Figuring out how to manage your work time is a major win. And the good news is you don't need a fancy methodology or a new gizmo (though go for it if that's your jam). The foundation of effective time management is — wait for it — knowing how long it takes you to complete the key tasks and projects you have to tackle on the regular. It's that simple.
That's not to say it's a fast process, but the return on the investment is huge. And it may be why I've been getting more requests for time management tactics from my training and coaching.
Three kinds of time
For most of us in marketing, PR and related departments, there are three kinds of time:
- Administrative time: non-creative aspects of the project like scheduling and sitting in meetings, engaging freelancers, managing hand-offs, scoping the project or preparing the creative brief.
- Active time: activities that relate directly to creating the work, including research, interviews, comps, processing changes, brainstorming, planning. Get tips for streamlining the writing process.
- Any time: anything that doesn't fit neatly into the other categories for your brain or workflow
Admittedly, this is a pretty granular approach, but we all know that the non-active tasks can be the fodder that blows up your schedule and exacerbates competing priorities.
What it might look like
I monitor time carefully because so much of my work is billable hours (revenue) and because I'm pretty obsessive about customer loyalty. (I want to be able to say yes to my repeat customers whenever I can). And, since I'm a 32-hour-a-week business, I need to schedule accurately.
Here are some things I've learned:
- In editor mode, I can reliably revise and improve a big report at about 3 to 4 pages an hour, and I'm fastest and most accurate when I break the project into 3- to 4-hour morning sessions. For a 60-page report, that’s 15-ish hours and 5-ish days.
- When I'm writing a 1500-word 3-source article, I know I need 2 to 3 hours for admin, 30 to 60 minutes of planning and processing, a couple hours of research, 30 to 60 minutes of interviews and then 3 hours to pull it all together and revise it once. That’s 9-ish hours spread across what usually ends up being 5 to 7 business days.
TIP: You can do this for non-client work, too, like that monthly report that needs to go to the higher-ups, expense reports, etc.
One way to track time your time
Back before I founded The Word Factory, my boss suggested we run my department like an internal agency so we could bill other units for our work. That meant we had to start tracking our time. Not being attorneys, we billed in 30-minute chunks, which made it a little easier, but we still had to get used to starting and stopping projects and jotting down minutes and hours — in a ledger! (This was, admittedly, last century.). It was tedious at first but after a couple weeks most of us got good at it and I found myself really liking it.
Why? Beyond accurate billing, I were able to see how much time it took to complete the project, including admin time, active time and downtime/waiting. These insights were invaluable when justifying pricing and managing individual and department workflows. (I even started assessing a 48-hour penalty when clients missed deadlines and it really helped trim delays!)
But this may be more work than you want to undertake. I get that. There is a less rigorous way.
One easy way to estimate your time
You can just flat-out guess. It won't be super-accurate, but it will probably be an educated-enough guess to work with. And you can refine it as you go along.
Think about the projects you've currently got going, your work in progress. For the purposes of this exercise, choose a project that you do frequently, like producing blog posts, creating slide presentations or editing white papers.
- Jot down all the tasks involved and about how long you think it takes to complete them.
- Look over the list to see if you forgot anything (scoping, admin tasks or processing revisions).
- Make adjustments, then total up the amount of time and see how it feels.
- Check off and refine your estimate the next time you do this kind of work.
Now you have a clearer look at what kind of time you have and how to manage it.
Reality-informed time management
Regardless of whether you track or estimate, you'll have a real-world-based sense of the time requirements. And if you do it for your entire portfolio, you can see how much time you have left for other work and whether or not you can even do it all in a 32- to 40-hour week. It's easy to see if you can take on something new or if you have a day that's got a zillion deliverables and you're gonna need some help.
It's this last bit that's the secret sauce. Because the earlier you pinpoint a problem, the easier it is to fix. The sooner you detect a delay, the less time you need to add to the schedule and smaller your adjustments to the downstream schedule. Small disruptions are so much less complex than big ones.
TIP: I suggest overlaying this on a week that's 8 to 10 hours below the number of hours you actually work because things happen and you need a contingency.
Want to learn more about putting this time management approach in action for yourself or your team? Talk to me.
BONUS: I borrowed a page from the Agile Methodology to track my projects and time requirements. I and any team I'm on has a spreadsheet called a backlog that shows dates, increments and next steps/status. It's an instant look at the work ecosystem every day so my colleagues and I can make good decisions about where to spend our time and know if we can take on something new or not.
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