 There are numerous articles and books on managing your time with catchy titles such as "10 Things Successful People Do Every Day" or "Five Things CEO's Never Do." The tips in these articles may work for some but will not work for everyone. They may even work for you most of the time, but as your context changes, how you create success will need to change as well. I find a better approach to creating success is to work with intent.
I'll break down what I mean by working with intent. We have a finite amount of time to accomplish everything we want to do. We have to decide how we will spend that time across business obligations, family, creative pursuits, relaxation, or any number of other tasks vying for our attention. We have to decide what is most important at that particular moment because the time spent can not be recovered or re-allocated after the fact. When you work with intent, you consciously set an objective for each task. What benefit do you expect to realize by spending your time on a particular activity? How does that outcome bring you closer to your definition of success? If taking on a task does not serve you at the moment, find something that does. Let's take the example of managing your inbox. Some people adopt the approach of touching everything once and keep a very clean inbox. Others use flags, tags, and other techniques and let their inbox pile up. Regardless of how you interact with email, what do you want to accomplish by going through your inbox? Are you organizing your tasks for the day? Are you creating a visually organized workspace? Are you looking for an exciting item to tackle? Are you killing time until your next meeting? What do you hope to achieve by addressing your inbox? After you have set an intent, decide if now is the correct time to take on the task to recognize the benefit. If the objective is to go through your inbox to find a juicy project to dive into, do you have the capacity to see it through? Is the environment conducive to working on a complex project? Jumping into a new project 20 minutes before your next meeting may not be the best approach. Instead, decide if you can recognize the maximum benefit from completing a task now, and if not, choose something else. Those tip lists outlining habits of successful people can provide a starting point and framework for discovering how you can obtain success. More important than understanding what to do is understanding why you do it. Spend your time on those tasks that further your goals when you can realize the most considerable benefit. When you work with intent, you set clear objectives for each action and how you get there can adapt based on your context.
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