OR, you decide that timeline is not ok with you, so now you have the opportunity to renegotiate deadlines, delegate some things, work extra hours, bring in a temp, etc. If this is ok with you, you now have control over your existing workload, only needing to work in new things as they come up, negotiating with yourself over what gets bumped. So if you’ve got 90 tasks on your task list (some related to bigger projects, some not), and you accept that you’re likely going to average only three per day, you are then forced to recognize that as things stand, there will be at least three tasks that probably won’t happen for 30 days, three for 29 days, and so on. If you’re honest about your capabilities, you’ll have to admit that you’ll likely only have the opportunity to accomplish three to five tasks in a day. Part of “assessing” your workload means recognizing everything else that happens in a given day, such as meetings, time to process email, phone calls, unexpected developments, new priorities, conversations with co-workers, etc. Once you have everything in one place, you can adequately assess it. And this is only possible if you have everything on your task list, not: some things on your list, some things in your email, some things on sticky notes, some things in the notebook you take to meetings, and some things in your head. By “arbitrary,” I mean the due date is the date you choose when you say to yourself, “When would I like to have this done, given its relationship to everything else I need to do?” Of course, this only works if you actually know everything else you need to do. What to Do Insteadįor effective task management, keep your tasks on a task list (electronic is best), and prioritize by (arbitrary) due date. It’s also an easy way for something to fall through the cracks – that meeting runs over the time you had scheduled to return the call to the client, and you forget to move that “appointment,” and days (or weeks) later you realize you never called the client back. There are a few cases where the concept of “time blocking” can be helpful, but routinely scheduling tasks on your calendar virtually ensures that you will spend more time reorganizing your calendar than actually getting things done. Also, scheduling tasks on your calendar is almost always a bad idea, because let’s face it: our days rarely go the way we plan them. Why Time Estimation for Tasks is a Bad Ideaįirst, people are bad at guessing how long things will take. But that’s not a good use of your calendar. This might seem like a good idea if you organize your tasks by scheduling time for each one on your calendar, and you need to know how many tasks to schedule in a day. If you are using a logical and useful process for managing your task list, time estimation for tasks has no place. One typical piece of “time management” advice that is contrary to effective task management is to try to estimate on your to-do list how long each task will take. Time management is an outdated concept, and many of the traditional “tips” aren’t relevant for the 21st century.
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