Time Math
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
In our training sessions, we teach people how to utilize their tasks and calendars to make order in their lives and save time. Often students in the beginning stages realize just how bad they are with time math.
If your workday is 8 hours and you have 7 hours of back-to-back meetings as well as a task list that will probably take 4 hours to complete, then the time math doesn’t add up. You either need to shorten some meetings, cancel some meetings, move some tasks to a future date, or work more hours. A lot of people decide to work more hours, but they don’t take into consideration the fact that they still have to deal with time math. The time they give to work is then time they’re going to sacrifice with their families, for personal projects, or to sleep for example.
At a previous job, I was paid hourly, and I wasn’t allowed to work more hours. As a result, I had to get really good at time math. I had to fit all work tasks and meetings within a certain number of hours in a day. So if I had a lot of important client tasks that needed to get done that day and a meeting would impede me from completing those tasks, I knew I had to reschedule that less important meeting in order to make the time math compute and fit all of my tasks into my allowable work hours. Also, if there was a meeting that popped up that was really important for me to attend, I knew I would need to move some tasks to future dates to make room for that important meeting in my day.
Every person has 24 hours a day. I look at a day like it’s a fun 24 hour math puzzle. I know I want at least 8 hours of sleep, 1 hour of exercise, and 30 minutes to get myself dressed and ready in the morning. Then I play with how many other time blocks I can fit into the time that is left, including time with my son, husband, friends, hobbies, reading, rest, work, chores, everything. Every day I’m experimenting to see how I can arrange these time blocks differently in order to optimize my energy, my connections with others, my productivity, my life.
Once you start using your calendar and tasks in the system we teach, you finally have a full idea of everything that is on your plate, and the ability to utilize time math to your advantage is an important skill that develops and helps you make sense of how much you can do each day.
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Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team