Poor Time Management
Time Management

It’s Not Poor Time Management, It’s Poor Focus

This article first appeared on SimpleProductivityBlog.com on 6 October 2014. It has been updated.

Recently I have observed several people whose time management skills are exceptional. They plan their day, pick their most important tasks, fill in gaps…and never get things done.

Why? It’s not poor time management…it’s poor focus management.

What Is Time Management?

Time management is making the best use of available time, based on your tasks, priorities and due dates.

In order to have good time management, you need to know what your outstanding tasks are, when they are done, what done looks like, and be able to break down the work into do-able chunks. The good time manager then arranges his work to fit the available time. Most good time managers have something with them at all times so they can move forward on a project.

What Is Focus Management?

Focus management, on the other hand, is what you are paying attention to at the moment.

A good focus manager is good at single-tasking, blocking out noise, and not being thrown off course by temptations or distractions.

Focus management is harder than it used to be with all the devices pinging and beeping and flashing for our attention.

How Do You Tell Which One Is A Problem?

In both cases, the person will not get much done. So the end result is the same.

It only has to be either one to decrease your effective work.

A great time manager with poor focus skills won’t get the things she sets out to do done because she has been pulled in other directions.

A great focus manager with poor time management skills will get things done, but they will be the wrong things.

So how do you tell what the problem might be?

If you have a day where you didn’t get as much done, ask yourself about your time management. Did you have a plan? Did you follow the plan? Did the plan take advantage of odd pockets of time?

Then ask yourself about your focus. Did you not get things done because of interruptions? Or did you not get things done because when you were supposed to be working on a task, you were thinking of something else, perhaps an email you had just read?

Tips For Focus Management

There are several things that you can do to manage your focus.

  • Don’t use email as a filler. One of the first things people do to use up little bits of time is to check email. However, email rarely needs just a read – it needs a response, research or filing. By checking email quickly before moving onto another activity you will find that your mind is not open to the new activity, but processing the email you just read.
  • Get things out of your head. Before you focus on something new, write down all those things that are going through your head. By writing things down, you clear the slate, but without the loss of train of thought for when you can next focus on the task.
  • Build in transition time between activities. Just as we need to build in travel time between appointments, we need to build in travel time between tasks. During this time we can think about what we were just focusing on, make any notes we need to for when we come back to it, and shift our focus onto the new task. Not only does it mean avoiding the “now where was I?” question, it also means we have to make sure we are better prepared for the next task or activity.

Conclusion

Not getting things done could be poor time management, but it could also be poor focus management. By figuring out what the problem is, and then applying simple techniques, we can manage our focus better, and gain better productivity.

Over to You

I challenge you to implement one of these strategies to improve your focus.

Image by ~James. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text added.