Work-Life Harmony: Addressing Common Gaps in Time Management Planning & Scheduling

Planning & Scheduling At Work

Planning

Outside of project planning, a lot of people skip the step of daily or weekly planning that occurs between prioritizing and scheduling. Planning is a key step to make sure that you are clear on the actions and time required to ensure your priorities are delivered. Without planning or organizing your day in advance, it is easy to lose too much time and energy to lower priority activities or to always be firefighting the next crisis. Time blocking is a great technique if you need to adopt a planning step. 

Planning Priorities

High level, time blocking is when you take your top priorities and design each day around those. Break each day into 2-4 hour blocks, assigning priorities to each block. Break your priorities into actionable tasks. Dedicate your most energized, focused and least distracted blocks of time for tasks associated with your top priorities. Then as you schedule, you fill in around those activities. Some people find that time blocking can also effectively replace or simplify to-do lists and other task management.

Proactive Organization

Taking a few minutes every day to organize and plan for the next day is also one of the keys to success that I've seen people give you as they try to make time for other activities. In reality, they just make themselves more ineffective. Scrambling to prepare. Being late or missing to the super early meeting someone added to your calendar, instead of communicating your lack of availability and an alternate suggestion to connect. You don't want organizing for tomorrow to be the last minutes of your day as you are trying to get ready to go home or start your evening (if you work from home). There may be something that you forgot or that was added as a priority for tomorrow that takes time to prepare. Do it around lunch time or mid-afternoon, so you have time to adjust or take action.

Scheduling

A common progression of scheduling that I've seen people use is -

• Keeping personal and work calendars separate. Work calendar is just to handle meeting scheduling.
• As work gets more complex, task functions or to-do lists may get adopted.
• As work gets more meetings, time blocks have to be put in for focused work. These may or may not be honored if someone double books. Major personal activities are added to work calendar.
• As meetings continue to proliferate, you leave the double and triple bookings (just answering "Tentative" instead of "Decline" to the meetings you can't attend) so you have reminders of where to follow up. At this point, you may give up on a personal calendar and put everything into the work one so you can see everything. 

At some point you find that you are scheduled from shortly after waking until a few hours before bed. As you look at your days, you wonder how on earth can you get your personal work done and attend to your personal life. You feel like the calendar is driving your day instead of your priorities.

What are your personal prioritizing, planning and scheduling practices? Are you designing your day or are you allowing everyone with access to your calendar to design your day? With as little sleep as you are getting, does it feel like you are literally scheduling 1440 minutes of your day?

The greatest challenge is not holding firm to when your day starts and ends and how to handle double or triple booking. The more proactive you are with daily planning and organizing, the less likely you will have an untenable situation.

RELATED: Addressing Common Gaps in Prioritization 

Leveraging Planning & Scheduling Tools for Creating Greater Work-Life Balance

As your day gets booked to the point that you are longing for a 25th (or 26th) hour in the day, you need to make some adjustments in how you plan and schedule. As you've noticed for yourself, something needs to change. It seems like the more structure and control that you add into your calendar the more your day diverts from your plan.

As you get to this level of busy-ness it is even more important to ensure that your calendar has flexibility and you more clearly define the priorities of the day. It seems paradoxical, but if you allow for space in your day for unplanned activities you will have a higher completion rate of your planned priority activities. Think about your commute - you probably do this already. You know that a typical worst case travel day is versus if you had good traffic. You have already adjusted for the variability as you plan your day. Without that buffer, you would frequently be late. With that buffer, you are usually on-time and viewed as dependable & reliable at work.

Time Boxing

One way to ensure that you have scheduled enough time for key activities is time boxing. Estimate the reasonably likely amount of time needed to complete a task and put it in your calendar. This is good for repeatable events / tasks, ones that you know that you need to make steady progress across multiple days and other tasks that you can make a pretty good prediction on duration.

Going back to the example of the commute. On a good day, your 15 mile commute takes 20 minutes, whereas bad days can take up to an hour. While you have more good than bad commuting days, using 20 minutes in your schedule does not give you flexibility and blocking an hour every day feels like overkill on your schedule. Since 80% - 90% of the time you can get to work in 35 minutes, that is a reasonably likely timeframe to use in your schedule. I'm sure you won't complain if you get a few extra minutes to talk to people as you arrive or check a few emails before the first scheduled task.

One of the most common activities in your schedule are meetings. There is a different tactic you can take to build in flexibility.

Pomodoro (A tomato sauce for my pasta?)

If you are time management geek, you have probably heard of or applied the Pomodoro Technique. This is usually the first occasion people hear about time cushions. This technique is about scheduling only 25 minutes of every 30 minutes. This gives you a moment between activities or meetings for short breaks or to get a quick task done. Most commonly people start with the meetings that they schedule - book for 30 minutes in calendar but set the agenda and run the meeting to ensure that you always end early. Alternatively, let everyone know that you will start 5 minutes later, giving people time to squeeze something in or connect with each other before starting the meeting. If you are just looking to find more time for breaks, email and other quick tasks so that you are not playing catch up at night, Pomodoro is probably sufficient.

Larger Time Cushions for Unplanned Urgent Issues

I find that as demands on your time increase, 5 to 10 minute windows does not provide enough flexibility for unplanned issues. It may be more effective for you to look at time cushions. These are unplanned blocks of time in your day that are not dedicated to priorities. They provide flexibility for you to take action on any unplanned urgent issue that arose through the day. If nothing pops up, you can use the time for other activities. Keep in mind that to be able to use these for unplanned issues - you have to make sure that these time windows are not needed to complete the top priorities of the day and you have to protect them from other people scheduling into them.

Here are two suggestions on how to include time cushions in your day. 

• Include 30 minutes time cushions every few hours. This is great if your most significant disruptions are communication or administrative tasks. It provides defined time to catch up on people that stop by, emails or calls or to cascade information to your team. This approach also works when you are frequently requested to do small tasks or provide information with 24 hour turn around. Based on your meetings and activities, you can move these around to different times of day.
• Based on the pattern of requests, sometimes 30 minute time blocks is not enough to deal with the types of urgent issues you have to deal with. In this case, larger 1-2 hour blocks in mid-afternoon may work better. Set a time for these, before you do planning for the next day and to provide sufficient time in the day for anyone that may need to respond to you. 

Planning, Organizing & Boundaries

The secret to finding a reasonable amount of time for planned activities and flexibility on a daily basis is prioritizing and holding boundaries. You have to effectively plan ahead and not let everyone determine your schedule. I can't emphasize enough that you may have to dig deeper into distinguishing between what has to be done and what you'd like to get done. You also have to be assertive and decisive on how you are handling double and triple booking on your time.

Boundaries I'll talk about more in a future blog. For now, know that you need to be clear on how you are containing work from your personal life. Is it okay for certain unplanned activities at work to takeaway from your time at home? If not, you need to protect that time and start building skills on how to handle requests that encroach on your personal time. Sometimes countering with an alternate delivery time is enough. Other times a more in depth resourcing or prioritization discussion with your upline may be needed so he/she can be aligned with how you and the team are making the time for the new commitment.

Mix & Match

Mixing and matching different size time cushions and time blocks, you will be able to find the right balance between planned priorities, breaks, and unplanned urgent issues in your day. This is an active balance - different periods in your personal life and career will need different approaches based on how much flexibility your life requires. These unplanned issues and delays are so often what puts the pressure on where you feel there is not enough time in the day to get everything done. They are a chronic source of stress when not addressed.

Are You Willing to Experiment for Yourself?

Objections

"Ugh .. I am in such a hole I don't think I can even make the time to clean up my schedule."

This means that you will stay on this hamster wheel of exhaustion and not having enough time in the day for when "stuff happens." An easy first step is to stop allowing your calendar tool to auto-accept meetings. Also, you can decide and prepare yourself to run meetings more tightly, so you can get 5-10 minutes for yourself to tackle next week's schedule. In time, you will feel more agile and able to handle more of what your day throws at you. 

Benefits

I get it - there are still only so many hours in the day and a limit to what you can do. You may not be able to change your schedule this week, but you can pick a date in the future and start putting in repeating time cushions or time blocks in your schedule. It will start changing how your calendar appears to others so you can start building in greater flexibility. You can slowly decide to make modifications to your current routines and workflows so you can also easily incorporate into your existing workflows. 

RELATED: TBD - Boundaries

My hope for you...

Over time, implementing strategies to manage stress and prioritize your time will become easier and more natural. This will lead to a greater sense of control, reduced stress, and a healthier work-life balance. By taking time for activities that nourish your body, mind, spirit, and relationships, you will experience greater fulfillment and satisfaction.

Remember, God is always with you, and by surrendering to Him and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide you, you will find the strength and courage to make difficult decisions and overcome challenges, ultimately leading to personal growth and flourishing.

Interested in this approach and want to learn more about how you can go deeper into using your existing time management skills to help you improve your work-life harmony and reducing your stress?  Book a free consultation.