Saving Time by Setting Goals

Have you ever prioritized a task or a deliverable, and spent time working on it only to find out that you, your manager, and your colleagues are not aligned? This is a classic case of goal misalignment – the frustrating disconnect between what you thought you were supposed to be doing, and what your manager expected you to do. When we have goal misalignment, we end up working on the wrong things.

Most of us want to know that our work has a purpose. And when we know what's important to our company, department, or manager, it's easier for us to align or re-align our individual tasks and time. However, when goals aren't aligned nobody wins, and you end up feeling conflicted, confused, and stressed. You can avoid all this disappointment and frustration by determining clearly and definitively what's expected of you.

 

There are three distinct time management benefits of aligning your work with your manager's goals for you. The first is that you can better prioritize and organize your tasks. When your work is aligned to organizational goals, you know for sure that what you're doing is important, which provides clarity. It also means that you know exactly what's expected, and you can achieve your objectives in less time, getting done what needs to be done efficiently, and not wasting time on unnecessary tasks.

 

The second time management benefit of aligning your work with your manager's and organizational goals is that you can more easily coordinate with others. When shared goals are aligned you know precisely the tasks and timeframes involved, aiding coordination. You save time in planning and scheduling, and because you and your teammates know what's expected and when, you'll have fewer scheduling conflicts and missed deadlines.

 

Third then, is the time management benefit of increased focus and drive. When goals are aligned and you know what's expected of you, it avoids confusion, allowing a calmer, more positive attitude. It's easier to maintain motivation, when you're clear about what needs to be done. And when everyone is on the same page, you don't lose time being pulled in different directions with conflicting demands and time-wasting detours. Aligning your goals and priorities is about working smarter. On the other hand, failing to align your goals and priorities, causes stress and pressure, and ultimately, makes you less effective.

 

Getting the right things done begins with having well-considered, strategic, and agile goals, which are a fundamental part of effective time management with several positive effects. They help align intentions, condense complex initiatives, ensure effective prioritizing, monitor progress, and allocate resources appropriately. In fact, SMART goals, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based – are central to many organizations. However, it's not always so easy to translate goals into deliverable tasks.

 

That's why it's crucial to create a tactical plan to ensure your activities are aligned with the goals that have been set for you. A tactical plan gives you achievable, aligned milestones, a short list of the most important things you need to accomplish, and a schedule for accomplishing them. Creating an effective tactical plan begins with making your milestones even smarter, breaking your deliverables down into realistic and achievable goal-aligned tasks, with distinct qualities matching the seven letters of SMARTER.

 

First, each task or deliverable needs to be specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of you without ambiguity. For example, improve sales is ambiguous, whereas increase new product sales by 10% over the next six months is a specific goal. Each task or deliverable also needs to be measurable, letting you quantify progress.

 

The third quality is to be attainable within the specified timeframe. For example, if you're asked to deliver a detailed report on Thursday, but the key information you need won't be available until Wednesday, that's probably not attainable. Goals are more attainable when you can plan out the steps and then determine a schedule that gives you enough time to complete those steps. Tasks and deliverables should be relevant. Everything you produce must contribute in some way to the overall goal or strategy of your department or organization.

 

In addition, tasks should be time-bound with a clearly defined deadline or due date and a sufficiently detailed schedule of all the individual tasks needed to meet that deadline. When determining deadlines, it's important to be realistic and sensitive to competing deadlines and priorities. Finally, effective goal setting also goes beyond just being smart. Each task or deliverable can be educational. The act of completing the task or project should teach you something useful, perhaps a new skill or process. These can be either hard or soft skills, but they should, whenever possible, help you grow and develop.

 

And each task needs to be rewarding. While this might be a financial bonus or career boost, it could also be personal and professional satisfaction and fulfillment. Begin each day with prioritization at a granular level. An effective way of doing this is to use the most important task method, letting you start off with your most important thing. Once you've translated your job responsibilities into achievable tasks, isolate the one, two, or three most impactful elements or tasks that will have the most positive impact in the shortest time. What will give you the most bang for your buck?

 

Look closely at your to-do list. It should be full of goal-related tasks. Rate these tasks in terms of their impact on achieving your main goal. Some tasks will have a minimal impact, whereas others will have a much bigger impact. The most important task is the one with the biggest potential impact on your goal. Or it may be the thing that makes other tasks no longer necessary or easier to do. Focus diligently on the most impactful tasks each day and barring urgent circumstances, stick with them until you've completed them. And make sure you block out time.

 

Once you've figured out your most important task, you need time to accomplish it. Time blocking simply means planning out your day in advance and dedicating specific hours to specific tasks. Time blocking gives you a list of tasks and a specific timeframe to complete each task. All you have to do is follow it. By sticking to it, working within a set schedule, and completing your most important tasks in the allocated time, you bring a concrete and coherent order to your day, your week, and your work.

 

Most of us understand the importance of goals to getting things done. But while converting these goals into deliverable tasks is sometimes easier said than done by creating a tactical plan, you ensure your activities are aligned with your goals and the timeframe for achieving them.

 

With a multitude of demands arising every day, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. It's imperative to know how to establish priorities. What comes across your desk with a big red flag isn't always what you should be working on or what should be done first. A priority matrix is a simple but effective tool to help you know what to do and when to do it. Specifically, it helps you prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance. You begin by differentiating between the urgent and the important.

 

Urgent tasks are things that are time sensitive, like today's project deadlines or responding to a critical e-mail from a client. These activities demand immediate attention. Often, we give these activities priority because they're immediate. The consequences of not dealing with something urgent are generally swift. Important activities are things that have a significant impact on whether or not we achieve our goals. Things like developing a new strategy or planning for a presentation contribute to the bigger picture, but they're not always immediate or urgent, and so sometimes get neglected in the face of urgency.

 

Using a priority matrix allows you to categorize tasks into four quadrants: urgent and important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent, and not urgent and not important. This lets you not only organize, but also visualize what needs to be done and when.

 

Let's review the different quadrants. The first quadrant is urgent and important, the do-first list. It contains the tasks that need to be done today or as soon as possible. If you have too many urgent and important tasks, identify which ones you could have or should have foreseen. Sometimes important activities become urgent because we put them on hold for too long. Think about how you could schedule these activities in the future so that they don't become urgent.

 

Next is important, but not urgent. Although these tasks are important, they can wait if necessary, as long as you don't leave them too long, which eventually will make them urgent. Most tasks should be in this quadrant. Urgent but not important is next. Although these tasks are urgent and therefore need to be addressed as quickly as possible. They aren't necessarily important. It's a good practice to keep an eye on these tasks and monitor their progress when you get the chance, but you don't have to be on top of them.

 

Finally, there's the not urgent and not important category of tasks. These are things you likely shouldn't be doing at all. They are distractions, derailing your schedule and efforts to deal with genuinely important things. They're often activities that serve as distractions. We may enjoy doing them, such as checking our social media accounts during the day, or feel an obligation to do them, such as helping out a colleague with a difficult assignment, but when we prioritize these tasks over important and urgent ones, we run the risk of derailing our concentration and over investing in the wrong activities.

 

With limited resources on our time and energy, these tasks should be left for moments when you are not trying to accomplish other goals. Imagine the first item on your daily to-do list is to book flights and hotel accommodations for a conference next month. Clearly this is important – if it's not done, you won't be able to attend the conference. However, it's not urgent. It doesn't have to be done right this minute. It can wait. It goes into the important but not urgent quadrant.

 

However, the next item on the list, responding to an angry complaint from your most important client is different. You do not want to lose your most important client and it's urgent. The longer an already-angry client is left waiting for a response, the angrier that client is likely to get. It goes straight into the urgent and important quadrant. Next is the weekly update meeting. This is obviously time sensitive which makes it immediate and urgent. It's probably not all that important though. If you miss it because you're otherwise engaged with something that's important and urgent, you can catch up later. It goes into the urgent but not important quadrant.

 

Finally, the last task is deleting junk and spam e-mails. That clearly goes into the not important and not urgent quadrant. Not all tasks are equal. Some are more urgent than others. Some are more important than others. Some are both, some are neither. That's why it's important to be able to clearly differentiate between urgent and important tasks, making the priority matrix a valuable tool.

 

When faced with what can seem to be an endless to-do list, we tend to deal with things that have pending deadlines and neglect things that don't – even when they're important. Although to do lists are a great way of feeling productive, ticking off tasks one by one, they're not always helpful when it comes to getting all the right things done.

That's why it's useful to have strategies to help you effectively pivot between competing priorities. The first is to determine the level of involvement needed. The key is to have guidelines in place for levels of task completion, to free up time for more important activities and spend less time on other tasks. When a task lands on your desk or in your inbox, pause for a moment and ask, is this task really necessary? Unimportant and unnecessary tasks tend to take out more time than they should. Have a strategy in place for making decisions quickly. Don't dwell on things. Sometimes a quick decision is better than a perfect one.

 

Another part of this strategy is to determine what's good enough. Many of us have a mindset that demands that every task must be performed to the level of perfection. But sometimes good enough is good enough. It doesn't mean not done well, it means done as efficiently and effectively as possible within the time frame available. Once you've determined an acceptable standard for a given task, you can better quantify the time and effort required.

 

Another strategy to help you juggle competing priorities is to narrow your focus. Take a deep breath and slow down. Make a conscious effort to focus on what needs to be done next. Start small, with tasks that can be quickly completed and allow you to progress to longer or more demanding tasks unimpeded, without a host of other things hanging over you.

 

A further strategy is to create a priority-aligned to-do list. While conventional to-do lists tend to be linear, a priority-aligned to-do list is more of a grid than a list and is split into six boxes. The first five boxes cover the five most important tasks or areas to focus on. For example, one might be to strengthen and deepen relationships with existing clients, two, reach out to prospective clients, three, grow skills and expertise, four, consolidate sales data, and five, work more closely with marketing and promotion.

 

The sixth box is a little different. It's for tasks that don't fit into one of the first five boxes, but you still need or want to do them. Call it the other 5%. The idea is that you devote 95% of your time to the first 5 boxes, while the sixth box gets no more than 5%. Every morning, give yourself five minutes to populate these boxes with the various tasks you want to get done that day with regard to the priority they align with.

 

This forces you to be more aware of your tasks and priorities, because you have to select the five crucial areas to pivot between. It helps keep your expectations realistic and manageable while serving as a visible accountability measure, ensuring balance between the different priorities. If one of the areas is neglected, it's readily apparent. Everyone is regularly torn between competing priorities during the workday. The problem is when we lose our way, taking care of urgent tasks while neglecting other tasks that are at least equally important. That's why we need strategies to help us effectively pivot.

 

Like any other skill you're developing, it helps to take a longer-term perspective on time management. And as with anything long-term, it's best to have a strategy. Fortunately, some basic strategies have emerged in recent years that are effective for developing long-term time management. It's useful to look at three in particular.

The first is simply to plan ahead. Starting the day without a plan can leave you directionless, and likely to get distracted. Create a daily plan, either the night before or first thing in the morning to schedule important tasks, including any relevant details. Consider allowing more time than you think may be necessary. It's easier to fill in the excess than it is to make up lost time.

 

A second basic strategy for long-term time management is to declutter and organize. It may sound like a cliché, but research supports the idea that when you're surrounded by clutter, you lose focus. And when you lose focus, you lose time. You could remove clutter from your workday with better organization. Delete old, no longer relevant e-mails, and sort and file the ones you need to keep. Schedule recurring events on your calendar and automate any repeating tasks that allow it. Use templates for recurring correspondence, reports, or charts. Investing a little time and effort up front can save a lot later on.

 

A third strategy, more complex and less tangible, is to find your balance. Managing your time more effectively can improve your work-life balance. And, in turn, a better work-life balance often leads to better time management. Achieving balance means being able to complete whatever work needs to be completed, while also having sufficient time for your personal life, your family, your friends, and yourself.

 

Balance means being in control of your schedule, rather than it being in control of you. Being controlled by a schedule is stressful and unhealthy. Finding your balance is also about healthy nonwork habits such as an exercise routine, nutritious diet, and relaxation. Healthy habits make you physically and mentally stronger, more focused, and better able to manage both professional and personal time.

 

When you're constantly under pressure, or behind schedule, it can be difficult to take a long-term view of your life and work. Getting through the day often seems like ambition enough. But taking a long-term perspective on your time, your work, and your personal life may be precisely what you need to thrive. And that's when these strategies for long-term time management are most valuable.