The Boss of You

A few weeks ago, as Lau­ren and I sat in our reg­u­lar coach­ing ses­sion, I brought up the (for me) aston­ish­ing rev­e­la­tion I was expe­ri­enc­ing in my own time man­age­ment at work. For the pre­vi­ous two weeks, I had been try­ing out a new approach (which I thought was of my own clever devis­ing) to my to-do list that had with the excep­tion of only one day, proven to make my days much smoother, less stress­ful and more pro­duc­tive. My approach was this: start my day by doing the biggest thing on my list, then move onto my other to-do list items and if pos­si­ble sched­ule only one “big thing” a day. Lau­ren turned to me and said “Oh, you mean the Pickle Jar The­ory?” To which I responded: “Ah, ya. I guess so.”

While I’ll admit that my ego felt momen­tar­ily bruised by the real­iza­tion that this awe­some new approach was noth­ing new to the world at large and in fact had been out there wait­ing for me all these many years of my work­ing life, it didn’t take the shine of the results this new approach was giv­ing me. Do a web search on the Pickle Jar The­ory and you’ll come up with all kinds of arti­cles, though I find that one at A List Apart to be the most rel­e­vant to my expe­ri­ence (and the least heavy on “man­age­ment speak”). And as I’ve thought about this more and more, I’ve real­ized that many sage entre­pre­neurs I’ve known over the years have been hint­ing at this approach as a san­ity saver for years and I fool­ishly ignored them. It is my own folly that dri­ves me here to share my expe­ri­ence with you all lovely inter­net read­ers. You see, as a part­ner in a small firm and the lead client man­ager to boot, I’ve always felt like my job was the lit­tle things, which is why I’ve always pri­or­i­tized them. And while that is in many ways very true, I do need to be avail­able for phonecalls, my email does need to be replied to with some expe­di­ency etc. but there are also a whole bunch of big things that are also a part of my job — for me this is mostly things like pro­posal writ­ing, project doc­u­men­ta­tion etc. — and the less breath­ing space I have for those tasks the less effect I am in get­ting them done. While that seems like a no brainer, giv­ing myself the “a-ok” to change my pri­or­i­ties took longer than it should have. I had read or heard of many folks who advo­cated not even check­ing email first thing in the morn­ing as a way to increase pro­duc­tiv­ity, which was one of those sug­ges­tions that I just couldn’t see as pos­si­ble in my client man­ager job descrip­tion. But a sub­tle spin on that so that I do check email first thing, but then only respond imme­di­ately if it is actu­ally time sen­si­tive, while leav­ing the rest to be dealt with once my “big thing” is checked off my list, has made a huge difference.

So, enough about me and my pickle jar. What tricks for time man­age­ment do you boss ladies who are doing it all use?