Prioritizing Your Time: Tips for Navigating a Busy Work Life

Episode Transcript

Julianna: Welcome to the Uncommon Career or Daring to Succeed podcast, depending on where you’re joining us.

Patricia: I’m Patricia.

Julianna: And I’m Julianna.

Patricia: And we’re here for another co-hosted episode of Elevated Leadership, balancing emotional intelligence and strategic execution.

Julianna: In these episodes, Patricia and I look at the two sides of a career mover situation where I look more at the strategic execution.

Patricia: And I’ll focus on the emotional intelligence side of things.

Julianna: For today’s episode, we are going to be talking about time management for busy professionals at large corporations, because we know it’s getting to that time of year when, you know, it’s year end, everybody’s wrapping things up and you’re trying to get in some good quality family time as well. So I am so excited to get into this one. I know Patricia and I were brainstorming what we wanted to share with you today, and there’s just so much for us to cover.

Patricia: Yeah, time management, we were talking about time management being one of those topics where no matter how much you learn, every time you hear of another time management strategy or technique, most of us are like, okay, I’ve heard it all, but let me hear this extra thing because we still have trouble with time management. So today we’re going to break down a couple of different ways that you can think about time in order to make more of it or do more within the time that you do have.

Julianna: Yeah. And I think just to maybe frame how we’re a little bit different is we’re both business owners and I’ve been in corporate as well. And so has Patricia. So we’ve got all tons of experience from really having to get the most out of our time, whether it’s now as business owners or in our own careers in the past. And It, it, there is just so much out there. And I know Patricia, you were talking about the Eisenhower matrix before and how powerful that is. And I love it because it’s so simple. Do you want to maybe walk us through how to use that?

Patricia: Yeah, definitely. So the Eisenhower matrix is something… So I actually came out of education where it is so busy because in education, everyone has an open door. That’s like, because you want to help students at any point in time, right? If you’re at a nonprofit and if you’re in an education sector, you know, you don’t ever have a free minute because whatever time administrators and meetings and colleagues don’t have on your schedule, it is open to all students. And you know, as students, you remember when you were a student, I remember when I was a student, I needed some help. And so I would always just walk into people’s office and it felt very relaxed. But by that same vein, because it felt very relaxed for my students, I had to appear relaxed when I was talking to them and helping them and counseling them and all that. But in the background, I’m like, oh my gosh, this was a time I had to focus on X, Y, Z, how am I ever going to do this? And so a lot of burnout happens in education because people end up working nights and weekends to get that work done. So one of the things that, you know, you get, you become known for certain little things. When I was really young in my career, I was the Excel queen. But once I got a little bit older, got into counseling, it was always a, how do you do so much work in such a little time? Because I don’t like working night and weekends. And so I kept that to a minimum. But one of the things that I use, I always use an Eisenhower time matrix because I taught it to, the university students. And so I was like, well, why should I should use what I teach? So the Eisenhower time matrix divides all your tasks into four quadrants. And so you have, and you can Google this, by the way, you don’t need like a fancy printable or anything like that. You can just Google it. It’s all over the internet. But you write down all of your tasks and then all of your tasks fall in one of four buckets. It’s either urgent or it’s not urgent. So you just separate those. Urgent means it’s time bound. It has to get done in the next week or the next month or whatever urgent means for you. And then not urgent means it’s not time bound. Then you split all of those into important and not important. If something is urgent and it’s important, you got to get that done. These are things like, If you’re a teacher, I have to prepare a lesson class for school because my students are coming and I have to teach, and that’s the core of my work. If you’re in project management, it is a new feature that has to be rolled out because all the other features depend on it and your cross-functional teams depend on it. That is both urgent, so time-bound, and important. And then you have, you know, the rest of your urgent items that are not important, they’re urgent and not important, meaning they need to get done. But again, they’re not important. So because they’re not important, they’re not high impact items is another way to look at it. Now you delegate those things to folks who can get it done on time, but maybe don’t have the same level or scope of responsibility that you do, because we just talked about this, right, Julianna, progress over perfection. And delegation gets you to progress and not everything has to be perfect. So as a leader, you have to decide what can move forward imperfectly. Or I always think of imperfect as, it’s just not my way. It’s someone else’s way of doing it. And I need to let that go. I need to let that be okay. And then when you’re not urgent. You have not urgent and important. And some people have decide on there. I like to say plan on there. I think that’s the original word that Eisenhower Matrix incorporated is that if it’s not urgent, but it is important, these are like your strategic things, right? Let me look forward in time. No one’s counting on me to do this, but this is going to inform how I take action over the next weeks, months, years. And so to me, that’s the space to plan. And then you have your items that are neither urgent nor important. And that is where you delete, remove, trash, forget about, get it off your list, right? So each of these items, every single item on your to-do list is an open loop. And the more you can assign an open loop to a bucket, the less open loops you have in your mind. And that, believe it or not, it removes stress. When you have more open loops, you have more stress, which means you can’t think as clearly. And so to me, the Eisenhower matrix gets all my thoughts onto paper, assigns them to a bucket, and now I know what my next step is. It’s either do the thing, plan the thing, delete the thing, or delegate the thing.

Julianna: Yeah, that is such a great tool. And I find that it’s so simple because there’s only those four things to choose from. And I do sometimes run into two issues with the delegate and the delete with people that I work with. One is not everybody has the option to delegate. or not right now, or it’s a lot of work. So one thing I would suggest is if you can’t delegate, whether that’s because you don’t have the authority to, or you don’t have anyone that you can actually delegate to, those are opportunities to move into your plan phase. That becomes a planning activity that, hey, if I keep getting this task that takes a lot of time but isn’t important, what can I do in the future to be able to delegate more? Whether that’s maybe asking someone else to do it, or volunteering it away, or even going to your manager and saying, hey, I can get these done. They’re really important. They’re really time sensitive. But that means these other things, I don’t have time for. Who else could do this? And then, similarly with the delete, I know some people who are just absolutely mortified when they start this process. Trying to be comfortable with not doing something that previously was seen in their own mind is something that’s really, really important. So what I suggest with that is put it on a list, get to it when you can, when you have free time, and move it back into your priority list if it suddenly becomes urgent or if it suddenly becomes important. But have that safety net of a list And I used to do this all the time. I’d have checklists and I’ll kind of go through what I used to do. But I used to have checklists of things and it’s like, oh, didn’t get to that, flagged it for later. And then I would review at the end of the week, at the end of the month and be like, oh, I guess I didn’t need to do that because I completely forgot about this thing. And it really didn’t matter. So having that safety net is just really a nice way to move into being comfortable with deleting stuff.

Patricia: Yes. You know, this reminds me of tentative plans. So sometimes we, I use this for burnout. So when we’re going through the burnout cycle or the burnout phase where we’re just like striving and working and it’s, you know, we’re not making progress, but yet in those seasons, emotionally, it’s really hard to let go of things because where burnout coincides with the emotional side of things, we feel like It’s not, we’re less than, there’s the guilt of not doing X, Y, Z. And so anytime burnout’s involved or you’re getting really tired, you’re striving, anything like that, it is really hard to let go of things because you feel like in order to move forward, I’ve just got to do this one thing. And so you can’t rip that away from someone in a moment where they are trying to figure things out with this burnout piece. The tentative plans is like, okay, make a tentative plan for how you’ll get rid of X, Y, Z. Like, imagine that you have to get rid of five things, make a tentative plan. You’re not going to get rid of them. We’re just going to dangle the idea and we’re just going to let it sit for a little bit. Same thing happens. Eventually you’re like, oh, I didn’t get to it. And you realize, I guess it wasn’t that important to begin with, right? And that allows us to start to let go of more and more things and be comfortable and not feel that guilt. So I really like that. And then you mentioned, You mentioned that not all of us have the ability to delegate, and thank you so much for that because that actually reminded me of something else. That delegate box. If you’re not a leader, you don’t have a team, you don’t have folks you can delegate to, you also can use technology, especially nowadays. You can start automating, you can deprioritize, you can schedule. So, for example, We were just talking about writing emails. If you have to write an email, instead of saying, oh, it’s going to take me 15 minutes to write an email, you just use AI and cut that down to three or four minutes, right? You also can automate things. So I have in my inbox, I use this app. It’s called Spark. No affiliate, nothing like that. But Spark is a really cool email inbox for me because it’s really easy. It’s like one click and you can set up automated options. You can set up automated blocks. It’s very similar to Gmail, but there’s certain things that they do that is like one click done. And there’s also these like one click response. And so when someone’s like, hey, did you get my blah, blah, blah, I literally am like, thumbs up, got it. And so it’s really, really fast to take care of some of these things. So if you don’t have a team, use technology to automate, to schedule for later, deprioritize, etc.

Julianna: Yeah, and I love that you have de-prioritized as an option because I think it kind of gets close to that idea of get it, what was it? Progress, not perfection, where maybe those are also things that you can get done, but they don’t have to be perfect. Your presentation doesn’t have to, it doesn’t have to be, outside ready, right? It doesn’t have to be perfectly polished with all the right colors and everything. Maybe it just needs to be utilitarian to get the point across. Or that email you have to send, maybe you don’t need to put every, it doesn’t have to be perfectly formatted and everything out there, right? It just needs to get the point across. So that might be another option for people who Maybe if, especially if automation or AI tools are quite limited in companies, because I know some companies are really worried about their stuff getting out there. Firewalls, yeah. Yeah, so that might be an alternative is if you can’t use technology to help you, maybe you can just let go of some of that polish that you used to think was absolutely necessary to get the point across.

Patricia: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so this is really a helpful tool. But the other thing that comes to my mind, another helpful tool, we’re talking about emotion and energy and focus time. So for me, there’s this app and I’m going to go backwards. I’m going to first share the app and then I’ll tell you why that app is so important to me. There’s an app I was introduced to, it’s called OmniFocus. I think they’re like on version 4 now, OmniFocus 4. Anyway, the exact app doesn’t matter, but the point is I have one space to put all my open loops. This is a concept I learned from Jordan Rayner. I feel like the name came up before. But anyway, where every single open loop is another stressor. It takes more of your RAM, if you will, your readily available memory, right? So every open loop that you have, every time you say, hey, I’ll get that to you, even though you’re not actively working on it, your brain is, and it’s taking up more space in your mind. It’s taking energy, it’s adding to the emotion and the stress. When a lot of these open loops add up, you really can’t think clearly because everything is happening in the back of your mind. So OmniFocus is one of those, there’s billions of them, but you just grab a to-do list app and you start organizing your things. And for me, once I put it in that app, I know that I’m going to review it once a week. So I review that list once a week and I’m like, okay, what else do I have to do? And that’s where I throw them into my do, plan, delegate, delete, or whatever piles. And for me, that has been a game changer. It’s less about time management and more about like the management of my mental clarity and like, you know, the stress, keeping the stress low so that the mental work that I have to do is at a much higher quality.

Julianna: I love that. I am such a list person and I really like having those lists of things that need to be get done. right away or things for later where I totally agree with you, your mind really fixates on things if there’s not a place for it. So even just having that list of to do later when I have time for it or whatever can help so much.

Patricia: Yeah, definitely. And that’s where emotion and energy come in. Every time we talk about time management, my original go-to when I was, you know, 20, 25 and the world was perfect and all we had was our single selves, right? Like, we didn’t have any other responsibilities. Yes. It’s all about time management. But the older I got, the more I had responsibilities, the more there were more people involved in the work that I did, the more I realized it’s maybe a little bit less about time and time management became more about emotion management, relationship management, energy management, focus management. Like how impactful and how strategic can I be about my time so that I use it in the best way possible? And this is where, you know, there’s a, like the spectrum right so during the day you have high energy times and low energy times and you also have positive emotion time so moments right someone gives you a compliment or you have a conversation with a colleague that you trust or you go to a meeting and get recognized and then you have low emotion moments moments like Something didn’t go the way you planned or you had an interaction with that employee where there’s a lot of assumptions and you know miscommunications or maybe there’s an employee you just straight up don’t like right for whatever reason. So there’s dips, right? hills and valleys for both amount of energy you have and the amount of emotion you have. And both of these make a really big impact on how you use your time. And so if you’re spending, you’re listening and you’re thinking, okay, well, I’ve done every time management strategy in the book and I can’t seem to find enough time. Then let’s go ahead and change focus and look at how does your energy in those timeframes, how are you refueling your energy? And then how’s your emotion in those timeframes and how can we get more positive emotion in there? So you’re acting from a high level of energy and high level of positive emotion.

Julianna: Yeah, and while you were talking about that, I had to look up this book that I’ve read in the past. It’s called Internal Time by Till Ronenberg. I’m so bad with names. It is fantastic, and Patricia, it talks exactly about what you said about all that, your ebbs and flows of your energy, whether it’s within the day or the week, and It even takes it further into your entire lifespan and the different changes of when you have that high and low energies. I know I’m always most productive and my mind is the sharpest first thing in the morning, so I always allocate my early hours to the things that need a lot of deep thinking. And then by the end of the day, I’ve like a run out of energy. So that’s when I plan to do more of my connection work that reenergizes me or my admin work that doesn’t require my full brain capacity. And it’s just more, you know, bookkeeping or whatever.

Patricia: Yeah, no, definitely. And you know what, you just said something that really got me going here. You said that internal time, the book you mentioned, talks about energy across your lifespan. So not just in your day, in your week, but how it ebbs and flows across your life. You might be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 20 in your first role, right? You might be considering a change or pivot at 30 maybe even 40 but then there’s also that later life stage when you’re you want to slow down just a little bit right to appreciate and to be more of a knowledge worker than a you know time for money kind of situation where you’re your workhorse right. And one thing that kind of came to mind is I have clients that for the most part, it feels like there’s nowhere to go. Oh, but I have a million meetings every single day. I’ve got so many things on my plate, right? And yes, we have a responsibility to our job descriptions. We have to get all these things done. But at the same time, we’re not machines. And so being able to talk to your leaders, being able to make the case, first do the work, similar as when you’re about to get your brand together, for example, or when you’re about to execute a really big plan, you want to figure out What’s the purpose? What’s going on with you? What’s going on with your audience? How do you position yourself? And then go out. So I would go through the process of figuring out what is everything that’s on my plate? What’s important? What’s priority? What’s impactful? And what am I just choosing to do? That what am I just choosing to do might sound like, oh, but that’s the one thing I have for myself. And that’s great. If it gives you positive energy, great. If it in any way is stressing you out, then it might just be that it’s not the season. And this is where we learn to say no. And no sometimes means no for you, but sometimes it means no for me. Sometimes it means in this season, I like doing this, but I need this time for something else. But it feels like we can’t move anything. And I promise you, there are things you can move. There are things you can move. If not this week, you can look forward, block out time and start to make some wiggle room. There’s always something you can do. And I just, if you’re listening right now and you feel like you can’t, I would encourage you to take a little bit of a deeper look or to take a deeper look with someone who’s not attached to the work to help you work through it. And this is where Julianne and I are happy to help you do that process. But you’d be surprised how much time can actually be opened up when we are willing to make those tough choices.

Julianna: Yeah, and as you were talking, I was thinking of an exercise I used to do way, way back in the day when I was a business analyst and helping optimize processes. And it’s super simple. It’s just tracking where you actually spend your time. So we’re sharing a lot of apps today. So there’s an app that I’ve used in the past called Toggl, T-O-G-G-L, no affiliation. And Patricia is so excited right now. But basically it’s like a stopwatch for your phone that you can also attach the activity to either a project or like give it a title. And then what you can do is use that to kind of block off and see where you’re spending your time. So for example, I know Patricia and I have been trying to figure out how we can delegate more in our businesses. and I use that to track, okay, where am I spending my time, and is that okay? Sometimes I actually found that I wasn’t spending as much time on something as I thought I was, and that was really useful for me, because then it’s like, okay, I don’t have to beat myself up over spending time on this, because it’s actually just not even an hour a week, so that’s fine. I can stop fixating on that. But then other times you may find that you’re spending way more time than you thought on an activity that doesn’t give you anything back, or that you can delegate, or that can be simplified so that you’re not using as much of your time on that activity. And especially in the workplace, like if you’re, and I’ve used this, done this in the past, this without this tool where I found, okay, I don’t have enough time to get my work done. I don’t know how to convince my boss. I did it a totally different way. I’m not even going to tell you how, because it was time consuming. But now what I would do is like use this app to track all my time and then show my manager the time chart and say, this is where I’m spending my time. Are you okay with that? Yeah. And if they’re not, then that opens things up to have that conversation of, okay, where can I start to get rid of some of these low-impact activities? Because that’s where I’m being forced to spend my time right now.

Patricia: Yes, that is so valuable. And it’s doing that work ahead of time to be able to show your leader and say, this is where time is going. This is the outcome. And even whether you do this on an individual basis or in order to prepare for a meeting with your leader, I really like what you mentioned of when you look at your time tracker, how you spend your time throughout the week, there’s recognizing how much time you spend on each activity and where time has been lost and all those types of things. But it’s also building in transition times, times to mentally shift from one activity to another, so that you can be like, especially before important meetings, so that you can be fully present instead of rushing from one meeting to the next. And also, like you mentioned, impact. I would go through each meeting or each commitment and say how much fruit came from this? What was the return on my investment of time? And you could actually probably rate yourself one to five, five meaning this is game changing for our company or for myself. And one meaning, you know, I’m not quite sure I can, you know, this maybe was a relationship building activity, but I do it every single week. And so this week probably wasn’t going to make or break my day. I can maybe come to this once a quarter and continue building those relationships, or I can send an email to stay top of mind and not spend any more time on it. So I would look at each section and identify how much impact came from those responsibilities, because that’s where you can tell what’s going to be high priority versus low priority.

Julianna: Yeah, that’s so amazing. And maybe one last tip before we start to wrap up. And this is the one thing that has always, always worked for me. And I know, Patricia, you were talking about how insane things are in education. It’s the same in corporate. And I feel like it’s even worse now with so much remote work, so many Zoom meetings where people’s calendars are completely jammed up. And what I basically did in corporate was lived out of my calendar. Everything was scheduled. Sometimes I’d move things around, but my lunch breaks, my break breaks, my work time, everything was codified into my calendar so that I knew how much time I had for things and I actually had to physically move things around. to kind of try and jigsaw my way around to see where I could find more time for things. And a lot of people have like half tried that and they’re like, oh, I don’t want to be this crazy person that schedules when I’m having lunch. But it’s not the point of you have to have lunch at that time, it’s that you have a block of time to eat. or you have a block of time to work on that really important project, or that really important presentation, because if it’s not in there, your time will get gobbled up by other things. So, if you don’t think it’s important enough for your calendar, it simply won’t get done, because time is limited. You only have so much of it.

Patricia: It also keeps it top of mind, right? I know when I’m working and I don’t see a lunchtime on my calendar, I will literally work right through, like my brain is in work mode, right? So keeping the lunch there really helps. And one other thing, I guess my last tip is we were talking earlier, about being able to say no. And part of being able to say no is coming up with a way that you’re comfortable. And what I tend to use over and over again that has worked beautifully for me is I learned somewhere and I can’t remember exactly where anymore. I think it was, anyway, it doesn’t matter. So now when people ask me for either time or money, because there’s a lot of charitable contributions that are well worth it, right? But I’m committed already to my volunteer activities, to partnerships with the business, with work, and this was always the case. We are always overly committed and there’s always a pull for time and money and energy. And so once I’m fully committed, I literally say, I’m sorry, I’m fully committed, but I hope you get X, Y, Z, whatever it is that you’re looking for. And that closes the door. That says, I’ve already reviewed all my time. There is no alternate. Don’t ask me for next week. And it’s not necessarily a mean thing. It’s a truth thing. I am fully committed because I have prioritized specific initiatives, whether it’s your own personal business or whether it’s work. There is a time when you’re fully committed, and I think as humans we have to acknowledge that we can only be at one place at one time, and failing to acknowledge that means that we will never actually get a handle on our time. So that fully committed phrase has been amazing for me.

Julianna: Yeah, I love that because it’s so, it also makes it seem, well, not seem, it conveys the idea that you are an intentional person, and like you said, you’ve already thought about it. Right? It’s not just, you’re not just brushing them off because they’re not important for you, but you’ve already considered what your options are, considered what your priorities are, and that’s not one of them.

Patricia: Yeah. It’s true. It’s not that you don’t have time to work out, it’s that it’s not a high enough priority. And that is true. And I think sometimes it can be difficult on relationships, like, oh, you don’t have time for me. It’s like, well, it’s not that I don’t have time for you. It’s that I’m focused on this piece right now and come the holidays or come this mid-quarter week, I’m going to catch up with folks that I need to catch up with, and we’ll find a time then.” And it’s just sort of serving people in the best way possible. And sometimes the only way to serve someone well is to be able to have that time to do the work, the deeper work that needs doing so that you can serve people when the time comes.

Julianna: Yeah. So last thoughts, Patricia?

Patricia: Yeah, honestly, last thoughts for me are just the fact that we’ve brought up so many great, not only tips, but also resources to try out. So there’s OmniFocus. We looked at the Eisenhower Matrix, which is a resource, but it’s not an app. There’s Toggle. I use Rise, which is very similar to Toggle. I really like Toggle. Rise will show you an entire calendar. There’s so many apps. And so You know, maybe this holiday season, you can take a little bit of a break, check out some of those apps and decide how you’re going to create your system, because it really takes a system to collect information, to then organize information, and then to track how you are moving that information through your process, right, to get things done. But yeah, this has been a really great episode. I think we’re in good shape now, just kind of leaving you with some thoughts to think about. And we will be back soon with another conversation. And in the meantime, make sure to connect with us on LinkedIn. Let us know what you thought about today’s topic. Let us know if you have any questions or you’re stuck with any part of the time management process. And if there’s any topic you want to hear about from us, we’ll go ahead and drop all our links into the show notes. And until then, any last thoughts, Julianna?

Julianna: I think just really just focus on what’s important. Even before you have your whole system in place, just focus on your priorities, because if you don’t have a clear idea of those, if you’re not truthful with yourself about what those are, none of the other things matter. None of the apps will help you. You could build the perfect complicated system, and unless you’ve got your priorities kind of clear and rock solid, your time will always be out of control.

Patricia: Yes, everything in its time, everything in its order. I love that. I love that. Well, as always, thank you so much for spending time with us and it sounds like we’ll see you on the next one.

Julianna: Yeah. Bye for now. Bye for now.