Dropping quality to manage time

How to get stuff done on time by purposefully and proactively managing the quality of your output

One of the most important skills that everyone needs is managing your own time. Over time I developed a ruthless and rigorous system to make sure I get stuff done on time and helped many people to improve their own time management skills.

The main thing that I aim for is to aggressively focus on things that matter and reduce stress from having things not done. The latter is underestimated by a lot of people, as a good time management system will actually severely drive down stress by letting you focus on a few things at a time and not worry about the rest.

I use several tactics to make sure I allocate my time to things that matter:

• Explicit rejection: I have a “Not Doing” list, partially in my head and partially written down and make sure to communicate to others things that are explicitly outside my focus to set expectations.

• Scheduling: I live and die by the calendar and aggressively manage my time. I schedule time for meetings and for specific tasks and even mundane and family activities are recorded religiously to make sure that I can accommodate them.

• Proactive procrastination: I will aggressively push tasks to the future if I can’t accommodate them currently and they lack urgency. I use Things as the task manager which makes it easy to schedule tasks to come to your attention in the future. It’s very important to use a tool or a list, so you wouldn’t stress about what you have coming, but would take one task at a time.

Unfortunately even with aggressive time management, saying “no” a lot and pushing as much work as you can to the future, you still may end up with more urgent work than you can accomplish in the time you have.

This is where I feel that not enough guidance is available — once I have exhausted all other options, I will start explicitly and intentionally reducing the quality of my work to be able to accommodate everything that needs to be done.

Most people do the same, but they do it unintentionally (under the pressure of time the work quality reduces) and implicitly (not communicating to others and stressing the expected drop in quality).

Usually the Pareto rule applies to most tasks — you can get 80% of the result with 20% of the effort. The incredibly important part about applying this in time management is to be thoughtful and purposeful in choosing where it’s ok to drop quality to the good enough bar, where higher quality is required, and where minimal effort will suffice.

Generally this is a usual Return of Investment (ROI) calculation, just harder to quantify. You should allocate your effort proportionally to the resulting impact, drop quality where it will affect the impact the least and raise quality where it will affect it the most.

Communication is particularly important here — I always try to explicitly set expectations where I allocate my time, and therefore which areas of my work will see high quality output, which ones good enough, which one cursory effort and which ones I am not doing at all.

If you manage the quality of your output purposefully and communicate it proactively to others. you will find yourself being able to do more in less time and with much less stress.