Time It
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
In our training sessions with clients, we teach people how to be the architects of their time. When people start to adopt the systems that we teach, they often find that the time they anticipate they’ll need for a task is incorrect. How do we get better at estimating how long tasks will take? We can time them.
The best way to figure out how much time to budget for future tasks is to see how long that task takes today. In my personal life, for example, I know it takes about an hour to mow my lawn. I know this because one day I looked at the time when I started mowing, and then I looked at it again when I was finished. Sometimes I’m a little faster or slower, but it’s usually very close to one hour. So if I have 45 minutes between meetings during a weekday, I know for sure that I can’t mow my lawn since I won’t have enough time.
Similarly, I have a lot of Christmas decorations that I put out each year. One year, I wrote down the start and end times for each time I worked on the project of decorating for Christmas. Now I know how many hours I can expect to budget for that time each year.
In my previous job, I was in charge of running and printing reports for financial advisors before each meeting they had with their clients. I tended to run these reports every Thursday for all of the following week’s meetings. I would note the time I started and the time I was finished. If there was an interruption before I finished, I would note the time of the start and end of the interruption and then get back to work on running the reports. I would then take the total time I spent, divide it by the number of client books I created, and I had a good average of how long each book took. So if there was a very packed week coming up with multiple financial advisors meeting many of their clients, I had the data to ask my team for help in shielding me from phone calls or other work that would distract me from preparing the needed reports. A couple of times the following week was so packed that I estimated I would need an entire 8 hour workday based on the math to complete all of the books that were needed, and I was allowed to work from home so that I could be as distraction free as possible in order to get my work done.
If there are time-consuming tasks that you do regularly, consider timing yourself. It will give you a good estimate of how much time to budget for that same task in the future, and the metrics of the data can help you explain to others if you need to carve our time alone to focus.
If you or your team would like to sign up for our 2 hour Balance and Productivity training to instantly double your meaningful output and find the feeling of lasting flow and optimized work life balance, please click here and say hello!
Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team