Squiggly sprint 24: Day 1 - Time management

It’s now August, so we have begun the now annual Squiggly Careers skills sprint. 

This year, the content is available on YouTube, so here is a link to today’s episode on the topic of time management. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDyNJsqVwH8

What I liked about this discussion is that Helen and Sarah identified the fact that different people have different ways of working productively, depending on when they are in a good place to do their most productive work. Helen was someone that does their best work early in the week and in the morning, where Sarah was the opposite.

It’s so important to realize what works best for you, and what constraints you have. In my case, I’m not a morning person, and I tend to do my best work when I’m bouncing ideas off of people. Our office is also generally emptier on Mondays and Fridays, and I often work from home on those days.

Like most people, I have many regular and repeating tasks. I bias the weekly ones heavily to Mondays, when I am at home, and I bias the daily ones to early in the morning. That means that I save my energy and creativity both for when I naturally get more energy in the day, and for when I have people available to talk to.

The other trick I have found is almost the opposite of the idea of “Eat the frog”. This common idea is that you should do your most important tasks early in the day. This sets a positive tone for the day, and helps reduce procrastination.

This doesn’t work for me in general, but I also think that it’s also a dangerous rule to follow in my particular field of customer support. 

There are always priority tasks, which should get the most attention, and be done first. A customer not being able to use the system is always more of a priority than a service management request to add a user to the system.

The problem is that if you always do the most important thing first, you never get to the little jobs, as there is always something more pressing. The little jobs then start to become more of a problem when they fall behind. Indeed, what can easily happen in this case is that customers start to question why apparently simple tasks like adding users and answering questions are taking so long.

To avoid this, I have two pieces of advice.

The first is to spend a little time at the start of your day reviewing all your tasks, and apply the 2-minute rule to them. If they can be done in 2 minutes, just do it. As I often say to my teams, your priority is not your most important ticket, it’s checking that nothing else has become more important.

The second piece of advice is to carve out some time each week to just go through your todo list regardless of priority. Do whatever interests you at that time. By doing this, you are ensuring that you are always nibbling away at your backlog. I do this on a Friday afternoon, and it’s a great way to use a quiet and low-energy time of the week.