Do you feel like you always lack time to do what matters in your job? It is the most common complaint I hear when I coach people. They want to implement the strategies I give them but feel they don’t have the opportunity.
Of course, in reality, we all have the same amount of time. What varies is how we spend it. All too often it gets used up without us making a conscious choice, or because others effectively ‘steal’ our time. These are both issues we need to address if we hope to implement more strategic steps in digital or user experience.
Let us begin by looking at the demands others place on our time.
Stop People Stealing Your Time
There are two groups of people who steal your time and each needs dealing with separately. There are our colleagues, and then there is management.
When Colleagues Steal Our Time
It is surprising how much of our time can get swallowed by others who request our help. That seems especially true when you work in digital, as there seems to be a culture that suggests that digital is a support service for the rest of the organisation, like IT. We are not! We are here to provide digital leadership.
The same is true if you work in user experience design. Our job isn’t to get sucked into every project that involves a UX component, but to help the entire organisation become more customer-centric.
In other words, just because a colleague asks for your assistance doesn’t mean you need to provide it and it certainly doesn’t mean you need to provide it on their timescales. You can choose to prioritise your strategic work before it.
Of course, things are not as straightforward if the person who is stealing your time is your boss.
When Management Steal Our Time
You could argue that management is not stealing your time, because by employing you, they are buying it. However, I would argue that management is employing you for your knowledge and your ability to deliver outcomes, not somebody to simply implement their whims. That said, it can often feel like it is the latter.
The point is that you cannot directly say no to management. What you can do is talk about priorities. Ideally, you would work with your management team to establish a set of criteria to prioritise your work, such as using my digital triage technique that I have blogged about in the past.
At the very least, you need to ask management what you should drop if they ask you to do something. It is essential for management to understand what you will not be doing if you do their work instead. Force management to choose between their priorities and the kind of strategic work that would help the organisation long term. Prove to them that you cannot simply take on more and more work without their being consequences.
Of course, if you are going to talk about priorities with management and using your time efficiently, you need to be doing that yourself too.
Using Your Time Wisely
We are often our own worst enemy when it comes to time management.
Many of the people I hear complaining about not having enough time do so because they are frequently in a state of firefighting. They lurch from one urgent task to the next, primarily because they have never taken the time to stop, prioritise and put in place efficiencies that will help them in the future.
We all know that the most urgent tasks are not necessarily the most important to do. However, we persist in doing them because we feel obliged. We also continue to do some tasks long after they have ceased to be of value, simply because we have always done them.
Take a step back and reevaluate the work you do once in a while. Put in place a system to prioritise that work such as Eisenhower’s Principle.
Prioritise not by its urgency, but by its value to you and the business as a whole. If you are looking for a good book on this subject, I highly recommend Getting Things Done, by David Allen.
When you do, I recommend you also prioritise tasks that will provide long term efficiencies. For example, if you are a designer, push hard to work on a design system, that will allow you to work considerably more efficiently once it is in place. If you are a team lead, put in place a playbook to avoid having to constantly have the same conversation with every stakeholder.
Heck, even taking the time to set up your working environment in a more efficient way can free up valuable time.
For example, people often comment on the amount of content I publish. They tell me they couldn’t find the time to blog or write a regular newsletter like this one.
Of course, I have no more hours than they do. The only difference is that I have honed my writing to be as efficient as possible. You can achieve a considerable amount if you are efficient about it.
Get an Outside Perspective
I am aware I sound a bit preachy. I am sorry about that. I get frustrated when I see people who feel trapped, unhappy with their circumstances and unable to work on what they know needs to be done.
I get frustrated because they are not the victims of their circumstances that they think they are. They merely need to make some tough decisions.
Of course, it is often easier to see these solutions from the outside than when you are knee-deep in deadlines. That is why so much of the work I do with those I coach is to help them prioritise the work they are doing. Perhaps you need that outside perspective too. If so, get in touch.
