Five great time management tactics
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Posted: Thu 17th Apr 2025
6 min read
We all want to get the most out of our busy days, and one or more of these tactics might help.
1. The four Ds of email sorting
Each morning, delete, delegate, defer or do the emails in your inbox.
Spend five minutes first thing applying the four Ds to your inbox. Once you’ve deleted, delegated and deferred 90% of them, you’ll be left with those that you must do. Now, prioritise them and do them. This creates a sense of momentum and progress.
2. Activity ranking
How middle and senior management can quickly and easily identify what they should and shouldn’t be doing daily – ask how many £10, £100, £1000 per hour activities they are doing per day.
It’s normal to discover that at least some activities are at the £10 per hour level, in which case those things should or could be delegated to someone else. Now, decide if some of the £100 per hour activities can be delegated. The aim is for everyone to spend as much time as possible doing that work which generates the most revenue. One of my mentees recently told me this one idea was the most impactful process of her entire Help To Grow experience.
3. The Eisenhower Matrix
It is an exercise to put your daily activities into one of four boxes. Draw a square, divide it into four equal smaller sqaures.
Beside the bottom left square write: Not important
Beside the square above that on the left, write: Important
Above the top left box, write: Urgent
Above the top right box, write: Not urgent
Now write down a list of all your weekly activities: e.g calls to clients, catching up with colleagues, exercise, planning projects, meetings, social media, time with family, life goals, business goals, holiday, shopping, training at work, improving systems and processes, delivering projects, etc.
Then, allocate each activity to the boxes – some things will be 'not important' and 'not urgent', others will be 'urgent' and 'important'.
This gives you a clear idea of where you spend your time and allows you to schedule your week according to what's most important to you and what will have the most meaningful results. It's introduced as part of habit three of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Put first things first!, and it's designed to help you become a more effective self-manager.
The goal is to make the top right quadrant the activities YOU do most of the time. Important but not urgent. Put the diagram with your list of activities somewhere you'll see it every day as a reminder.
4. Only ever put six items on a day’s to-do list
Make the first one the easiest and quickest (build momentum quickly). Make the second one the hardest and probably most time-consuming, and approach it with the 50/20/50 Time Block Method (see below). And resist the temptation to multitask: CPA (continual partial attention) leads to overstimulation, which ultimately leads to doing tasks slower and more poorly.
5. Summary of three reasons to conduct meetings
Reasons to conduct them:
Create a forum: An opportunity for individuals with different values, ideas and experiences to share their perspectives regarding problems, market changes, operational opinions, etc
Make decisions: Use a facilitator to keep the meeting focused and on topic
To build/strengthen a team
How to conduct meetings (the process)
Publish an agenda in the form of 'what are the outcomes that are desired?'
Use a facilitator if possible, somebody who isn’t connected to the outcome
Stick to a schedule: Build in breaks if getting the outcome is taking longer than expected
Check on progress
Specify next steps: Action steps must come out of meetings, or nothing will change
6. Bonus: The 50:20:50 Time Block Method
Studies by Dr Glenn Wilson, King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, have shown that external distractions can have a profound effect on concentration. We all know that's true, right. So, create a quiet space, free from all distractions (phones, people, TVs, computers etc).
Set an alarm for 50 minutes, then 20 minutes and another 50 minutes (two hours in total). This is your time block.
Choose a task you need to get done – now spend 50 minutes totally focusing on completing that task. When the 50 minutes are up, take 20 minutes to do whatever you want, grab a coffee, check your emails, etc. Then, spend another 50 minutes on sorting that task again, or another task, if the first is completed.
This two-hour process can really help focus the mind and help to get things done.
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