Time Management Beyond the To-Do List — An Advanced Treatise
I. Overview
This article will review some of the time management tools and techniques we currently use to organize our daily tasks. Some of these tools are very popular and barely need any introduction, others slightly less so. Here is a list of what to expect:
These time management tools will help you organise your day and make the best use of your time.
II. Agenda for the Series
This article is part of a broader series on time management. We hope you find the concepts and ideas helpful.
III. Time Management Tools and Techniques
A. The Dynamic To-Do List
The To-Do list is one of the most basic and straightforward methods for managing your time. It consists of writing down the tasks you want to accomplish in a sorted table. You can then use that table to track your progress. Setting a priority and a due date for each entry in the list will make the tool more powerful and effective. Managing the table entries is straightforward:
This representation of the To-Do list is a slightly modified version of the familiar Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). In our version, the salesman still needs to visit all the cities, except this time, she needs to ensure that visits to the top priority cities are completed as soon as possible. In addition, she needs to visit the lesser priority cities before, say, 6 PM. Note the following:
B. The Eisenhower Matrix
I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
The above quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower seems to be at the origin of the Eisenhower Matrix, a technique for categorizing work along two dimensions: importance and urgency.
You have probably seen this matrix before if you have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you haven’t, it’s not too difficult to explain, which we will do here. The best part of the Eisenhower matrix is that it helps you put things into perspective. Here is how it works:
The Eisenhower matrix is a powerful time management tool you can use to your greatest advantage.
C. Queue Management and Triage
1. Uniform Requests
The two previous time management techniques are designed to help individuals efficiently manage their tasks. This section will describe a slightly different time management problem in which we have multiple servers (such as tellers or help desk staff) and a queue of incoming requests.
The problem can be formulated as follows. Assuming all servers have the same processing capabilities and all requests require the same amount of processing time, how best do we distribute the load to optimize their utilization? More specifically, how do we ensure that:
A) Servers process high-priority requests first
B) Low-priority requests do not stay in the queue forever.
In this case, the following solution suggests itself:
2. Variable-Sized Requests
We can make the problem more intricate by allowing a variable processing time for every request. In this scenario, processing times can differ between requests, forcing us to deal with long-running tasks. The optimisation technique for this new problem is very similar to what has been outlined above. The difference is that we must now monitor the processing time on every server, interrupting long-running tasks in favour of looking into more urgent ones.
A key takeaway from this section is that low-priority tickets are not kept waiting forever. Starving low-priority tickets is a common problem in customer service, where support staff never find the time to address them. To avoid this issue, a timer can be kept on a low-priority request; after a specified period, the priority of the long-waiting request is increased.
D. Delegation, Enablement, and Automation
Is it possible to manage your time so that productivity increases without risking burnout? The short answer is Yes. As the leader of any team, you can manage your time more efficiently by applying the following guidelines:
IV. Time Management under Uncertainty
A. Introduction
As technology advances and customer preferences constantly change, how do software development companies stay abreast of all these changes? In short, how do they ensure they develop the right thing before it becomes obsolete or customers change their minds? This section looks at two useful tricks for peeking into the future and gleaning valuable information from it:
Both of these methods rely on the same fundamental principle that allows software companies to test the grounds and let customer feedback guide the product implementation and roadmap. This is a radical departure from previous methods (analytical, Waterfall-based) based on prior design down to the last byte. Let’s see how MVPs and Agile practices allow software teams to manage their time better.
B. Agile Practices: Shorter Cycles and Faster Releases
One of Waterfall’s principal weaknesses was its sequential approach to software delivery and its unquestioning reliance on the software designer’s ability to articulate business needs fully. It might be several months or years before the customer can glimpse the new product and have the chance to provide feedback on its usability in the field. More often than you might hope for, customers end up with unusable features or features that require significant rework. As a result, deadlines are missed, budgets are overrun, and customers are frustrated.
These drawbacks can be readily seen in the Waterfall methodology and its Software Development Lifecycle.
Fixing Waterfall
The traditional solution to this problem was a stronger focus on clarifying requirements before project kick-off and creating a solid design before any development.
This solution only seemed to aggravate the situation as it meant additional effort in the project’s earlier phases and, consequently, costlier rework and redesign if that were to happen.
In 2000, a team of software experts convened and came up with 12 principles proclaimed in the Agile Manifesto. The first and second principles went like this:
Agile is far superior to Waterfall when you are not sure of the landscape you are navigating. In simple terms, Agile practices consist of taking a step forward, validating your direction, pivoting if the direction needs correction, taking another step forward and repeating.
In software delivery, this translates into delivering smaller changes in shorter cycles, allowing the developers to get valuable feedback from the end-users, information that would otherwise not have been available until very late in the project.
Agile practitioners invented a rich toolkit, allowing them to implement Agile practices in well-defined processes. Of these practices, some are directly related to how Agile teams spend and manage their time:
B. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Let’s now look at the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (or MVP). The MVP allows developers to test the prospect of a brilliant idea with minimal cost. It works as follows: You are encouraged to release new software to the market without perfecting any of its aspects.
The software’s core components will be available in the first release, but the bells and whistles will be postponed until the usability of the new idea has been established.
Why do MVPs work?
The principal argument for an MVP is the Pareto principle of the vital few. In its most generic form, the Pareto principle states that 20% of the causes produce 80% of the effects.
Translating this principle into a feature valuation context, we can assume that around 80% of the product’s value is carried by 20% of its features, or 20% of its use cases cover 80% of the customer’s needs.
From a time optimization point of view, the MVP is a very powerful tool. It also allows you to avoid using up all your capital on ideas that may or may not work.
V. The Value of Time
A. Time and Organisational Culture
Does your team spend a lot of time arguing or trying to find a consensus? What does that tell us about the nature of their interactions and their relationships with leadership? Did you ever ask for help and get told, “Sorry, I don’t have enough time?” Did that person get away with it? What does that say about the value of assisting others within your team?
Leaders may opt for decision-making styles designed to “save time.” For example, they can make unilateral decisions for efficiency reasons. They might also decide to “spend more time” deliberating a particular topic because their objective is to find the best possible solution, regardless of how long it takes.
You can learn a lot about an organisation’s culture by looking at how people spend their time.
The way people choose to spend their time can say a lot about what they value and what they don’t.
B. The Cost of Lost Time
Because time is a scarce commodity, squandering it will most certainly have a cost. How can that cost be measured?
The most common measure of lost time is in dollar values. If an employee needs to spend a day reworking a defective feature, then the cost of that loss is whatever happens to be his day rate. If the defect is a blocker, the cost becomes their day rate compounded by the cost of the delay.
Another measure of time wasted could be opportunities lost. For example, if your competitors beat you to market, your loss is not just the time spent working on the product but also the profits that never materialized. If you consistently arrive late, you might even lose your business.
VI. Conclusion
The time management techniques we presented aim to coordinate the efforts of individuals or groups to make the most of their limited time.
Time management techniques appear straightforward on the surface, but this is seldom the reality. They often require setting priorities, and that itself is not evident. A typical illustration of this can be found in the Iron Triangle of Project Management, where you constantly have to choose between prioritising quality, cost, and scope.
The siloing of organisational structures exacerbates the tension between departments as each seeks to accomplish its own goals. Developers often seek quality at any cost, and salespeople desire new features on time, even at the expense of cost and quality. At the same time, business owners want to keep their budgets under control regardless of both.
We hope this article has shown the reader the multitudes of factors that can be considered while implementing and assessing time management techniques.
VII. References
- Organisational Culture and Leadership, by Edgar Schein, 2004
- The Toyota Way – 14 Management Principles From the World’s Greatest Manufacturer, by Jeffrey Liker, 2004
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, 2004