Time management for consultants - (and everyone else!)

The life of a self-employed professional (SEP) is a busy one. When running a one or two-person business, there's no shortage of tasks but few people to complete them.

So, how do you structure your time to get the most out of your efforts - without falling apart in the process?

I had two questions on this during a recent Consultants of Choice office hour.

1. How to find balance

"My biggest issue is making sure I set aside time for "me". I'm terrible at taking breaks, and when i'm diving head first into work the first things to fall off the list are eating properly and exercising. "I don't have time for a workout today" and then its the end of the week and I've told myself that everyday. 

What's the secret for finding that balance and not going all in on your career?"

2. Fitting it all in

"I would like to learn how to effectively make progress and structure my day/week so I can fit most things in! Do you have any ways of working or tips where you’re able to make progress while keeping it all balanced? Do you have set days where you do marketing/social media posts or do you outsource this? Do you set a limited amount of time on tasks to make sure you don’t go down the rabbit hole? 

I’d love to hear how you manage family and work so I can introduce some different ways because I’m wanting to make progress that’s really intentional."

Here's how I answered them.

First things first: we’re set up to fail

Let's zoom out to see some social and economic context. We're all struggling with time management; most of us feel we're not using our time correctly.

That's not because people are lazy, scattered, or inherently bad at... existing? It's because we're facing unrealistic expectations. You can optimise your little patch, but the fact remains: you are targeting individual change to counteract the impacts of a broken system. 

There's no 'right answer'. No one has it figured out. You didn't miss a memo. Everyone is fighting the same battle, especially if you're dealing with family and work responsibilities.

We weren’t meant to be doing it all

The traditional nine-to-five grind was built for a time when one person worked and another handled everything else, but that's ancient history. We're juggling multiple full-time gigs - work, domestic duties, and childcare - and winning at this game is impossible.

The pressure to optimise every spare minute and constantly achieve more can be overwhelming. But before looking at ways to change, we must remember that we are set up to fail.

So here's the deal: forget the idea that there's a 'right' way to do this, and don't believe the hype from those productivity gurus who pretend they have the answers.

Over 90% of productivity literature is written by the same type of person - middle-aged, middle-class white men who curiously leave out care labour and family responsibilities from their to-do lists (this famous tweet debacle rings a bell here), bar a mention of 'being home more to see their family.' 

I'm going to give you some genuinely helpful, practical tips on how to manage the juggle, but I don't want you to read them until you've taken this serve of tough love: you're doing great, and it's not you that's broken, it's everything else. 

The good news is that self-employment is an incredible opportunity to break out of this time trap and to design a life that works for you. So that's what we're going to do.

Six tips to help you strike a better balance

Before we look at any tricks, step one is to lower your expectations and boost your self-compassion. Your working time container probably isn't big enough for everything you want to put in it. You're an ambitious high-achiever, after all!

That's OK. Your ambition is fantastic. But not when you use it as a stick to beat yourself with.

So, size up how much time you've got available, and be realistic about how long things will take. When you realise your maths is off (and it will be), get ruthless about stripping out the items that add the least value.

Then, and only then, can you start to look at hacks and tips for getting the most out of your limited availability.

Here are six tips to help you strike a better balance with no Pomodoro timer in sight.

1. Embrace deep work

2. Hack your constraints

3. Turn want-to into have-to

4. Run experiments

5. Leave things better than you found them

6. Manage energy, not time

1. Embrace deep work

You can't do everything at once, and there will always be more tasks than you've got time for. But you'll never focus if you spend all your time harbouring a sense of guilt and FOMO about the other things you should be working on.

That's why presence counts. Andrew Huberman says we can only expect to achieve two 90-minute stretches of intensely focused work each day. 

That might not sound like much, but it's more than many of us currently achieve! Multi-tasking, distractions, interruptions, and what-about-ism eat into our capacity for focus.

So, use your limited time as productively as possible by putting aside intentional stretches of deep work. Set aside dedicated time for specific tasks; no distractions are allowed. Put some tunes, lock into that task, and work like a boss. 

‘Deep work’ keeps you present and fully engaged, leading to better results. Choose quality over quantity.

2. Hack your constraints

You'll be surprised at how much you can accomplish with limited time. Have you ever pulled off a miracle just before the school pickup or a deadline? You know what I'm talking about!

Work expands to fill the time available for it. So, when you put your headphones on for deep work, create a clear time container. Setting strict deadlines will help you use your limited time more productively. 

Embrace the concept of "done is better than perfect," allowing yourself to complete tasks even if they are not flawless. Perfectionism can hinder progress and waste valuable time.

Short bursts of ‘good enough’ work will always beat long periods of tweaking and perfecting.

3. Turn ‘want-to-’ into ‘have-to’

If there's something you desperately want to do but you find challenging, make it something you have to do.

I've been writing Wednesday Wisdom every week for over five years. If I waited until inspiration struck or I had the right idea to publish, there's no way I'd create an article every week.

But I promised it, and people expect it - which is a huge motivator to make it happen. When you know people are watching, you'll be more motivated to follow through.

Make public promises to motivate private progress

4. Run experiments

Those productivity gurus telling you to wake up at 5 AM or have "content days" don't know about your life. Most of them aren't getting something in the slow cooker while typing an email and aren't worried about the laundry or their elderly Mum's doctor appointment either.

This means you should take all advice (including this) at face value and play lightly with trying things out to see what works in your life.

Don't set hard and fast rules. The best thing about self-employed life is that you can call the shots. But this newfound freedom might be overwhelming if you've worked on someone else's schedule for a long time. You might not know where to start! 

Try short-term experiments to discover what works for you - and release what doesn't. Here are some things you might try:

• Give specific days' jobs' to do, i.e., one day for content and another for admin. Or, three days for client work, two for everything else. Or, Friday for sales meetings... etc

• Put weekly appointments in your calendar for things you're worried you won't get to (running every Tuesday and Thursday at lunchtime, newsletter writing on a Wednesday morning, etc.)

• Get up early to work before the rest of your household is awake and finish at 3 PM

• Keep afternoons free and then go back for a night shift

• Set aside your first two hours as 'deep work' before you touch emails or admin

Treat each idea as an experiment, and if they don't work for you, or you get distracted or bored, try something else. Eventually, you'll get the hang of what does and doesn’t work for you.

Also, what works today may not work as well six months from now, and that's cool.

Trial scheduling experiments to find out how you work best.

5. Leave things better than you found them

This is all about reusing, leveraging, and making life easier.

Every effort you make, whether writing an email or creating content, can be used.

• Save that outreach email as a boilerplate to use next time

• Turn that proposal into a template to speed up your sales process

• Turn that blog post into six short social media posts and the basis for your next newsletter.

• Write up the lessons from your last project as a case study or article

• Plot the steps you took in your previous project and how long it took, and put it on a one-pager that you can send to clients as a "how we work together."

• Use the above as the basis for scoping up similar client engagements.

• Write down the six paint points your coffee date mentioned, and use them to create a list of standard questions for your next discovery call.

• Take COC member questions and write an article from them, like this one (or this one, on how to do value-based pricing) - oh wait, that's for me :D

Adopt a mindset of leaving things better than you found them, considering how your work can be repurposed or used as a foundation for future tasks.

This approach has an extra benefit, too: it stops you from trying to do everything perfectly!

If you aim for forward motion and minor improvements and leave things better every time, you'll keep going - and stack up progress along the way. Momentum beats perfection every time.

Leverage your efforts by reusing your work in multiple formats and creating templates and processes from new ideas.

6. Manage energy, not time

When discussing time management, we often think of people as machines, as though each day comprises identical units that will be met with the same enthusiasm. You have xx units available, and the job is to allocate them correctly.

I'm afraid that's not right. Not all time is created equally, and not all activities require the same level of energy and motivation. Not only that, but not all actions lead to a net drain - some boost you, lift you and give you more power to get more done!

Some activities are energy boosters, and others are energy drainers. Striking the right balance in your day can be the difference between fulfilment and fatigue.

• If going for a run gives you an afternoon energy boost, schedule that into your week.

• If client coffees and sales meetings give you a lift, scatter them throughout your schedule and use the boost to write marketing copy and have new ideas afterwards.

• If admin sucks the life out of you, make sure you don't have a whole day of it, or delegate it to someone else.

• If client work drains your tank, don't book three days in a row without rest and recovery.

Your boosters and drainers will be individual to you. The trick isn't to find a perfect balance but to be aware of how you tick and set yourself up for success.

Try tracking your tasks in a journal and using a little arrow key to monitor your energy - an ⬆️ up arrow in the margin for things that gave you energy, a ⬇️ arrow for things that drained your energy. Over time, you'll start to see a trend. Go with that, and prioritise adding boosters to keep you motivated. 

Prioritise energy-boosting activities to get more out of your day.

Keep it real, and do your best

We need to get real. We're not machines. We're flawed, fascinating, curious humans with the capacity for creativity, connection and change.

Instead of trying to squeeze every drop out of the lemon, we're better to:

• Set realistic expectations

• Recognise our limitations

• Prioritise quality over quantity

• Embrace 'done is better than perfect.'

Use tools like deep work, hard deadlines, time experiments, commitment, and public accountability to get you on track, and make sure you include a healthy dose of activities that give you energy and bring balance and joy into your daily life.

Most of all, remember that there's no ultimate answer. No one has this figured out, and it's perfectly fine to adapt and evolve as you navigate your way to better time management. Consulting life is all about freedom. Please make the most of it.