From the course: Time Management Tips

Handling unexpectedly long tasks

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Handling unexpectedly long tasks

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- In Time Management Fundamentals, I teach people to process items in their inbox. If an item is going to take you five minutes or less during processing time, you should do it right then. This is because it's much better to quickly complete a brief item rather than switching your attention over to scheduling it into your calendar, which will take a few minutes, and then later also have to switch your attention to stop whatever it is you were doing to complete that brief task. If you're processing and if it will take five minutes or less, do it now. But there's a problem with that, sometimes. What if you think something is going to take five minutes or less and it turns out after you give it a go that it's really going to take 10 minutes, or an hour, or more? The solution is fairly simple, it just takes some awareness. The answer is if something turns out to take longer than expected, put it back into a gathering point. A gathering point is a place like your inbox or your email inbox. So, let's imagine that I had a task where I needed to call someone. I thought it was going to take me five minutes or less. I call Stratton on the phone to get a quick answer to a question, but he doesn't answer. Now I have to leave a message. This means that it did not take me five minutes and I'm still going to have to reconnect with him. In this case, I'm going to immediately put that task, call Stratton, back into the top of my inbox. And since I process from the top of my inbox, it's time to immediately re-process that item. I ask myself, the what, when, where questions. What is the next step? When will it be done? And where is its home? In this case, my next step would be I'm waiting for Stratton to respond to me. When will it be done? Well, I'm going to create a task reminder for myself, perhaps tomorrow, or in two days, that I'm waiting for Stratton to get back to me. And where is its home? In this case, now that I've processed this task, it's resolved. Because it's on a task reminder list. So I can archive this email, or if it's a piece of paper, just throw it away. One final word, your ability to estimate how long things are going to take is a bit like a muscle. There's a part of your brain that determines how effective you are at estimating lengths of time. The more you process consistently, the more you will need to estimate how long things take, which will also strengthen that mental muscle. If you find that you're always getting your time estimates wrong, get in the habit of doubling your estimates. This will help reduce the number of instances where you find that something is taking too long and helps you be more realistic with your expectations.

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