessary meetings
Meetings are essential for mission alignment. That is to say, we want our team members to be on the same page and all moving towards the same goal. Oftentimes, meetings can become… something else. We’ve all attended meetings that seemed like a waste of time. If our goal is to try to make ourselves more time at work, we have to cut out the pointless meetings.
In order to cut out pointless meetings, we first have to identify whether or not a meeting has the potential of being pointless. Here are some instances in which a meeting isn’t pointless, in fact meetings for these reasons are very necessary:
Making irreversible decisions like selecting the next leader of the organization
Solving issues that require discussion and debate
Project Kick-offs
1 on 1 coaching sessions or performance reviews
Sensitive topics like personal issues
If the requested meeting has to do with an issue from this first list, there’s a good chance that it’s a necessary meeting. All that’s needed from there is to etermine if your attendance is required, or if it is appropriate to be driven by someone else. Note: just because the necessity of a meeting is valid, doesn’t mean the right people have been invited.
By contrast, here are the earmarks of a pointless meeting:
Meetings that could be replaced by a detailed memo
“Brainstorming sessions” by people unfamiliar with the subject matter
Meetings without intended results or an agenda
Meetings “because that’s what we’ve always done”
Meetings for status updates that could be communicated via message
Meetings to get feedback or advice on a “couple quick questions”
If a meeting request has any vibes of this second list, you probably don’t need that meeting, but it’s best to ask some clarifying questions before dismissing it altogether. If your intuition is correct and the meeting isn’t necessary, not only is your presence not required, there’s a bonus because you have also prevented others from wasting company time on such activities.
6. Leverage technology
With the advancement of technology, it’s quite surprising to see how many organizations are still using manual processes instead of leveraging technology. Humans are flawed by nature and will make mistakes from time to time. Big mistakes can seriously derail operations and can cost us yet more of our valuable time (and money).
One of the fastest ways to make more time at work is to use tech to streamline and automate workflows. The efficiency gained by implementing automated systems to handle repetitive tasks allows your entire team to focus on company goals instead of just “busy work”.
If that wasn’t enough, technology gives us access to more data (and the ability to analyze it) than we could ever need. It allows us to make data-driven decisions, which helps us get better results. When we are making better decisions based on real data, the need for extensive debate is reduced as a side-effect. Better decisions lead to better results and less re-work. This is a win for those of us that are into saving time and money.
Collaboration and project management apps give us real-time communication and insight into progress. Status updates are at your fingertips so there’s no need to constantly follow-up to ask “where does this stand?”.
Technology has added an extra layer of complexity to our lives in some sense. It does take something to stay up to date with new innovations. However, the time and effort you put into leveraging technology is not in vain. The benefits of implementing the right tech into your processes far outweigh the burden because it essentially “makes more time” for you to do something perhaps more meaningful.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these 6 tricks and strategies will help you make more time at work. We only get a certain amount of time in life, we shouldn’t have to spend so much of it spinning out and getting frustrated. Implementing these tricks can increase your productivity, and make you feel more purposeful in your workday. Give them a shot, you won’t regret it. You will feel more fulfilled when accomplishing meaningful goals instead of just surviving a relentless barrage of “busy work”.
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