9.7 Enhanced Strategies for Time and Task Management
Getting Started
- What strategy helps me prioritize my top tasks?
- How do I make the best use of my time when prioritizing?
- How do I make sure I tackle unpleasant tasks instead of putting them off?
- What’s the best way to plan for long-term tasks?
- How do I find time in a busy schedule?
Time Management
Here are three unique strategies that have become staples of time management. While not everyone will find that all three work for them in every situation, enough people have found them beneficial to pass them along with high recommendations. These three techniques are:
- Daily Top Three
- Pomodoro Technique
- Eat the Frog
1. Daily Top Three
The idea behind the daily top three approach is that you determine which three things are the most important to finish that day, and these become the tasks that you complete. It is a very simple technique that is effective because each day you are finishing tasks and removing them from your list.
Even if you took one day off a week and completed no tasks on that particular day, a daily top three strategy would have you finishing 18 tasks in the course of a single week. That is a good amount of things crossed off your list.
Reflective Practice
Think about what would be your top three tasks for today? What would you have on the list tomorrow?
2. Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo. The basic concept is to use a timer to set work intervals that are followed by a short break. The intervals are usually about 25 minutes long and are called pomodoros, which comes from the Italian word for tomato because Cirillo used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer to keep track of the intervals.
In the original technique there are six steps:
- Decide on the task to be done.
- Set the timer to the desired interval.
- Work on the task.
- When the timer goes off, put a check mark on a piece of paper.
- If you have fewer than four check marks, take a short break (3–5 minutes), then go to Step 1 or 2 (whichever is appropriate).
- After four Pomodoros, take a longer break (15–30 minutes), reset your check mark count to zero, and then go to Step 1 or 2.
There are several reasons this technique is deemed effective for many people.
- One is the benefit that is derived from quick cycles of work and short breaks. This helps reduce mental fatigue and the lack of productivity caused by it.
- Another is that it tends to encourage you to break tasks down to things that can be completed in about 25 minutes, which is something that is usually manageable from the perspective of time available. It is much easier to squeeze in three 25-minute sessions of work time during the day than it is to set aside a 75- minute block of time.
Reflective Practice
How long do you think you can focus on a single task without letting your mind wander? Would 20 min work better for you? 30? If you are “on a role” while working, do you think you would find it difficult to stop and take the break? Why or why not?
How useful do you think this strategy might be for YOU?
3. Eat the Frog
Of our three quick strategies, eat the frog probably has the strangest name and may not sound the most inviting. The name comes from a famous quote, attributed to Mark Twain: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Eat the Frog is also the title of a best-selling book by Brian Tracy that deals with time management and avoiding procrastination.
How this applies to time and task management is based on the concept that if a person takes care of the biggest or most unpleasant task first, everything else will be easier after that.
How is this technique useful you may wonder.
- First, we greatly underestimate how much worry can impact our performance. If you are continually distracted by anxiety over a task you are dreading, it can affect the task you are working on at the time.
- Second, not only will you have a sense of accomplishment and relief when the task you are concerned with is finished and out of the way, but other tasks will seem lighter and not as difficult.
Reflective Practice
Breaking Down the Steps and Spreading Them over Shorter Work Periods
Breaking Down Projects into Manageable-Sized Tasks
Day/Time | Task | Time |
---|---|---|
Monday, 6:00 p.m. | Write outline; look for good sources of research. | 60 minutes |
Tuesday, 6:00 p.m. | Review references to support outline; look for statistics. | 60 minutes |
Wednesday, 7:00 p.m. | Create PowerPoint and list main topics on each slide | 60 minutes |
Thursday, 6:00 p.m. | Add bullet points and pictures to each slide. | 60 minutes |
Friday, 5:00 p.m. | Rewrite and polish final draft ensuring reference page complete | 60 minutes |
Saturday, 10:00 a.m. | Only if needed—finish or polish final draft. | 60 minutes? |
Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
8:00–10:00 | Work | Study for Business Foundations Quiz | Work | Business Foundations | |||
10:00–12:00 | Accounting | Work | Math | Work | Math | 10 a.m.–11 a.m. Only if needed | Work |
12:00–2:00 | Lunch/study | 1 p.m. WRIT | Lunch/study | Accounting | Lunch/study | Work | Work |
2:00–4:00 | Marketing | Math | Business Foundations | COMMS | Strategies for Success | Work | Cleaning |
4:00–6:00 | Study for Math quiz. | Grocery | Complete COMMS assignment | Study for History exam. | 5 p.m.–6 p.m. Rewrite and polish final draft and reference page | Work | Laundry |
6:00–7:00 | Write outline; look for good sources of research. | Review research to support outline; look for statistics. | Research presentation project. | Add bullet points and pictures to each slide | Create presentation. | Meet with Darcy. | Prepare school stuff for next week. |
7:00–8:00 | Gym | Free time | Create PowerPoint and list main points on each slide. | Free time | Create presentation. | Meet with Darcy. | Study for Math Quiz |
8:00-11:00 | Free time | Gym and movie | Work | Movies | Free time |
While this is a simple example, you can see how it would redistribute tasks to fit your available time in a way that would make completing the paper possible. In fact, if your time constraints were even more rigid, it would be possible to break these divided tasks down even further.
You could use a variation of the Pomodoro Technique and write for three 20-minute segments each day at different times. The key is to look for ways to break down the entire task into smaller steps and spread them out to fit your schedule.
Analyzing Your Schedule to “Find” Time
What can you accomplish in 5 minutes? Take a moment and make a list.
For example:
-
- Unload dishwasher
- Fold laundry
- Read instructions for report
- Scan current event highlights
- Review course site for what today’s class is about
Start to pay attention to what you do throughout the day and how much time you spend doing it. The example of waiting for the next thing in your schedule has already been given, but there are many others. How much time do you spend in activities after you have really finished doing them but are still lingering because you have not begun to do something else (e.g., reading social media posts or waiting for someone to reply, surfing the Internet, etc.)? You might be surprised to learn how much time you use up each day by just adding a few unproductive minutes here and there.
Reflective Practice
Applying Your Knowledge
“4.7 Enhanced Strategies for Time and Task Management” from Fanshawe SOAR by Kristen Cavanagh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.