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Five great time management tactics

Five great time management tactics
Stuart Young
Stuart YoungStuart Young Consultancy

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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Stuart Young
Stuart YoungStuart Young Consultancy
ABOUT I’m Stuart Young, an experienced manager of people and businesses having managed multiple design studios, a large print company and my own SME consultancy in the past 30+ years. In the last few years I have helped deliver clarity via SME executive coaching helping with direction, clarity, strategy and growth. I marry this with a good understanding of marketing principles. I help SMEs define issues, create solutions and apply the steps to get clearer about their goals and how to achieve them, by utilising many business tools, exercises and frameworks. MY EXPERIENCE Apart from managing and running various businesses throughout my career, I’m proud to have completed training in the Association of Business Mentors and was recently a finalist for Most Inspirational Mentor on the H2G platform. Any mentoring or coaching interaction requires good active listening skills. I use Socratic questioning and appreciative enquiry, to maximise a success mindset in my clients whether that's in marketing and sales, evaluating systems and processes, identifying roles & responsibilities along with all other aspects of business. The wide variety of business tools that I have curated over the years along with personal experience and a curious mind help to nurture clarity which leads to effective action. For me, mentoring is about asking the right questions, shining a light in dark corners and offering unwavering support. HOW I CAN HELP I help SMEs struggling to scale in a sustainable and more predictable way, get clear about their goals, the steps needed to achieve them and identify who might help them on the journey. This creates a sense of relief that they know where they’re going, the clarity of why and how to make it happen.  Would you like a tangible sense of purpose that inspires you into action? Define goals, Create a plan, Apply it consistently. I add a level of supportive accountability to help you stay on track with the commitments you have made to yourself and your business. I'm proud to have multiple 5 star reviews from my mentees. SOMETHING THAT MAY HELP RIGHT NOW The Quickest Exercise to Make Immediate Improvements In Life and Business Right NOW!  In life and in business sometimes we need to look at starting afresh.  That could be as simple as rethinking how you do things, or how you think about things, or even what things you are doing or thinking about. ---- I can hear a collective groan! “Not another exercise to do - I don’t have time!!” ---- I hear you, I’m a busy owner of an SME too. But from time to time I realise I’m not being as effective or as efficient as I know I can be. This little exercise acts as a reminder of what I could Stop, Keep and Start doing to keep the wheels of the bus going round. Most importantly it helps me identify the things I’m not doing right now, for whatever reason, that could really help move the needle in my business and potentially in my life. This could be the most productive half hour you spend so far this year - you may even get to Christmas and reflect on this being the best half hour you spent all year. Phil Daniels, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University is credited with devising the core of this process and I have added four powerful questions and one clear action step to turbo charge its effectiveness and application. The Process - Stop. Keep. Start. -- PART 1 -- A) Ask yourself: ‘what should I/we STOP doing?’ There are multiple activities in our lives and business that are directly detracting or hindering our progress. Think of the distractions in your day to day life, phones, fitbits, children, colleagues, social media - the list goes on and on. Answering this question honestly shines a light on them so we can address them in Part 2. (EG: Stop doing activities that aren’t part of your vision/mission) B) Ask yourself: ‘what should I/we KEEP doing?’ Likewise there are activities that we practise each day that are moving the needle and improving things - it’s good to understand what they are in order to ensure they happen in a predictable and consistent way. Having good time management habits and practical task organisers help keep us on track along with scheduling blocks of time for certain activities. (EG: Keep delivering value to our core market/audience)  C) Ask yourself: ‘what should I/we START doing?’ Then there are those activities that we either know we should do but don’t, OR we haven’t even thought of doing. We've all heard of chaos theory and the butterfly effect - stating that tiny changes can have a huge impact beyond our understanding. History is full of small events that went on to make a massive difference, well that's what this third part is about. This question is usually the hardest to answer but often reveals the most important insights.  (EG: Start identifying those activities that could end up really moving the needle) Write as many answers as you can for each. For the 4 extra powerful questions reach out to me, no strings. :)