How to Allocate Your Time, and Your Effort

As Tom Rath wisely explains in his StrengthsFinder books, you can achieve more success by fully leveraging your strengths instead of constantly trying to shore up your weaknesses. Realizing the importance of purposely deciding where I will invest more time and energy to produce stellar quality work and where less-than-perfect execution has a bigger payoff has had a profound impact on my own approach to success and my ability to empower clients who feel overwhelmed.

As I talk with time coaching clients struggling with overwhelm whether they be professors, executives, or lawyers, a common theme comes up — they can't find time to do everything. And, they're right: no one has time for everything. Given the pace of work and the level of input in modern society, time management is dead. You can no longer fit everything in — no matter how efficient you become. (This conundrum is what inspired me to write a book on time investment).

In my time investment philosophy, I encourage individuals to see time as the limited resource it is and to allocate it in alignment with their personal definition of success. That leads to a number of practical ramifications:

• Decide where you will not spend time: Given that you have a limited time budget, you will not have the ability to do everything you would like to do regardless of your efficiency. The moment you embrace that truth, you instantly reduce your stress and feelings of inadequacy. For example, professionally this could look like reducing your involvement in committees, and personally this could look like hiring someone else to do lawn maintenance or finish up a house project.
• Strategically allocate your time: Boundaries on how and when you invest time in work and in your personal life help to ensure that you have the proper investment in each category. As a time coach, I see one of the most compelling reasons for not working extremely long hours is that this investment of time resources leaves you with insufficient funds for activities like exercise, sleep, and relationships.
• Set up automatic time investment: Just like you set up automatic financial investment to mutual funds in your retirement account, your daily and weekly routines should make your time investment close to automatic. For example, at work you could have a recurring appointment with yourself two afternoons a week to move forward on key projects, and outside of work you could sign up for a fitness boot camp where you would feel bad if you didn't show up and sweat three times a week.
• Aim for a consistently balanced time budget: Given the ebbs and flows of life, you can't expect that you will have a constantly balanced time budget but you can aim for having a consistently balanced one. Over the course of a one- to two-week period, your time investment should reflect your priorities.

Once you have allocated your time properly, you also need to approach the work within each category differently. As I explained above, trying to "get As in everything" keeps you from investing the maximum amount of time in what will bring the highest return on your investment. That's why I developed the INO Technique to help overcome perfectionism and misallocation of your 24/7. Here's how it works:

When you approach a to-do item, you want to consider whether it is an investment, neutral, or optimize activity. Investment activities are areas where an increased amount of time and a higher quality of work can lead to an exponential payoff. For instance, strategic planning is an investment activity; so is spending time, device-free, with the people you love. Aim for A-level work in these areas. Neutral activities just need to get done adequately; more time doesn't necessarily mean a significantly larger payoff. An example might be attending project meetings or going to the gym. These things need to get done, but you can aim for B-level work. Optimize activities are those for which additional time spent leads to no added value and keeps you from doing other, more valuable activities. Aim for C-level work in these — the faster you get them done, the better. Most basic administrative paperwork and errands fit into this category.

The overall goal is to minimize the time spent on optimize activities so that you can maximize your time spent on investment activities. I've found that this technique allows you to overcome perfectionist tendencies and invest in more of what actually matters so you can increase your effectiveness personally and professionally.

On a tactical level, here are a few tips on how you can put the INO Technique into action:

• At the start of each week, clearly define the most important investment activities and block out time on your calendar to complete them early in the week and early in your days. This will naturally force you to do everything else in the time that remains.


• When you look over your daily to-do list, put an "I," "N," or "O" beside each item and then allocate your time budget accordingly, such as four hours for the "I" activity, three hours for the "N" activities, and one hour for the "O" activities.


• If you start working on something and realize that it's taking longer than expected, ask yourself, "What's the value and/or opportunity cost in spending more time on this task?" If it's an I activity and the value is high, keep at it and take time away from your N and O activities. If it falls into the N category and there's little added value or the O category and spending more time keeps you from doing more important items, either get it done to the minimum level, delegate it, or stop and finish it later when you have more spare time.


• If you keep a time diary or mark the time you spent on your calendar, you can also look back over each week and determine if you allocated your time correctly to maximize the payoff on your time investment.