A few months ago, one of my days could be like this:

• I arrive in the office.  Check my to-do list and start writing a document.  It shouldn’t take longer than an hour.
• One of my sentences in the document reminds me that I should write an email requesting some information.  I have been thinking of writing that email for a few days, so I’d better write it now before I forget again.
• I am half way through the email I remember that the person to whom I’m writing asked me yesterday if I had 10 minutes.  I told him I would call him later… and I forgot.  I decide to go talk to him.  After 10 minutes I realize that there is some confusion in the team and call a meeting to make sure we all have the same goal in mind.  It shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes, but in the end it lasts 2 hours.
• Back at my desk.  I check the email.  There is a long mail from the customer requesting a lot of information.  I decide this is high priority and start gathering data.  I send an email to request the information I’m missing.
• While I wait for the answer I decide to go back to my document.  I have to read everything I wrote early this morning.  5 minutes after I start writing again, another phone call:  my mates are picking me up for lunch.  Lunch time already???
• Back from lunch.  I check my email, and 15 minutes later I decide to go back to my document.  I read it again.  I start writing, but I check the email every 5 minutes because I am waiting for the data for my customer.
• I finally get it half an hour later and continue with the email for my customer.
• Suddenly my heart starts racing!  I haven’t filled the spreadsheet that my boss sent me yesterday!  And he needed it TODAY!  (swearword)
• It takes me 2 hours to finish my boss’s spreadsheet.
• I check the time.  Is it really that late?
• Instead of going home, I finish the email for the customer.  I NEED to feel that I finished something today!
• I feel tired and start shutting the computer down.  I see the document I started this morning, and I sadly realize that I have written less than 25% of it.
• And then I see the email I started writing while I was with my document.  God, I could have sworn that I had sent it… and it is still there.  I finish it and send it.

My day is over, and my very first task is not done!  Something inside me tells me that I didn’t do a very good job today…

Have you ever felt like that?  Do you have days similar to the one I just described?  A project manager has to deal with very different issues, and that is normal.  But we are not designed for multi-tasking, and there is a huge difference between doing many things and having many things in your mind at the same time.

When you have many things in your mind, you keep switching between them and it is very hard to concentrate on one. Therefore you are not effective.  What is the solution?  Transfer all those ideas and pending tasks somewhere else.  It could be a piece of paper, your email application, a PDA, whatever you feel comfortable with.

But writing things down is just the first step.  You have to build a routine to check that list regularly so that your mind feels that anything there will not be forgotten.  This is the key point.  When your mind feels that anything on that list will be done, it will stop jumping from one thought to another.  And the day you get to that point, you will realize how much more productive you can be.

From the different time management techniques I have learnt, this is the one that has had a bigger impact on my productivity.  And not only that, it also helps you reduce the amount of stress you suffer.  I highly recommend it.

One of your main responsibilities as a project manager is to manage how the time of your team is spent.  In fact, if you are able to make an efficient use of your team’s time while they are working towards a clear goal, your success is almost guaranteed.

But let me ask you a question:  do you use your time efficiently?  Because if you don’t, how can you lead a person or a team to be effective?

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to check if you are efficient:

• Do I attend meetings where people digress and by the time the meeting is over nothing has been accomplished?
• Could I skip some of  the meetings that I currently attend without causing any problems?
• When I sit down at my desk, do I spend a lot of time thinking what I should do next?
• Do I procrastinate when I have a complex task ahead of me and I don’t know where to start?
• When I start a task, do I get interrupted often, forcing me to stop and start again later?
• When I am working on a task, do I switch to something else because I just remembered there was something urgent to do?

If you answered ‘No’ to all of these questions, congratulations!  If you recognized yourself in one or more of these situations, there is room for improvement.  The first step to improve is to know what your current situation is.  Write down for a few days:

• What you do in a detailed level (i.e. 30 minutes slots)
• What you planned to do one day and didn’t do, and the reasons why
• What the source and frequency of your interruptions are
• The meetings you attend

Once you have done this, it is usually very easy to recognize your ‘time robbers’.  Start with one at a time and commit to do something specific to improve that situation.

And when you manage your time correctly, you can assess your team to do the same, getting an overall performance improvement in your project.