How to Protect Your Time

Some days, it feels impossible to carve out time and mental space to get through your work tasks. Sure, you might have built a beautiful plan for your week, but it’s only noon on Tuesday, and that plan is out the window: interruptions, urgent requests, shifting priorities. How can you protect your time so you stay productive?

Before we talk about protecting your time, make sure you’ve read my previous post about how to structure your time for maximum efficiency and ease.

Enemies of Efficiency

If your orderly schedule is constantly being intruded upon, who or what is to blame? Let’s look at the top offenders and see if we can implement strategies and techniques to protect your time.

Meetings

Depending on which study you trust, you’re probably spending between 7.5 and 23 hours a week in meetings. Some of those hours are great and considerably more efficient than talking to a group of people independently or wasting time misinterpreting people’s emails and getting frustrated. But some meeting time is a complete waste. To protect your time from low-value meetings, try the following:

Talk with your team leader about how to build a better meeting structure. While you’re at it, consider which topics you’ve been covering in meetings would be better suited to an asynchronous approach.Assess whether you’re using your time on the most valuable topics using this Weed-o-Meter tool.Triage whether you need to attend a meeting, and if so, for how long, with these strategies for politely declining an invite.Email

Email is right up there with meetings as the second most significant black hole in your calendar. When I think back to the trickle of emails I received early in my career when the inter-office envelope was the primary mode of communication; I wonder what we’re doing to ourselves today.

Many people I know have completely given up trying to process their email. Some have declared email bankruptcy, while others have just learned to live with the little bubble that shows 35,723 unread messages and the constant low-level anxiety that neglecting one of them was a career-limiting move.

Rather than giving in, try these approaches to wrangling your email:

Set standards for communication on your team, particularly about what gets communicated to whom and the expectations for how responsive people need to be.Run a workshop with your team on better email practices where emails are crafted to help the receiver efficiently process and respond to information.Open Workspaces

Open-layout offices have become ubiquitous, but the research on their impact on productivity and morale is not good. Even more bizarre, face-to-face interactions are 70% lower in open offices. Whoops! [To be candid, I advocated for an open office layout as a leader and always enjoyed it, but I know now that it was not great for most of my team.]

Use these techniques to protect your time and focus in an open office:

Create what Professor Linda Lai calls a fourth wall using a physical or symbolic barrier to signal you’re not open to distractions. These might include wearing headphones or having a sign on your workstation that says, “Do Not Disturb.”Use private or quiet spaces in your office for periods of focused work. Most open offices have small stations where you can close a door or open areas like the cafeteria that are mostly deserted at off-peak hours.Why You Need to Protect Your Time From Yourself

It’s easy to point fingers at all the inefficiencies from your environment, company processes, or manager’s behaviors. It’s important to reflect on the self-inflicted efficiency issues slowing you down. Do any of these sound familiar?

FOMO

Are you letting yourself be distracted by activities that are not mandatory but they’re interesting, captivating, or exclusive? Perhaps fear of missing out is the biggest issue you have to address if you’re going to protect your time. If you’re ready to address your FOMO problem and embrace what Anil Dash calls JOMO (Joy of Missing Out), this article by The HT Group has some promising evidence-based approaches.

Distractions

If your work environment exposes you to more bells, shiny objects, and temptations than a Vegas casino, no wonder you’re having trouble protecting your time. What is it that you need to change? Start with this list.

Remove notifications from email, Slack, Teams, etc. Don’t allow the interruptions or even the little badges that tally what you’re missing.Set up different versions of focus mode on your phone, tablet, or computer for deep work, regular work, and private time. Turn on the appropriate mode for how you’re spending your time (that includes blocking personal notifications while you’re working, blocking work notifications on your downtime, and blocking both when you’re trying to get into focus and flow)Use different spots for different work to signal to your brain what you’re supposed to be up to. Make your deep work spot as distraction-free as possible, including leaving your phone in another room. It turns out that having your phone in sight (even if it’s off) decreases your cognitive capacity.Set up email filters so that when you have dedicated work email time, you’re not getting distracted by the NYT 5 Weeknight dishes newsletter or some fantastic new vacation destinations curated for you by Pinterest (totally hypothetical examples, of course). Have those go directly to a folder so you have to go find them when it’s the right time.Fear of Saying No

One last suggestion. If you value someone else’s priorities more than your own, your mindset will never allow you to be maximally productive. Look at this graphic to see why you say “yes” to requests for your time. Some of them are healthy, but many others aren’t.

Once you’re clear on the most significant opportunities to say “no,” this guide will give you five options for how to do it while maintaining your reputation as a good team player.

Effective time management isn’t just about having a beautiful, optimized plan for how you hope to spend your time. It’s also about setting and enforcing boundaries for how you will protect your time so you can invest it in the most critical work.

If you do, you’ll be the primary beneficiary. A study by Mark, Gudith, and Klocke suggested that interruptions don’t stop you from completing your work on time or with decent quality. Still, they do cause you to work faster, exert more effort, and experience more stress and higher frustration. Those are problems worth avoiding.

In the next post, I’ll suggest techniques for the third and final aspect of time management: adapting your time. Stay tuned.

Additional Resources

1 Yes and 3 Less – A Different Way to Look at Prioritization

Enough is Enough!–Tips and Tools for Saying NO

Protecting Your Time by Setting Better Boundaries by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

 

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