Time Management: Less Time Can Mean More Productivity

You want great time management. You want to be efficient. You want to be focused. But how do you do that? 

The truth is: less is often more with time management. 

Less time can actually help you be more productive. And that’s good news, because less time is usually what we get. 

Too often, we wait for a big opening in our schedule for when we can become really productive. You know, the big, freeing block of time with zero interruptions and a head full of ideas. 

And, as you probably know, that doesn’t usually happen. 

More realistically, we get a lot of small chunks of time in our schedules. 30 minutes here, 45 there. Maybe an hour. But sometimes, that can actually be enough. 

When you have a little time and a lot to do, think in stages. 

Don’t wait for the big block of time to arrive; break the project into smaller stages that fit into small blocks of time. Spend your first block of time mapping out those steps. Make a list. Then, when you get time again, review prior steps and move on to the next. 

Why this is good news.

Our energy naturally wanes about every 20-30 mins. As author Tony Schwartz explains in his best-selling book The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, at the beginning of a high-energy cycle, we’re energized. But around the 20-30-min mark we begin to fade; this is true of athletes, students, and almost everyone else. That’s the time to take a short break. For athletes this might mean focusing on heart rate and consciously slowing down. For others staring at a computer screen, this might mean stepping away from the computer, standing up, taking a sip of water, or looking out the window. 

And if that’s all the time you have, that’s ok. Embrace this small block of time, knowing you are actually working within your body’s organic cycle. 

What if I have more time?

Excellent! Embrace the longer block of time, but nonetheless, break it into 20-30 minute sections. An ideal block of time is about 90 minutes, and if you have more than that, take a longer break after 90 minutes (20-30 minutes perhaps) before coming back to the project. Schwartz writes that our body operates in 90-minute intervals, even during sleep. So utilize the long block of time but keep the smaller breaks. 

We often think we will be productive only when we get a large chunk of time. But consider thinking small to get big results.