Time Management – Let’s Do It Before It Does You

For effective, efficient management, you first have to master one thing: your own time. Good time management isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the prerequisite for managing your direct reports and running your business. Get it wrong and everything downstream - your team, your pipeline, your sanity - wobbles.

Here’s an uncomfortable observation from years of advising owners and managers. When someone complains they “didn’t have time” to get something done, it’s often a time-management problem dressed up as a workload problem. Not always - sometimes people genuinely are under-resourced or buried in work that was poorly delegated to them, and that’s a structural issue no diary will fix. But more often than we’d like to admit, the time was there. It just wasn’t protected.

And the cost of not protecting it is real. Cognitive research compiled by the American Psychological Association found that the mental blocks created by switching between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone’s productive time. Forty percent. That’s not a soft motivational figure - that’s nearly half your working day potentially leaking away through fragmented attention. Multitasking feels efficient. The evidence says it quietly bleeds you dry.

The Business Answers playbook for best-in-class time management

Itemise. Write down everything you have to do at this moment - absolutely everything. From picking up the dry cleaning to making a medical appointment, getting the car washed, every task. This declutters the mind. You can’t manage what’s still rattling around your head.

Categorise. Place each item into a category. It could be functional - sales, marketing, personal - or task-specific: contact existing customers, follow up past customers, place a purchase order, whatever fits. This gives you clarity on where your time is actually going, which is rarely where you think it is.

Prioritise. Now write each task in sequence, in order of importance or urgency. You decide. This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that separates a list from a plan.

Schedule. This is the key. Schedule every item on your prioritised list into your calendar - preferably an electronic diary. Once your brain has been emptied onto the page and into the diary, the next time a new task or ask lands on you, it simply gets scheduled into the next available slot. Your calendar absorbs the demand instead of your already-full head.

Two habits make this far more powerful:

• Open your calendar to your team. Give colleagues visibility of your diary so that when they want to meet or talk, they check your availability first. Fewer interruptions, fewer “have you got a sec?” moments that quietly torch your focus.
• Schedule thinking time at least twice a week. Managers are paid to think, not only to do. The whole playbook above is about execution - and that’s exactly why deliberate thinking time has to be protected, or it’s the first thing the busy days eat.

A word on the obvious objection

“But my day never goes to plan.” Correct. It won’t. The diary is never set in stone - daily demands will blow holes in it, and emergencies are real. The point isn’t a perfect, rigid schedule. The point is that when things shift, every task gets rescheduled, not forgotten. The diary keeps control of your time when your frazzled brain can’t. That’s the difference between a bad day and a lost week.

This is tried and tested, and it works. So try it, see for yourself - then get your team to adopt it too.

Time is the most valuable and scarcest resource any of us has. Protect it. Manage it. Or it could cost you dearly.

Source: American Psychological Association, “Multitasking: Switching costs” - Prof. David Meyer’s finding that task-switching can cost up to 40% of productive time. apa.org/topics/research/multitasking