Millionaire Time Management Consultant Shares 5 Time Management Secrets That Really Work

How to properly plan your day to get more done in less time and get it all done Insider.

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As a time management and productivity coach for Google and Lyft executives based in San Francisco, California, Alexis Haselberger works with people who have a lot of responsibility at work, in addition to a fulfilling life outside of work.

Most people come to her with the same basic problem: they don't know how to make the "urgent" stop crowding out the "important." They feel stuck in reactive mode with no time to focus on strategic work.

For the first 15 years of her career, she managed operations and people in several early stage startups. She had a lot more to do than there were people to do and the burnout was huge, so she started developing strategies to increase productivity at work and in her personal life to help people stay sane.

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Since starting her time management firm in 2018, she has taught more than 77 people, including employees at companies like Google, Lyft, CapitalOne and Workday, how to manage their time through her coaching, workshops and online courses.

Here are a few strategies that Alexis uses with her clients that can benefit busy people in any industry:

1. Stop relying on memory

Many people spend a lot of time and energy just trying to remember what they need to do. Keeping it all in your head is not only stressful, it's also inefficient because you end up reacting to what's in front of you (no matter how important) or using your emotions to prioritize.

“Instead, one of the first things I teach all my clients is to use a task app, which captures everything running through your brain—work and personal—so you can use your brain to focus on the task at hand. task. It also allows you to prioritize all the information rather than what is currently on your mind,” says Alexis.

To date, her favorite application for individual tasks is TickTick. It's what she recommends the most because Alexis says it's easy to use, free, and syncs easily across platforms and devices. However, if you're going to put your entire team or company on a common task management platform, she thinks Asana is the best option for your money.

“I recently started working with the head of an engineering department at a large automotive company. A few weeks after he started using the task app instead of his memory and several fragmented lists in different places, he told me that it was truly a game changer,” says the coach.

Before implementing the task app, he used his email as a to-do list, which meant that his actions were determined by other people's priorities and what appeared at the top of his email. Now he uses his time for his most important tasks, delegating the work that someone else could do, and his mailbox is just an entrance to his system, and not the driving force behind his actions, as Alexis explained.

2. Batch messages and turn off notifications

One of the biggest sources of frustration for many of her clients is the endless stream of email and Slack messages. According to the classic study of interruptions and distractions, when we are interrupted by calls and texts, it takes us an average of 23 minutes to refocus on what we were doing.

When you have notifications turned on, you are constantly engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to stay focused and get things done. Even if you've turned off notifications, the average person still checks email up to 15 times a day.

The vast majority of Alexis' clients check email as many times or more when they start using it, even if they have audio and visual notifications disabled, and with notifications enabled, they check email literally every time they receive it. On average, people receive about 120 emails per day.

It takes practice to intentionally close email when you're not actively processing it. Many people find that even with notifications turned off, if an email is open or tabbed and they see that little red number, they internally have to check it many, many times a day.

Instead, Alexis asks her clients to try two strategies: First, disable these notifications, because no one relies on written communication in a real emergency anyway. Second, process messages in batch mode. She recommends checking and processing email and Slack two to four times a day, depending on your position or corporate culture, going as close to zero as possible each time and keeping email private otherwise.

“The vast majority of my clients start saving 30 to 60 minutes a day once they implement these strategies, and they become more responsive when texting than when constantly checking email,” says Alexis.

3. Check your calendar regularly

Most people have too many meetings and don't have enough time for strategic thinking.

“In fact, my very first client, a Google executive, had over 40 hours a week of recurring appointments on his calendar when we started working together. No wonder he was so stressed!” - says Alexis.

One of the first things they did together was an audit of the meeting. They looked at all of his appointments and used a 5-step framework:

Thinking: They decided on a set of criteria that would be required to keep a permanent appointment on his calendar, and then critically reviewed each of the appointments. If you're not entirely sure which appointments to keep, then for a few weeks, every time you go to a meeting, if it's not efficient for your or company time, change the color of that appointment to gray (or whatever color you like). you don't use) in your calendar. You can then look back a few weeks and determine which appointments need to be shortened or changed from their current form.

Removal: Based on reflection, her client determined which meetings he could cancel entirely or simply not attend. Sometimes you can send someone to replace you or read the meeting notes.

reduction: For the remaining meetings, her client reduced the length or frequency where possible.

Redistribution: Once the client made sure the calendar had the right appointments, he rearranged them so that his calendar looked less like Swiss cheese and he had more time blocks to spare for the rest of his work. This allowed him to go from almost no strategic work a week to a few hours a week, which had a huge impact on his schedule.

Repetition: and finally, the meetings are complementary - just because you've done an audit once doesn't mean you're done. Add a task to your task app to audit meetings every six months or so to keep your calendar in check and make sure your meetings reflect your priorities.

“This particular client also had a pretty surprising outcome: His HR manager approached him in the hallway one day and asked him what his secret was. She wanted to know how he was so much more effective than other leaders of his level who had just as much responsibility. He told her it was because of the productivity strategies and techniques that Alexis had been working on with him,” Alexis says.

4. Change the default meeting notifications to 2 minutes before

“I mentioned above the enormous harm that notifications can cause to our productivity, but not all notifications are bad. In fact, meeting notifications are becoming increasingly important in a virtual and hybrid world, where we don't have the same visual cues when we see others around us get up and head to the meeting room,” she says.

However, the problem with meeting notifications is that they default to 10 or 15 minutes before the meeting. It's too much time. Usually you get distracted from what you're doing and then find yourself wasting 10 or 15 minutes, and possibly losing track of time anyway when you start doing something new and you're late anyway.

Instead, set a notification two minutes before the meeting, Alexis advises. This is just enough time to complete what you are doing and not start something else. This may seem like a bit of a cheat, but think about how many meetings you attend each day and how much time these notifications steal from us. This simple trick can result in you getting back an hour or more of productive time each day.

5. Switch from reactive to proactive planning

Taking 10 minutes today to plan for tomorrow is one of the most powerful strategies we have at our disposal to move from being reactive to being truly proactive, where you manage your day according to your goals and priorities.

An added benefit is that having a plan allows you to better evaluate incoming items.

Instead of doing something just because it showed up in your email, you compare that item to what you have planned for the day and either set a due date for that incoming item or change your plan for the day. Separating planning from doing in this way can take you from “busy” to “actually productive.”

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“One of my clients, an entrepreneur and comedian, told me that by starting this planning process at the end of her work day the next day, she stopped waking up with that “Oh crap!” feeling like you don't know what day you're having or whether you'll be able to control it. Instead, she knew what was on the list and that she only gave herself what she could do. More productivity, much less stress,” says Alexis.

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