Managing Tasks: Taking Time to Save Time
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
In our Outlook Balance and Productivity training sessions, we teach clients how to utilize tasks to keep them on top of everything they need to do in their lives. Recently, one of my clients observed that with the new method she is taking a lot of time managing tasks and not working. A synopsis of my response to that very good observation is below:
Yes, it definitely takes time to manage tasks. But once your brain is used to the process, it takes much less time to deliberately and proactively manage your tasks than it does to reactively manage them. And they’re much less likely to fall through the cracks in my experience.
Let’s say that my tasks for the next half hour are to schedule a meeting and review a blog draft from my colleague.
First, I send my email to schedule the meeting. I then task that email for a future date including next steps so I stay on top of it even if the person doesn’t respond. And then I don’t think about it again until that future date or I receive a response email, whichever is sooner.
I then move on to review the blog draft. I note the questions I want the submitter of the blog entry to address in an email to them. I then task that email for a future date including next steps so I stay on top of these questions even if the person doesn’t respond. And then I don’t think about it again until that future date or the blog submitter answers my questions, whichever is sooner.
For any task that I’m doing, the time that I know the most about what the next steps should be is right when I’m finishing the current step. I don’t do my work throughout the day and wait until the end of the day to update my tasks. Updating my task is part of each action that I take. The farther away I am from when I do the task, the more I’ll forget about the next steps that need to be done. So the cadence is: send email to schedule meeting, update task. Submit questions for submitter of blog, update task. Send report to client, update task. Etc.
If people aren’t proactively managing their work, they still have to manage it, but it’s largely reactive then. So let’s say I send the email to schedule the meeting. Many people would assume that the person on the other end will respond to them. But if the person doesn’t respond to them, then their brain has to remember that the email is outstanding and the meeting hasn’t yet been scheduled. There’s sometimes a little mini panic in the brain because it’s wondering how long ago you sent the original email. You’ll then need to search for that email and follow up with it. That’s all assuming that your brain does magically happen to remember this outstanding meeting. And your brain sees this meeting as a loose end that it constantly has to keep track of because there’s no set system to make sure that you’ll actually remember it again. All of this uncertainty and anxiety eats many more minutes and calories than simply setting up a task, updating it, and forgetting it until the due date comes up.
In the case of the blog, again, many people would assume that the submitter would get back to them with the answers to the questions. But if the person doesn’t respond, then that blog entry goes into a no man’s land where no one is keeping track of it. It won’t be worked on until a manager or client asks why a new blog entry hasn’t been posted in a while and people go looking. At this point it’s been a couple of weeks and both the reviewer and the submitter are searching their email to find and remind themselves what the last step in the process was. Again, anxiety and uncertainty are produced, time is used by both parties to search and remind themselves of the status, and this time the anxiety has probably spread to not only the two people on the email but probably the manager as well.
So either way, we’re taking time to manage our tasks. One way is just deliberate and has the benefit of allowing our brain to forget about the work until we need to think about it again. The other way keeps loose ends constantly in our field of vision and taxing our brain to remember all things at all times. I promise, it gets faster and more natural the more you work on it.
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Deliberately Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team