Happy new year @jane

I know how you feel about working all day and still having so much to do. My problem was that I used to spend a lot of time on the phone with clients and the day was over even before I had started. When I started out each call was somewhat important but then when work increased and time became more valuable and I needed to cut out the extra things that didn’t bring value to my day.

I started to tighten up my work day, keeping it to 9-6 just on weekdays, taking regular breaks as well. The weekend could be for my work but not to be interrupted by others, if they wanted to get in touch there was always email. This really helped and when clients know that you are only available during certain times they will generally keep with it. Even with emails, I normally just skim through and unless it’s urgent it is put off until the start of the next week.

This has been good for me not only mentally to break from work, but also personally where I spend more time with friends and family. You can find that time management gets better when you set limits. It’s not a quick fix, you have to train yourself to keep up with only the good habits during the day.

I have found that the ability to say NO is the best time management technique you'll ever have.

Saying no is not that easy, I found it a struggle personally but have improved in this area. More importantly, it also depends on what stage of ‘established’ you are, when you start out and need work, you tend to say yes to clients that you may otherwise have not taken on if you had a few projects on the go. This also then leads onto charging less or working for free and we all know where that has led us. 

Waiting on information is when most of my time is wasted, especially when you work with new people. It’s always a chore, you have to check the work before you add it to your drawings then make sure that everything is working as it should. This part of construction drawings for me is always the most time consuming. I don’t want to rush this stage so I always allocate extra time for unforeseen circumstances. Nothing is foolproof and sometimes things don’t go as you planned.

Hello @jane,

Without having any specific knowledge of your situation, my guess is that there is some issue with allocation of time slots.

One thing that's useful (if you have never done it) is to keep a log of your typical work week, broken up in half-hour slots.

You should start seeing certain patterns emerging.

Long post incoming, but thought I'd make things easier for those who were struggling with this (not sure if it helps Jane)

I agree 100% with @ascott about keeping a time log. I did it to see  if I was wasting any of my efforts. The tracking part itself is very easy and it doesn't take a lot of time. What takes longer is the analysis part, but the practical implementation would be that it allowed me to see the "big picture" when it comes to where my time went. By doing that, I could see where I needed to focus my attention on with regards to time management improvement.

For example, when I started the analysis I noticed that procrastination was one of my biggest issues. I did try to understand better why I suffer from procrastination so much. There were many reasons of course, some were more obvious and some weren't. For example, I found that in my case, whenever I had to deal with project accounting, I would put those tasks off. I just assumed the reason was I don't like accounting. Then I realised I wasn't really sure how to use Excel 🙄 . I talked to my manager who sent me on an Excel training course and it solved the problem.

This shows that, once you dig deeper to understand things, then you can improve yourself.

A colleague recommended the book “Personal Efficiency Program” by Kerry Gleeson and it helped me significantly. In particular Do It Now and Weekly Planning alone are worth the price of the book:

Do It Now - any task that could and should be done, should be done now.

1. Go to your desk and go through every single bit and piece of paper on your desk or anywhere near your working space. Pick up the first piece of paper and determine what it is and what must be done to process it to completion. Do whatever is required to complete that task and get that piece of paper off your desk so you never have to look at it again. If a task is going to take you several hours to complete, schedule a time to do it.

 

2. Go through any saved emails, voicemails, and so forth one at a time and begin dealing with each of them to completion. Again if any will require hours of work, schedule them on your calendar for action at a more appropriate time.

 

3. Determine what tasks ought to be done and decide what must be done to process each task to completion. Take the task as far as you possibly can. If you run into a roadblock, get clever. Ask, "How can I get this done another way?". If you decide to delegate the task or pass it on to someone else, remind yourself to follow-up.

Weekly planning

Events change rapidly and it is not feasible for most people to plan a month in advance in detail. On the other hand there is not enough lead time to get critical things done planning only a day in advance. For most people weekly planning is the most effective planning interval.

The book suggests once a week to collect all of your to do tasks (which may be scattered across multiple media) and

• Prioritise all these tasks
• Plan out your week
• Take into account how much time was taken in the past by unplanned events
• Your weekly schedule needs to take into account this (you plan the time left to you): planning for the unplanned

The book of course goes into much greater detail but this is a good start.

Thanks everyone. Recovering from a Covid hangover but I thought I'd check back in.

I hate to admit it but setting priorities and then sticking to them has recently been a bit of a problem for me.

For the past few projects it's mostly been emergency after emergency. Asbestos, a well turned up where it wasn't supposed to be, you name it - which increased site visits and just knocked me flat.

Posted by: @jane

I hate to admit it but setting priorities and then sticking to them has recently been a bit of a problem for me.

For the past few projects it's mostly been emergency after emergency. Asbestos, a well turned up where it wasn't supposed to be, you name it - which increased site visits and just knocked me flat.

The construction industry on a whole has a lot of complexity which increases exponentially with project size. The scenarios you described are impossible to avoid.

To help me with priorities I found a tool like the Eisenhower Matrix to be generally helpful.