97. Time Management 101 - How I Create More Time In My Life

Time Management 101 Q&A with Michel Shah, lead UpSkiller, president and founder of UpSkill:

🕰 Topics Covered: 

• Juggling Multiple Responsibilities: Learn strategies to balance work, family, and multiple projects 
• Eisenhower Matrix: The power of this prioritization tool 
• The Driving 'Why': Explore how a clear understanding of your 'why' can guide decision-making, prioritization, and help in keeping the main thing the main thing.
• Clarity in Goals & Processes
• Defining Work-Life Balance
• SMART Goals (refer to Episode 14): Uncover the essence of setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals
• Systematic Approach: Learn about the integration of to-do lists, calendars, and other tools to outsource your brain and streamline your life

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Transcript

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In this episode, I'm speaking with upskillers about a really truly a skill that most of us could improve in some way or another. If this is a skill that can make the difference between those Who are able to get things done and those who really struggle to get things done. welcome to Upskill Talks, I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, lead Upskill at Upskill Community. Upskill Talks is a podcast for leaders, leaders who are actively seeking innovative and creative ways to interact. Lead themselves and others in every episode through real life stories and enlightening conversations, we will explore the challenges and opportunities real leaders face in today's everchanging workplace. We will present you with real strategies. For you to leverage your soft skills and produce transformative results. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let us begin. Today, we're talking about time management and I'm joined for this episode by fellow Upskillers and we're really having a conversation about how we use time in our lives. What is time management? How do we actually execute at higher levels to make what we do more effective? And to help ourselves free up space for ourselves and for the joy of life. One thing that I say is, start off by thinking about someone that you believe is super successful, super busy, super productive, someone whom you admire. And I want you then to think about how many hours does this person have in their day. Right. And you have the same amount of time in your day. So all of us are given the same amount of time. What makes the difference is not if we manage time, because we literally can't manage time. You can't pause it. You can't press pause and stop it. You can't speed it up. You can't slow it down. You can't add any more. You can't take off any. You're stuck with a 24 hour block of time in a day, like everybody else. And so the question therefore is, how do we manage? Ourselves and our activities and our priorities within that block of time. That's what we're going to be talking about today. I'm going to begin by saying you don't need to worry about time management. If you don't have goals that matter to you, if you have no priorities, if you have nothing that you want to achieve, that management's not something you need to worry about. Mastering the skill is critical for people who have things they need to get done, more critical for people who have very important goals, compelling goals that they want to get done. That's when this skill becomes one of your critical skills. Let's do this together. I'll open up for questions. My name is Flora, and my question for you, Michelle, is how do you juggle multiple lines of work at once? Let's say you have multiple projects, or you have multiple supervisors or managers that you're reporting to, and they all need different things from you, maybe sometimes at the same time. Or maybe you're running multiple businesses. You have a full time job and a side hustle, and maybe you have kids or you have school, how do you do it? Many people do this there. I spoke with a colleague of mine recently who is a healthcare professional. Who lectures at the college, who has three young children, who teaches yoga, who has about five or six different things that she does and, and she's getting them all done. So the question is, how does she do it? I think she prioritizes when you have this many things to do, you prioritize and you really have to get magical at. Organizing yourself at being clear about what the main things are and what things that are not important are. And one of the key tools that we recommend for time management when these many things are part of what you have to do is the Eisenhower matrix. The Eisenhower matrix helps us to categorize tasks and activities by things that are urgent compared to not urgent. And what it says is There are quadrants that you want to spend more time on, so it's not just having a list of things to do or having multiple things to do, it's understanding the quality of the different tasks and understanding how tasks impact the bottom line. Which activities are related to what outputs, which activities add more value, and which ones don't add as much value. Everyone who has to juggle multiple things, they have to choose what they're going to do with their time and what they're not going to do with their time. They're going to delegate, they're going to leverage partnerships, they're going to leverage systems, technology. We're going to do all of those things in order to make things work. More than anything else. They're have to, you're going to have to find discipline to wake up and to go to bed. It's really interesting that a lot of people think about the first place where discipline needs to start is waking up early. But actually I want to suggest that the place where it needs to start is getting to bed on time, which is the piece that we usually don't think about. So people who get to bed on time, wake up on time, get sufficient rest. Have sufficient energy. That means well being routines that support your energy. Therefore have the space organized for work structure, their work in, in blocks of time that suit their needs and understand how they work, understand how they're productive when they're productive and what supports they need to be productive. When you understand yourself at that level, you can get more done than the person who is not really clear about how I work. Where I work and why I work. Bottom line, the why has to drive time management. Why are you doing this? Why are you waking up two hours earlier? Why are you getting to bed early? Why do you need to do it this way? Why do you need to give up these things? Because it's really about decision making and choice making. One choice over the other. So it's studying instead of watching a movie. It's waking up early and getting your work done or getting your quiet reading done before the children wake up and they're ready to go to work. It's making sure that after the children go to work, go to bed, you have an hour to plan your next day to answer those emails, to address the different concerns that you have. It's. Thinking about what you have to do and thinking about where is that chunk of time that I can leverage to get these things done. Yeah, I have a follow up question to that. My name is Lucas. So let's say somebody kind of puts out their tasks in this quadrant and they know what's urgent and important and they know what's not urgent, not important. I find that a lot of people probably would still struggle with making the right choice, right? Like, we could work on our side hustle, let's say, but like that movie just lounging on the couch is so tempting to us. And I feel like a lot of people, even though they know what the right thing to do is, they don't make that right choice. Do you have any suggestions for what people can do in those situations? But what you flagged up there, Lucas, is the classic case of your goal is not as meaningful to you. Your goal is not coming from deep inside of you. You are not as passionate about this particular goal because when you are passionate about your goal, when you want this thing, if that side hustle is something that you're desperately wanting to lift off the ground, to get started. To get to another point, you won't remember that there's a TV in your house. You won't remember this when your side hustle, your work, your study competes with a movie, it doesn't mean anything to you. It doesn't mean that much to you. And that doesn't mean you don't put aside time to have your own recreation and quiet time and relaxed time. But if the time. Has to be chosen. If the choice is between moving my business forward, getting my work done, and you are competing with can also watch this movie, it means the goal is not as important to you. The goal is not coming from deep inside of you. You probably need to get some more goal clarity, get super clear on what you need to do, what the steps you need to take to get you there, because sometimes people are clear on the goal and not as clear on the process. And also not clear on the rewards. So something in that Mix is not clear enough and not compelling enough. Maybe the rewards are not compelling enough. Maybe the process is not clear enough. Maybe the goal has not been clarified. Those are some of the ways that we come to a place where we're worried about, Wow, you know, I could do that, but a movie. That is one of the things that I would think would be really impacting someone's willingness to sit and watch a movie when they have something as important as an assignment to submit. A business that they want to work on, a target to meet for work. It would mean then that these two choices are equally important. And we could add also the impact of what you're doing. You don't really care about it as much. Maybe it's not as significant for you. Have I answered your question? Yeah, it sounds like it's going back to what you mentioned at the start about making sure you have meaningful goals before you worry about time management. Yes, you have, you don't have to worry about time management if you don't care about your goals. Because you're not going to really stay on track with anything if what you're doing means nothing to you, you're going to float through. Time management becomes much more critical and meaningful to you when you have something you definitely want to achieve, when you have a goal that's compelling, a reward you want, a process you're clear on, an impact you want to have. When you are clear about those things, the why, the what, the how, time management becomes really critical. Because you are on a mission, you're doing something and you need to get there, and you need to make sure time is working for you. For some people, deadlines, timelines are not there, and that's why we talk about goals needing to be smart, time tested. Meaning, If you have unlimited time to do it, then usually will take unlimited time to do it. It says work will expand to fit the amount of time available to do it. I think that's the parade of principle. And so these are some of the things that we have to be mindful of. Is the goal clear is a goal smart. And I mean, that's not the only way we categorize goals. Now there are smart goals, fast goals, clear goals. There are many different ways that we conceptualize our goals. I did a, an episode on smart goals. I think is episode on setting the smartest goals. I think it's episode 14. You can go back and listen to what we talked about in terms of setting the smartest goals. Once you have those smart goals, the smartest. goals, not just smart, they need to be more than smart when you have the smartest goals out clear, then you really value time management and you need time management to really help you to get to that, that timeline. Hello, Michelle. I have a question. This is Althea here. How does the concept of time management work with this idea of, um, work life balance? How does that, uh, how does that concept sort of assist or help us to Um, dismantle or, um, break down this concept, I don't know, I really don't think it's achievable, but this concept of work life balance, like how do those two concepts fit in? Wow, well that's a really, really great question. Uh, I have very different views on this, I'll go through some of them with you. Work life balance and there are different ways to think about that. It can be well being and work life. It it's different ways that we're conceptualizing this. The bottom line is one. Um, you need time to take care of things like your health. Your well being, health being both physical and mental in order to show up and produce well at work. You need time. That means when you come home from work, how much work are you taking home? How frequently are you taking work home? Do you fall asleep with the work? Do you wake up with the work? Do you, is work life? So that's really what it is. Is work life? Or is there more to life than work? And how you organize your time to be productive is really instructive. So work life balance really means understanding your work, making good choices about how you spend your time, your productive time, understanding the conditions under which you work, how you learn, how you respond, how you communicate, understanding those things so that you can be super productive and you can shade off time off the amount of hours in the day because you become a super efficient. Person or worker, there are people who go to work and literally, you know, liaise the day and drag their feet and, you know, move paper around the desk for several hours and are not very clear about what they get done at the end of the day. There are people who go to work and are laser focused on the goal that they come in to achieve. They're working on projects, they're driving it and they get it done. There are people who have heavy cycles with work. So work doesn't operate sort of at the operational level where everything remains about the same all the time. Some people have spikes in their work, spikes where it's all work and they really sacrifice a lot personally. And sometimes they have lulls where they can do much less work and really. catch up on those personal time. So work life balance doesn't mean every single day you need to split it in two halves for work and life. It means understanding the way how your work is constructed and balancing that off. So for instance, right now it's back to school, coming into back to school is a very busy time for me. There are other times like Christmas time when people who are in retail or travel or those industries are super, super busy. Those are times when I'm not as busy. And so understanding that there are opportunities for me to max out on the life piece gives me the freedom and permission to max out on the work pieces at other times. My business happens in cycles. There are some people whose business operates nine to five, Monday to Friday. And that means it's making sure that that nine to five, you are optimizing the time. So you're going to work and you're giving to Caesar what's due to him. You're giving to the work what they have paid for what. What is fair for, for your contribution, you're not looking to cheat the system at the same time, you know, what is fair, you know, what is reasonable, and you're not coming home and doing five people's jobs and burning yourself out and taking everything away from your family day after day after day. And that doesn't mean there aren't some times when we give a little bit more to help to fill a gap, to help to take a process over the hill, but then we have to remember that we need to come back into balance. So work life balance is not something that necessarily we have to make sure every single day we split it half half. It really means take a look at what your work looks like, how it's constructed, and be honest about the times when work needs you. And be honest about the time when you need a little bit more of your time for yourself and all the other responsibilities you have. And the bottom line is you are no good to work if you're not good to yourself because you are better at productivity when you show up feeling healthy, energetic, enthusiastic, engaged. And so that is why this concept is really important, but it's important for us to understand that work life balance does not mean the same thing for everyone. And part of that is not just the life piece that the work has to happen as well and life needs to be part of it. So it's not a life of work, but it is work for life. Have I answered your question Althea? You sure have. Thank you so very much. Pleasure. Pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of Upskill Talks. We bring you new episodes every Monday. Please take a moment to subscribe. Leave a five star rating and a written review at Apple Podcast or follow us on Spotify, Google podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Don't forget to share Upskill talks with other leaders like yourself, so they too may gain the skills and insights to produce amazing results. Please go to upskill community.com to review show notes, and learn how you can join a community of leaders from across the globe. Collaborating to lead in a more meaningful and impactful way. I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, and again, thank you for joining me on this episode of Upscale Talks.