Managing Time

Time is “the only thing you can’t buy,” said Warren Buffet in a famous roundtable with Bill Gates. The trickiest thing for new remote workers is managing time and being effective in doing things without burning out—and without working 24-7.

Note: This chapter is not a substitute for a book or a course about time management. There are many different methodologies, and different people benefit from different styles. In this chapter, we’ll see some topics related both to managing time and remote working.

Manage expectations with others

When you’re working remotely, you should set clear expectations with your manager and with all the people that are working with you, inside and outside your company.

Since you’re working remotely (even more so when working from home), you’ll have some periods during the day when you cannot be present, or when it’s problematic for you to participate in meetings. Block those moments on your calendar and agree with your colleagues or other relevant people to avoid those times and to always use alternative time slots when your presence is needed. Of course, there will be exceptions, but you’ll solve many issues just by blocking the appropriate times.

I had a colleague that was working at home with a newborn, and sometimes she couldn’t participate in meetings because the baby was sleeping next to her. She could listen to the meeting; she could work on the PC; she could do a lot of stuff—but she couldn’t talk in those moments. We knew it, and we set up meetings with her at appropriate times when she had help from the family, or when the baby was at kindergarten.

Set clear expectations about when people can reach out to you, which tool you prefer for different kinds of communication, and many other things. You should also set rules at home, if working from there. We’ll look at that in Chapter 6.

Work toward objectives instead of tasks

There’s a big difference between being busy and being productive. Busy people like to clear tasks; productive people like to reach objectives.

Of course, objectives should be prioritized so that you focus on the most important and urgent ones first. One of the best-known tools for prioritizing objectives (and related tasks) is by using the Covey’s Matrix.

Concentrating only on urgent tasks first, without matching them with your priorities and objectives, is one quick way to destroy your productivity—when you’ve finished with all the urgent tasks, you don’t have enough time for important ones, or perhaps you’re too tired.

Working on important tasks, regardless of their urgency, can be also negative. Prioritizing tasks both on importance (first) and urgency (second), will give you enough context to plan your time more efficiently.

Note: There is another related technique called “eat the frog first,” which says you should do first the things that you need to do, but that you don’t like to do. In that way when you’ve finished, you’re left with better things to do. It’s important to correctly prioritize your tasks to know which “frog” to eat first.

Stop wasting your time responding to interruptions

If you start tracking your time, you’ll quickly find that between one quarter and one third of your work hours are spent responding to interruptions: emails, calls, messages, and “quick questions.”

You can regain your time (up to four or five hours a week) by adopting some small habits:

• Close your email program, or completely disable email notifications if you’ve established regular times to check email. Consider if you still want to be notified of upcoming appointments (like in Outlook, if you turn it off completely, you will not be notified of upcoming meetings).
• Set your phone to “do not disturb” or disable all the unnecessary notifications.
• Set specific times in your calendar to check email and to go through notifications.
• Stop interrupting people with quick questions all the time. If you find that you need constant communication with someone, schedule regular meetings with them. Interrupt people (and allow them to interrupt you) only for emergencies.
• Adopt asynchronous communication methods when possible. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how to choose the right tools for this.

Delegation

Delegation isn’t a topic that’s relevant only for managers. Delegation is an important tool even for employees, especially when working remotely.

Of course, you can’t delegate your work to somebody else every time, but there are many activities that other people can do better than you—and you can return them a favor by doing some activities that they dislike or cannot do.

Sometimes a colleague that’s physically in the office can do something for you, so you don’t have to go there. Colleagues will be more inclined to help you if you start helping others in advance, if you’re always proactive with others, and if you help them solve their problems.

Being an effective remote worker requires a lot of soft skills—and the ability to delegate is one of them.

Virtual meetings’ duration

When planning for a conference call, virtual session, or video course, please keep in mind that people’s attention when attending remotely is lower and shorter. Try to reduce meeting and session duration by removing less important topics.

If you need to present something and have less time than expected, you can use the Pareto principle.

Note: The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, says that most of the time, 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. As an example, most salespersons agree that 80 percent of sales come from 20 percent of the customers.

You can apply the Pareto Principle to your content, even recursively. If you have a course that lasts six hours, thought to be delivered in one day with all the breaks, you can convey 80 percent of the value with a 75-minute presentation—if you select the right materials, slides, and stories from the original course.

If you have only 15 minutes to deliver your message, by again selecting the right content, you can still deliver approximatively 64 percent of the value (80 percent of 80 percent). And so on.

Tip: The difficult part is selecting the right content to be delivered in less time. Focus on VALUE. Always ask yourself: can I remove this part without sacrificing value? When in doubt, remove it.

Virtual meeting fatigue

Another reason to reduce the duration for a virtual session is so-called meeting fatigue, also known as “zoom fatigue,” where Zoom is used as a generic word, instead of the brand Zoom (like you can use Kleenex to indicate a generic tissue). Meeting fatigue applies to Zoom, Teams, Skype, Hangouts, or whatever software you’re using.

Meeting fatigue is driven by your perception that other people in the meeting aren’t physically there; they’re flat images on the screen, and their voices are coming all from the same point.

Part of your brain knows that you’re having a conversation with multiple people, or that you’re listening to a speaker, while other parts of your brain disagree. This kind of cognitive dissonance can be problematic after some hours.

Here you can find two articles if you want to understand more about the issue:

• Zoom fatigue is taxing the brain
• You’re tired because your lizard brain knows that Zoom meetings aren’t natural

Note: To reduce meeting fatigue, some Microsoft engineers have developed new ways of showing meeting participants “all together,” using AI techniques, such as segmentation of images, to separate participants from their surroundings and place them together in the same virtual environment.

Figure 27: Together Mode in Microsoft Teams

Under-schedule your days, say no to useless meetings

I hear a lot of complaints about people working remotely spending all their time continuously meeting, working, meeting, and so on. Some of them burn out; some of them feel that they’re not productive anymore; and some of them crave returning to the office.

My best advice is to keep time during each day (marked BUSY in the calendar) between appointments, and between focus times. You can use that time to handle unexpected tasks; you can take an extra break if needed; or you can finish a task that went too long. In any case, that extra time will save you from stress, and you won’t fall behind your schedule.

Note: If you know that there are times during the day or week when you’re more likely to be interrupted, (for example, your manager calls you after synching with their boss every Monday at noon), don’t schedule important meetings or focus time during that timeframe.

Busy is the new stupid is a great short video with Bill Gates that contains the phrases: “You control your time; sitting and thinking maybe is a much higher priority,” and “It’s not a proxy of your seriousness that you fill every minute in your schedule.”

Warren Buffet’s agenda was quite completely empty in the video—and not because nobody wants to work with him. Sometimes you have to say “no” to meeting requests that include you with no apparent reason.

Note: I know a lot of people that send a “tentative” response, or they even don’t send a response when they don’t plan to attend. I use tentative when I want to participate in a meeting, but I’m not sure I can do it. It allows me to participate if my schedule changes.

I decline the meeting if I don’t think it’s relevant for me. If the sender thinks that my presence is important, they’ll call me back when they receive a decline. Perhaps the next time the meeting will have a clear agenda, or a clear description that will show how it’s supposed to be important for me.

No, I don’t usually decline meetings with my manager, or with other important managers or customers. I care about my career more than a single meeting slot. 😊

Plan and take breaks between meetings

If you have a full day of meetings, try to shorten their duration (even automatically if you’re the sender of the meeting) and reserve the empty space in your calendar for breaks. “Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks” is a great paper that shows the results of a study where participants did a series of virtual meetings back-to-back, and then a series of virtual meetings with a ten-minute break between the various sessions.

The results are impressive. Doing meetings back-to-back increases your stress level, but with just a ten-minute break, your stress level due to virtual meetings will remain constant, but not increase.

Note: Speaking of stress, do you know how “stress eating” is when someone eats even when full? “Stress working” is when you work when you need a break.

Effective breaks

When you start taking regular breaks, you can feel guilty, but research is on your side. You should see breaks as an important part of your productive workday—but not all breaks are the same!

There are a lot of people that spend their breaks staying at the computer, “doomscrolling” on social media, eating unhealthy foods, or doing other negative things. These are not breaks because they won’t regenerate you.

Step away from the computer, and instead: walk, do some exercises, read something, meditate, do some home duties that don’t require brainpower, play with your children, call someone you haven’t heard from in a long time, listen to music, socialize with other people without talking about rumors and other negative topics, eat quality food, or do some gardening. You get the idea.

Note: Are you sure that the meeting you’re scheduling is really needed? And when the meeting is approaching, are you sure is it still relevant? Could it be done with an email or a chat? In that case, simply do what’s best for you and for other attendees and cancel the meeting, write an email, or start a chat. Canceling an unnecessary meeting is even better than taking a break after it!

Understanding energy levels and sleep cycles

Our energy levels during the day are variable. They change in different times of the year; they change from person to person; they could also change due to stress and other factors. Each person has their own basic preferences. Some people prefer to start early in the day, and then they need to recharge at lunch. Some people prefer to start later and have a short lunch, but then they need more energy during the afternoon.

When working at the office, these preferences are often overridden by the conventional working hours, but when working remotely, people can adapt their schedule to better align to their energy levels during the day.

Even sleep cycles impact energy and productivity. The number of hours a person sleeps is important, but even more important is getting some rest when needed by the body. People working remotely have better chances to adapt their schedule to their sleep cycles if they plan their calendar accordingly.

The burden of working too much from home during the pandemic was in part related to the fact that a lot of people didn’t listen to their body, didn’t adopt healthy sleep cycles, and didn’t adapt their schedule to their energy levels when possible.

Wrong definition of success can lead to anxiety

Most people work overtime, never delegate, and jump from one activity to another because they want to be “successful.” People are developing various forms of anxiety due to a misguided definition of success. Even young people suffer from this kind of anxiety.

Instead of focusing on the individual metrics of success, like money, work level, power, number of followers, or fame, people should think about success as the impact on the life of others, instead of a comparison against them.

Note: At the beginning of my career, I always worked to be promoted, earn more money, and so on. I liked my job, but I was always busy comparing my results with the results of other people I knew.

Some years ago, I met a CEO of a company who was clearly more successful than me in many of those individual metrics (money, power, car). We started chatting, and he was happy because he could spend 30 minutes to 1 hour per day, during the workdays, but sometimes even during the weekends, with his child.

I usually spend much more time during the day with my child. I take him to school; I get him back when I can; I organize my time so I can spend some quality time with him during the day, and I do some work when he’s sleeping.

My child helped me change my definition of success—from individual metrics to the impact on my life, and on my family.

Working too much can kill you!

A study by the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization confirmed that long working hours are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people a year. The study says that working 55 hours (or more) a week is responsible for one third of all the work-related burden of disease, due to higher risk of stroke or ischemic heart disease, compared to a typical working week of 35–40 hours.

Note: The study was completed before COVID-19, and is not related to working in the office or working remotely. Since most remote workers tend to work long hours, especially from home, this should be taken into great consideration for their health.

Use all the tips in this chapter to effectively manage your time, be more productive, take more breaks, and try to work fewer hours—not more. Deadlines shouldn’t have a literal meaning!