CLIP: Time Management is DEAD

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I think time management, traditional time management is dead. What I see as the next evolution is what I call time investment. And that is about deciding what's important and what's not, saying no as much as possible, and then really focusing in on what matters.

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What are those high value activities? So that is, first of all, just cutting out a whole bunch of things and just saying, I'm not doing this and I'm not going to feel guilty that I'm not doing it because that's the fastest way to get something done. Then from there, I have what I call an I&O technique. And what that stands for is investment neutral and optimized.

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So there are certain perks of your life or time that I see as investment activities. So basically they pay returns on that time. It's not about like ABC priority, like what needs to get done today versus tomorrow, that first thing. It's about looking at what's the ROI on that time invested.

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So professionally, an investment activity may be setting up a system that will mean you never need to do something again. Or it could be moving ahead a huge contract that is going to help you meet this quarter's quota or maybe half a year's quota. Those things where if you put in a few extra hours or even a few extra days, it's exponential return on that investment.

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So maybe this could be like having a meeting with your staff or talking to your assistant or something like that. You need to put time into it. We don't want to just cut it, but spending a lot more time in that staff meeting is not going to probably lead to 500% return on that time. So you want to get them done, but you don't want to spend any more time than is necessary doing them.

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And then optimize activities are things that you want to accomplish as quickly as possible. So like I was saying with the textbook standards, answering a repetitive email is not something where there's any value in that taking any more of my time than it needs to take. So if I have a little snippet of text that pops up, that's what I should use. coordinating, scheduling things.

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That can be something that can be delegated to an assistant, or if you're doing it yourself, you can use tools like Calendly that make it easy for people to book a time with you or time trade. It lets me tell it what is appropriate, and then it gives people the freedom to set up the appointments they want within those parameters.

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And I still do have like to-do list places where I write down potential items. But what I'm finding more and more is that if something is truly important to me, it should just go right on my calendar, either as an event where I'm going to get the item to happen or as like a task or all events at the top of the day when I'm sensitive and need to get done.

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Otherwise, it's probably not that important and either like shouldn't be on a to-do list at all or should be on some sort of like someday maybe list. So I've been evolving in that area more and more towards it's important, just schedule it now. And if it's not that important, maybe you shouldn't even write it down or hold yourself accountable to it.

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What I found worked best is to do something I call priorities-based decision-making. And what that is, is a filter that helps you determine, it can help you determine from an overall life view or from a narrow view, like just within your professional life, what needs to be attended to and what doesn't.