Time management for Project Managers

As Project Managers there are always long lists of things to do. The efficiency with which you can get through them can be a game changer for your project.

Here’s 5 efficiency improvers I learnt over the years that still stick with me today.

The Bullet Journal

This was all the rage a few years ago but the trend was short-lived and may have passed you by. I latched onto it pretty early and it made a difference to me.

The problem is that my to-do list seemed to get longer and longer. I didn’t seem to get through it quick enough. Remembering the current status of things on my list - what had I started, what was I deferring until tomorrow, what had I scheduled a meeting for - took time. I found myself reading through my list several times a day just to find the task that I could do today.

Bullet journalling is essentially creating ‘marks’ next to tasks to denote status. These are the marks I use

. means this is a new task I haven’t started yet.

x means this task is complete

- means this task is in progress

^ means this task has been delegated to someone else

> means this task has been scheduled in my diary at a later day

< means this task has had a meeting booked

* means this task is important and should be my focus today

Now I don’t struggle to remember where everything on my to-do list is. This probably saves me 15-20 minutes on any given day.

Inbox Zero

I thought everybody did inbox Zero and then found out that they don’t. I first learnt this when I was the CEO of a project management consultancy. I’d typically get 300-400 emails a day. I’d go to sleep, wake up and there would be 150 emails in my inbox. I needed a strategy for dealing with emails. I read a whitepaper on inbox zero and I’ve used it ever since.

Each time you go to your inbox, you have to get your inbox to empty. No items in there at all. The inbox is sorted with oldest items at the top (the opposite to the way most inboxes work) and grouped by conversation (so if there are 20 replies to a message, that’s one line in your inbox not 20 lines spread over 6 hours of messages).

As you read each message, you can do 1 of three things

1. Delete it. The message needs no action and is deleted.

2. Do it. The message is asking for you to do something (send me the file, book a meeting) and it takes less than 120 seconds to do the task. You have to do the action. Then delete the email.

3. Delegate it. Either to someone else (forward them the email, tell them what you want them to do, then delete it), delegate it to your diary (plan the date, attach the email as reference, then delete it from your inbox), or delegate it to your to-do list (or in my case my bullet journal).

Having an inbox that got to zero every day was a game changer for me and these techniques helped me rattle through my inbox much quicker than before. Time saver 30 mins plus per day.

The 6 box to-do list

I always marveled at how some people seemed to get so much more done than others. They had the same hours in the day, didn’t seem to work particularly hard, but seemed to achieve so much more. I learnt that it came down to what they spent their time doing. The 6 box to-do list helped me do the same.

Take a single piece of paper and divide it into 6 equal boxes. In the box in the bottom right, black out half the box. In each of the first 5 boxes, write a theme. The theme describes the sort of work that goes in each box. This makes you think deliberately about the sort of work that you should be doing. Your themes might be things like “team culture”, “executive engagement” or “influencing priority”. The themes are generally the big ticket areas that you need to focus on to make a difference to your project. In the last half-sized box, you write “everything else”.

As your to-dos come in during the day, you have to work out which themed-box they belong in. If there isn’t space in the box then you either have to ditch it, or take something else out of the box to fit this in. This restricts the number of things you can do on each theme. And the smallest box of all is for those things that don’t fit with any theme. Those jobs we all say “yes” to, but don’t really help our project at all. This forces your hand to concentrate on the important work, minimise WIP, and get more done.

Not really a time saver, but it gets more done every day.

Thinking breaks

I’ve written about Thinking Breaks before. It’s where you take conscious time out of each week to think about what you are focusing on, what you are not focusing on, what’s going well and what’s not going well. It culminates in building a stop-start-continue list.

This is my weekly reset to make sure I’m still focused on the really important things. Like the frog placed into water that is slowly heated up and won’t jump out until he’s boiled to death - most of us actually drift in our intent and purpose over time. It’s imperceptible as it happens - like the temperature change to the frog - but after a period of time, we realise we’re not pointing to our true north any more. Thinking breaks disrupt that pattern and realign me to my true north every week.

Not a time saver, it uses half an hour a week, sometimes an hour, but it means I’m more likely to be doing more of the right work in the week ahead and that makes me a lot more productive.

Filing information

Something really simple that we all do. We all get documents and store them in a file system of some sort, for retrieval at a later point in time. When it comes to finding that document in 6 months of 12 months time, we find we can’t find it. We spend half an hour looking. We search in our email. Then we ask our colleagues if they have it. 3 days later we find it. David Allen (Getting Things Done) changed my view on filing and retrieving information.

When I file information now, I either change the title of the document, or the title of the folder that I put the document in. I make that title as descriptive of the content as I can. So when I have a third part audit on my project, rather than saving this document to some non-descript part of my file system with a generic name I’ll never find again, I rename the document “third party audit from KPMG that particularly highlighted the need to improve on risk management with some great examples”. When you do this to every document, the search facilities in your file system come into their own. I can now find anything, even years later, because the context and the value are stored with the document.

This saves me hours of time when it comes to retrieving that document from years ago. It doesn’t happen often, but I reckon it saves me 2-3 hours probably once a quarter.

As someone who is a bit of a nerd on time management, I’d love to hear what works for you too.