5 Time Management Lessons That Will Transform Your Career

“Wait a minute,” my colleagues asked as I prepared the room for a time management training my boss asked me to do for the team. “You’re telling me that you do all this work, managing people and programs and you play in a band, play soccer and you still have time to go out on dates with your girlfriend?”

“That’s right,” I said as I rehearsed my introduction on how I became a super-efficient manager (according to my boss). “You also forgot to mention that I teach music to little kids on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“What? Really?” My colleague asked. “I don’t even have time to sleep! How do you do it?”

“Well,” I looked at the time and saw that I was ready to go 30 minutes before my presentation, “it took a lot of research and implementation. Nothing happened over night.”

There are a few books that changed my life completely but there are certain types of books that I felt helped me get recognized a bit more at work and eventually helped me with my career. The books weren’t about leadership or about business. The books were about time management. The books helped me become extremely effective, efficient and productive and pushed me to prioritize my balance between my life and work.

I can give you a list of books to read on Time Management and efficiency but this article is not about which books to read, but about the most valuable lessons I learned. These lessons became the foundation of my productivity, but the transformation I needed to boost my career and my relationships outside of work. I always thought my time management skills were decent, but these lessons changed the way I did things at work and at home. Later, I was the one asked to do time management trainings to teach others what I was doing with my time. Here are five of the lessons I learned that helped me with my time management, work-life balance and, eventually, with my career.

1. Never check e-mail in the morning

This lesson was not only the title of one of Julie Morgenstern’s book but also the hardest lesson for me to master. It was common practice at our company to always check emails during the mornings and to answer emails within 24 hours. According to Julie Morgenstern, some people are the most productive in the mornings and if you spend your doing simple, unproductive tasks during your productive slot, you are going to waste all that energy and brain power. I decided to try it and I found myself getting much more work done in my first three to four hours in the office than I did the rest of the day. I began to check emails after lunch despite some initial push back I received from some higher-ups.

2. Does it go in your calendar or is it a simple task?

Recently, I wrote a blog about to-do lists (Read 3 Reasons Why Your To-Do List Is Not Effective). Early in my career, I was a huge proponent of lists. I carried a planner with me all the time and used that planner frequently. However, I later learned that there is a difference between putting something in your calendar and putting something in your to-do list. Tasks in your to-do list have no time association. If you were to write down the time it would take you to complete your tasks, you’ll start to notice how much (or little) time you actually have to complete your entire list. Now, I like to estimate the times for completion on all the tasks on my list in order to sum up the time of all my tasks. Many times, I realize that I can complete my entire week’s tasks in only a few days. Therefore, instead of putting bigger tasks (or tasks that take a long time to complete) on my to-do list I put them on my calendar and plan to spend the estimated time working to complete those bigger tasks or projects.

3. Time everything

Throughout the years, I got in the habit of timing everything I did, such as checking email, conducting meetings, and doing my reports. I became so good at knowing how productive I was that I later developed a strategy to know what will automatically go into my calendar. For tasks that were quick to complete (less than 10 minutes) I would keep them on my to-do list, but for those tasks that I estimated would take more than 10 minutes, they automatically became mini-projects and went directly to my calendar. I now like to compete against myself to see if I can complete certain projects faster and with higher accuracy than the last time I completed a similar project.

4. Don’t rely on memory

Early in my career, I convinced myself that I had a bad memory. Later in life, I met many impressive people with great memories that even inspired me to become better at memorizing information. However, I noticed that these folks with great memories had the habit of trying to keep so many things in their head that with time, career advancement or more complex projects, things began to become too stressful and small (but important) details were forgotten. Over the years I acquired the habit of  writing everything down..and when I say everything, I mean everything. If I speak to someone and this person asks me to call him/her back, I quickly send an email to myself so I don’t forget. I write down the simplest tasks you can imagine on my notebook such as ‘call the internet company’, ‘check your email’ or ‘tell someone they’re doing a good job’.

5. Don’t sync your email to your phone

There was a point in time early in my career in which I felt my colleagues and I competed to see who would reply to emails the fastest. Some of my colleagues even bragged about their response time. I didn’t know this at the time, but having my email synced to my phone created a few problems: (1) it slowed down my phone because I was getting too many emails (most of them were just emails I was CC’d on); (2) I was constantly receiving notifications to check emails which made me get in the habit of checking emails every few minutes; and (3) it took over huge chunks of my time. I decided to keep my calendar synced but to disable my email notifications. Now, I only use my phone at work to make phone calls. I haven’t checked emails on my phone for about 4 years – and nobody has had a problem with me doing this.