Three Ways to Accomplish More in a Day

Do you open your email to find 100+ unread messages? Do you view your calendar for the day and break out in a cold sweat as you stare down 6 hours of scheduled meetings? Do you see the same inefficient things happening in your organization, but feel powerless to do something about it? Agile Development and SCRUM are methodologies widely practiced by the tech community and can easily be applied outside the industry to help teams work better together and avoid burnout.

The term "time management" is incredibly misleading. You cannot create more time or slow it down. Instead, you must manage yourself and the things you do with the time you have. Time does not have to be your enemy; it can work to your advantage if you understand how long it takes you to do certain tasks versus others. To begin, you need to understand what you have on your to-do list. Whether you do this with a spreadsheet, a fancy app, or a gnarled scrap of paper covered in coffee stains doesn't matter. The point is that you gather your tasks into one place that is easily viewed throughout the day.

Estimate how long it will take you to complete each item on your to-do list using an estimating technique that is forgiving and systematic: T-shirt sizes. For example, the task "Email Bob Loblaw to update him on our ad numbers" is probably an XS — something that will only take you a few minutes. But the task "Edit the 40-page research paper we are publishing next week" is more like a Medium or Large depending on your thoroughness.

Once your to-dos are assigned appropriate T-shirt sizes, put them in order of importance. The next time you find yourself with 30 minutes between meetings, you know you can accomplish one Small task. If your 2-hour team meeting gets canceled, you can start making headway on a few Smalls or a Medium. As humans, we are hardwired to finish things. Seeing things left undone can become detrimental to our psychological well-being and productivity. It is better for us to knock out a few smaller tasks completely rather than trying to make headway on larger tasks in shorter spurts of time.

The worst first dates or awkward conversations cannot compare to the feeling of being constantly distracted with numerous meetings. There is evidence that too many meetings are strongly associated with fatigue and burnout for employees. First ask yourself: does this really need to be a meeting? If so, the organizer of the meeting is the ruler of that meeting. Meetings are governed by a dictatorship, not a democracy. This person shoulders the responsibility of keeping everyone on task, on time, and brings the meeting back to focus when it begins to stray.

The agenda is your most important communication device for the meeting. SCRUM methodology requires all meetings to have an agenda, no matter how short. Your meeting agenda should contain: the goal or purpose of the meeting, tasks broken out as individual items to be addressed, and action items at the end including follow-up tasks. Always book-end your meetings — schedule your team's meetings back-to-back so everyone has larger chunks of free time during the day to maintain focus.

The Daily Stand Up happens every day and is only 15 minutes long. It involves your core team members standing in a circle to report on three items: What did I do yesterday? What am I going to do today? What, if anything, might prevent me from accomplishing my tasks? Each person should talk no longer than one minute. All additional conversations should be saved until everyone has had a chance to speak.

The Retrospective is typically used at the end of a specified timeframe — projects ending, campaigns closing. This allows a team to review what went well and what can be done better. The structure is: What went well? What didn't go well? What is one thing you want to focus on doing differently? What is one thing you need from your team to accomplish this? To make team members more comfortable, everyone can write their answers on sticky notes and put them on the wall. This view into a team's efficiency and struggle is invaluable to managers.

Above all: be flexible. Agile Development and SCRUM are useful practices, but the core of these methodologies point in the same direction — if a team is going to work efficiently, it has to be willing to evolve and change. These tools are meant to give you and your team the framework for making better decisions and communicating effectively. By implementing these best practices to fit your style, you will find that you not only get more done in a day, but that you create a safe haven for your team to continue to grow and adapt.