Leveling Up Time and Task Management

I’ve been privileged to work for some great companies in the past; companies who absolutely had their shit together. While I’ve appreciated other employers, the good ones helped me grow as a developer and leader.

You Can’t Leader Others If You Can’t Lead Yourself

When I was at FinTech, in order to become a leader, I participated in what was called “The Journey.” Yeah, a bit cheesy, but at least they had a well-defined path to leadership unlike many other companies I’ve worked for. Anyway, The Journey consisted of several levels with Level 1 being what I want to talk about today. For what it’s worth, I made it to Level 2 (Team Leader). I believe Level 3 was Director-level, and 4+ was executive-level stuff.

The gist of Level 1 was that if you can’t lead yourself, you can’t lead others. This coursework in this level focused on task and time management, writing and responding to emails, leaving voice mails, and a few other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten about. While all of those things are valuable, I want to focus on task and time management in this post.

There are a lot of ways to manage both time and tasks. For me, the biggest challenges I deal with are not having clearly defined goals and dealing with distractions.

Goals

Goals were a big part of the course, and the focus was on SMART goals. As a refresher, your goals should be

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time bound

It’s unfortunate that more companies don’t have explicit training on creating and managing SMART goals. From my experience, most assume everyone knows what should be a SMART goal and how to write them.

I’m pretty sure I had a SMART goal for completion of the course, just like I continue to use SMART goals in my current job. In fact, here’s one of them:

Pass the AZ-104 (Azure Admin) exam by July 31 so that I can start focusing on the Azure Architect certification exam since AZ-104 is a prerequisite.

It’s specific (pass the exam), measurable (I know what the passing score is), achievable (study and hands-on experience say I should pass it), relevant (it’s definitely relevant for my job), and time bound (by the end of this month).

If you’re not using the SMART format for your own goals, you should start, but read this wikipedia article because it has some interesting thoughts about the effectiveness. S.M.A.R.T. Goals Made Simple: 10 Steps to Master Your Personal and Career Goals by S.J. Scott is a good book on the subject, too.

I do think it’s one of those things where YMMV, but I still believe they are a good tool for your toolbox.

You should also look into OKRs. It’s unfortunate that so many companies have simply renamed “goals” to OKRs without properly training their employees on the what, why, and how of OKRs. I strongly suggest reading Measure What Matters by John Doerr for a deep dive into the history and use of OKRs. While I was job searching a couple years ago, I wrote OKRs to track the process. Here’s an example (with some key information changed):

Get a job at BigTechCompany as measured by
Apply to two or more roles per week until Sept 1, 2022.
Have at least two initial conversations with hiring managers per month until Sept 1, 2022.
Have at least four interview loops by Sept 1, 2022.
Get at least one job offer by October 21, 2022.

I kept track of my progress in the same document, and the comments are interesting. It looks I was making some headway until I wasn’t. Need less to say, I did not get a job at BigTechCompany, but that’s ok, I’m happy where I am.

If you have to get something important done, wrap it in a SMART goal or create some OKRs and let them help guide you to completion.

Focus

I blogged about ways to beat procrastination early in July, and those methods are things you should check out. In The Journey course I took, I’m sure it covered the Pomodoro technique, and I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some variation of the 2-Minute Rule.

Distractions are a killer when it comes to getting things done. My office is full of distractions, and for the most part, I’m good about avoiding those distractions. It tends to be distractions of the software variety that kill my productivity. I’m talking about games and surfing that’s not related to what I should be doing.

One of the best tools I’ve ever installed came right around the time I took the course and it was to help with distractions and to figure out where my time was being spent. RescueTime has some great features including the ability to log activity in different applications, showing where your time is being spent. Some may think this is a bit invasive, but I find it valuable, AND it’s opt-in. I can set goals and alerts around specific applications or categories of applications. The premium version has a feature called “Focus Time” and it’s just what you’d expect.

I can get many of these features on my Mac / iPhone with Focus and Screen Time, but for Windows, RescueTime is awesome, AND if I want consistent reporting across my OSes, RescueTime is a great way to go.

I hope you enjoyed today’s post.

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