Master Time Management: 4 Steps to Boost Your Productivity with OATS

One of the questions project managers most often ask me in the training room is about personal time management. They want to know:

‘How can I manage my time, in the busy context of a project?’

Project Managers learn about all sorts of tools for managing the project schedule. But, when it comes to personal time management, many of us have nothing more than a ‘To Do List’. This can be a great tool. But, on its own, it’s toxic.

So, in this article, I’ll explain when to use a To Do list, how to use it properly and, most important, I’ll introduce you to the most powerful technique for personal time management I know.

‘Why is this so important?’ you ask.

Because how can you expect to lead and manage others, if you can’t manage yourself?

In this article, I will share with you:

• A Project Management Approach to Personal Time Management
• Introducing the OATS Principle for Personal Time Management
• Using Your OATS Plan for Personal Time Management
• How to Plan Your Time with the OATS Principle
• Weekly OATS Plans
• The Meerkat Principle: Agile Personal Time Management
• Keep Learning: Refine Your Approach to Personal Time Management

Before we look at these, you may be wondering what I mean when I use the term, ‘productivity’. Here’s a short video, in which I answer that question, and discuss how the term relates to ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’…

So, now you know where we are going, let’s get into how you can master your own personal time management…

A Project Management Approach to Personal Time Management

Firstly, let’s be clear: there are still some project managers who refer to ‘Project Time Management’ to mean ‘Project Schedule Management’. For me, it introduced an unnecessary confusion and ambiguity. So, I prefer to use the term ‘Personal Time Management’ to refer to how you plan and use your own time and ‘Project Schedule Management’ to refer to how you plan and use project time. Let’s skip using the ambiguous term ‘Project Time Management’, and use the term ‘time management’ as a generic and deliberately ambiguous term!

For me, personal time management refers to how you use your own time, to be effective and productive in your work. But that doesn’t mean that it is entirely divorced from project time and schedule management.

Project Management and Time Management

Over thousands of years, humans have honed a set of techniques to get big things done to a deadline. We’ve codified the process, and we call it project management. So, if this can get big things done, then the method must work on smaller things too.

So for personal time management, I combine what I know about psychology with the basic principles of project management. When I did this, I developed a simple, powerful approach to personal time management. And it works.

The OATS Principle

From the combination of project management and psychology, I get an approach to personal time management that I call ‘The OATS Principle’.

This offers something more flexible than a system, but with the simplicity of only four things to remember.

I know the OATS principle works because I use it every day, every week, every month, and every quarter. And many other people do, too. I’ve presented it to thousands of people at conferences and live seminars throughout the UK. The OATS model forms the core of my best-selling book, ‘How to Manage Your Time’. This is the second edition of my best-selling ‘Brilliant Time Management’.

Brilliant Time Management has also been translated into Polish, Arabic, and Georgian.

I also adapted the OATS model into a new acronym (the less catchy GTDA) for my later book, ‘Time Management Pocketbook’, which offers a wide range of time management advice in a pocket-sized package.

But you don’t want a load of adverts for books, do you?

You want the good stuff!

Introducing the OATS Principle for Personal Time Management

Any project manager will recognize the OATS principle. Because basically, it’s the project process, adapted to individual productivity.

So let’s review the basic project process that you’re familiar with:

• Step 1: Define your project
  What do you want? What does success look like?
• Step 2: Set out your scope of work
  Create your activity list – usually using a work breakdown structure.
• Step 3: Estimate the time and resource requirements for each activity
  How much effort and how long will each task take?
• Step 4: Schedule your activities into a logical sequence
  And don’t forget to include contingency to increase your confidence
• Step 5: Implement your plan
  Monitoring and control your work as you go.

I know there’s more after this. And I know there’s more detail. But this isn’t an article about the project management process.

But I hope you’ll recognize it, and find it comfortingly familiar. So, what if we translate this into personal time management?

That’s exactly what I’ve done… and it’s not hard.

From Project Management to Personal Time Management

An OATS plan covers steps 1 to 4. It’s an approach to planning your day, your week, your fortnight, your month, or even a quarter.

I’m not sure it will scale beyond that, though. I don’t recommend you use it for a whole year; there are other tools.

So, let’s translate our four project planning steps into the language of personal time management. I will illustrate the OATS Process, by assuming you will start with making a daily OATS plan.

• Step 1: Outcome
  What is the outcome you need to achieve tomorrow?
  Outcomes are changes… and they should be worthwhile changes.
  Under time pressure, you’ll need to prioritize what outcomes you work towards.
• Step 2: Activities
  Next, list the activities you’ll need to carry out tomorrow, to meet the outcomes you set yourself.
  Note, this is NOT a To Do list. If you recall, they can be toxic.
  Don’t worry… I’ll explain everything, later.
• Step 3: Timing
  Now, make a time estimate for each of your Activities.
  How long do you expect it to take?
  And of course, make sure you put enough contingency into your estimate.
• Step 4: Schedule
  This is the secret sauce of the OATS process.
  As a Project Manager, you do this as a matter of course. But, too often, in personal time management, this is the step you drop.
  So, put every activity into your daily schedule, agenda, or diary.

When you Schedule your tasks, you become more resilient to interruptions.

One of the challenges you have as a Project Manager is a constant stream of small, frustrating interruptions. Frankly, these often have little importance, and you’d love to just say ‘no’. And now, you can.

Because, when you schedule all of your planned activities, you can say, with integrity:

‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that now. I have something scheduled.’

A Short Video about the OATS Principle

Using Your OATS Plan for Personal Time Management

The easiest way to start doing OATS planning is on a daily basis. Only when you have the habit does it start to make sense to plan on longer timescales of a week, a month, or a quarter. What pattern you’ll settle on will depend on the nature of your work, and your own personal preferences.

For example, I now do a quarterly outline OATS plan. At the end of each month, I then use it as the basis for a monthly plan for the coming month. And on Friday afternoons, I produce a weekly plan. I work from this throughout the week, only changing it when something unexpected hits me. This suits how I work, but may not suit you. We’ll look at the different time spans below.

The problem of reacting to changed events affects everyone in professional and managerial roles. But it particularly affects project managers, because your job is to handle fast-changing, complex and dynamic environments. We’ll see later how my concept of ‘meerkating’ helps you deal with this.

When to Create Your Daily OATS Plan

If you are going to do an OATS plan, should you do it first thing in the morning, while you are fresh? Or should you do it in the evening, so it’s ready to go, the next morning?

I’d strongly recommend you create your OATS plan at the end of each day. And if you are doing a weekly or monthly plan, do it at the end of each week or month. There are two good reasons for this.

1. For daily OATS planning, doing it before you leave work the evening before will flush out of your head all the things you need to do. By putting it on paper (or onto a device), you relieve your brain of the duty to remember. This really can really help you relax in the evening, and get to sleep. If you have unfinished stuff buzzing around in your head, it’s a sure-fire route to laying awake, when you want to turn off.
2. It also means that you start a new day or the new week afresh. You know what you need do, and can get started straight away. For most people, your best, most productive time is first thing in the morning. So don’t spend that valuable time on a job that needs little concentration or intellectual horsepower. Now, you can use this high-capacity time for demanding work.

Overnight

Of course, for plenty of project managers, you work on a global 24-hour-a-day project. That means things can change overnight. I am not a fan of starting the day by checking your emails. It can be a big distraction and another waste of that valuable and productive first hour. But in this circumstance, you must create a way to find out if anything has happened that will mean you do need to change priorities and review your plan.

How to Plan Your Time with the OATS Principle

To recap, personal time management needs four steps to plan what you will do: Outcome, Activities, Time, and Schedule. Let’s look at each of these in some more detail.

Outcomes: How to Decide on Your Priorities

Outcomes are worthwhile changes that you will see by the end of the day, week, or month. If you aren’t planning something worthwhile, why would you do it?

Without a big juicy ‘because’, we aren’t motivated. This means the OATS process is motivating, because it starts with worthwhile results.

When you want to decide on the outcomes to pursue, you’ll have four sources for ideas:

1. What’s in your diary – stuff you already have scheduled
   Start by reviewing each item and asking: ‘is this still a good use of my time?’
   If not, cancel it. Otherwise, it’s a fixed constraint.
2. Your project plan
   You are a project manager, so this is another constraint on your OATS planning process.
3. Your list of things to do
   Yes, it’s a ‘To Do’ list. I promised I’ll say more about this later, and I will.
4. Things that have come up in the last 24 hours
   This doesn’t mean they are automatically a priority.
   But it does mean you need to evaluate them.

So, now it’s time to choose priorities. First off, ask yourself how much time you are likely to have in the coming day, to deliver your outcomes. Pre-scheduled events from 1 and 2 above will mean you won’t have a full day to yourself. This is where many people go wrong with their personal time management. They think: ‘I work 8 hours, so I’ll plan 8 hours’ of work’. They forget, that they won’t have 8 hours to work on things!

Let’s take an example…

Schedule: you may already have two hours of meetings scheduled.

Reactive: a typical Tuesday may bring you three hours of reactive work that you can’t avoid. You don’t know what it will be, but things will happen.

Conclusion: there is no point in scheduling 8 hours worth of outcomes into an 8-hour working day. That will lead to madness.

Alternative: you will have 8 – 2 – 3 = 3 hours at most. So, find the most valuable and important three hours’ worth of outcomes. If you try to plan for more than that, you will be setting yourself up to fail from the start.

‘But, what if a meeting gets canceled, or I find I don’t get caught up in as much reactive stuff as I expected?’ you ask.

Don’t worry. The OATS Principle has you covered. Soon, we’ll learn about Meerkating and an agile approach to the OATS Principle.

Activities: Why they are More than a To Do list

To do lists can be toxic.

If a To Do list is your only personal time management tool, then ask yourself: ‘what typically happens at the end of each day?’ There’s stuff left on your list.

So, you have two choices. And that’s a dilemma, so already you can see how that won’t be good!

Choice 1: Stay at work until you have cleared your To Do list.

This isn’t such a good idea. Pretty soon, you’ll be stressed and exhausted. You’ll resent your work and anyway. Clearing your To Do list today will rarely stop it from growing out of hand tomorrow.

Choice 2: Say ‘S*d it’, and go home.

Nice idea. Prioritize your rest and recreation. But, when you get home, you’ll be worrying about all the things you need to do tomorrow, and how far behind you are. You won’t relax, your sleep will suffer, and you’ll get stressed. And tomorrow, you’ll start the day in catch-up mode, setting yourself up for the same dilemma again.

You can’t win with a To Do List

…until, that is, you recognize that To Do list is really a list of the things you could do. In fact, it would be better if we called it a ‘Could Do’ list.

If you think of it as a list of things you ‘should’ do, then it will become a source of frustration and guilt. When you don’t finish your To Do list, you’ll feel like there’s something left to do, and that is never satisfying.

Activities are Not a To Do list

The activity list in your OATS Plan is not a To Do list. Nor is it a Could Do list. Instead, it is a ‘Today’ List.

It is a list of things you will do today, to achieve the outcomes you have chosen.

It is a closed list, which means that when you complete it, you are done. You don’t add each new request, response, or idea to your Today list. No, you add it to your Could Do list. Your Today list won’t grow. So, at the end of each day, when your Today list is done, you can go home satisfied with a good day’s work.

So, what do you use your Could Do list (aka To Do list) for? To help you review candidate Outcomes for your OATS plan.

Time: The Hardest Part is Estimating How Long

Estimating is a big subject. And the Project Management literature is big and sometimes very complicated.

But, for personal time management, the solution is simple. The challenge is that it can take a long time to get good at it.

Here’s how to get good at estimating

Deliberately estimate how long everything you are about to do will take.

Next, deliberately notice how long everything you do actually takes you to do.

As a result, your brain will gradually start to integrate all this data. It will spot patterns and refine your unconscious mental models. These are called heuristics. So, over time, you will get better and better at estimating.

At some point, you’ll start noticing that your estimates are usually pretty good. And sometimes, they’ll be uncannily accurate.

Of course, they will be way off sometimes, too. But this will usually be due to a big, unexpected external factor. Something you can’t plan for. All you can do is leave contingency time. That’s why you should always assume a complication or delay, and add time to allow for it.

Contingency Time

If your plan doesn’t include contingency time, then a single event can put you permanently behind schedule. My solution is to put two to three hours of contingency time into my weekly OATS plan on Fridays.

This gives me a chance to catch up at the end of the week, if I hit a problem.

But, what if I don’t need the contingency time? That’s a bonus. I can either choose to:

• Get ahead with next week’s work
• Give myself some self-development time, for learning
• Give my team members some extra time at the end of the week
• Go home early and get some well-deserved extra rest and recreation

A Quick Tip for Estimating

My top tip though, results from a major bias we all have. Everyone tends to underestimate how long it will take them to do something. But luckily, we tend to be more realistic in estimating how long a colleague would take… I guess we think no one is as good at our work as we are. Hmmm.

So the tip is to never estimate how long a task will take you. Instead, estimate how long your colleague would take if you delegate it!

Schedule: When to Schedule Activities into Your Day

The primary principle…

for how to schedule your activities is to start with the biggest ones.

Block the big tasks into your schedule and then fit in the mid-sized ones around them. Finally, use the smallest tasks to fill the gaps between activities or, between a big or medium task and lunch, or the end of the day.

The secondary principle…

is to put the most important, most complex, most demanding activity into the time of the day when you are at your mental and physical peak.

For most people, this is your first task of the day. Get a big slug of valuable work done before you start engaging with the trivia.

But is this what most people do? No. They waste the best part of their day on things like checking email or browsing social media. These make low mental demands, so you are better off saving them until after you’ve done some hard work, when you need some recovery time.

Weekly OATS Plans

Once you find your daily OATS planning working for you, try planning a week ahead, as your last task on a Friday afternoon. Here are the steps

1. Divide your working week up into however many days you work, then mark off your main work sessions each day:
   • Two sessions: 9am-1pm and 2pm-6pm
   • Three sessions: 7am-10am, 10am-1pm, and 2pm-5pm.
   • Four sessions: 9am-11am, 11am-1pm, 2pm-4pm, and 4pm-6pm
2. Next, draw out a grid: for five days with three sessions in each, 5 x 3.
3. Then, look at your diary and project plans, and block out fixed commitments.
4. Now, use your Could-do Do list to slot in major outcomes you want to achieve.

The same process works on a monthly basis, perhaps putting one or two outcomes into each day. I also create a quarterly plan, where I identify a theme for each day where I don’t have a dominant commitment that will occupy most of the day.

The Meerkat Principle: Agile Personal Time Management

Shift happens! That’s life as a Project Manager.

One thing happens and now your priorities have changed completely. So, if something urgent and important happens, you’ll need to respond straight away.

When you have dealt with it, you’ll need to review your OATS plan and change it if you need to. And sometimes you get an unexpected gap. Another chance to review.

The Meerkat Principle

Don’t just review your plan when you need to. Think about a family of meerkats. Every now and then, they all look up from what they are doing. They stand on tiptoes and scan the horizon. They are looking for anything that means they’ll need to change their plan. If there’s nothing, they get on with what they planned to do (more eating, I guess). But if they spot something, they can quickly re-prioritize.

Too many time management ‘systems’ are flawed. They lock you into a plan, and fail to reflect the realities of real work. The OATS Principle encourages you to plan, and then constantly monitor and review. This is, of course, Step 5 in our Project Process.

Stay Agile

Like project management, the OATS Principle is NOT a system. Work to the principle of:

• planning ahead,
• monitoring your progress, and
• adapting to events.

If you can be flexible and structured at the same time, you’ll stay in control of your personal workload.

Not only is that what personal time management is about; it is an inspiring example to set for the project team you lead.

Keep Learning: Refine Your Approach to Personal Time Management

We love hearing ideas and opinions from our readers. And we enjoy answering your questions. So we’ll respond to any comments you leave below.

And I’d like to point you to some of the Free and Paid resources that can help you learn more.

Time Management Video Courses

Practical Time Management

First up, there is my premium Practical Time Management course. This article is a brief intro to the core idea inside that course. The course follows my book How to Manage Your Time and explains the OATS Principle in depth.

It is a video version of the live seminars and workshops I have been delivering to small (<20) and large (>100) audiences since 2004.

Personal Productivity

Our sister YouTube channel, Management Courses, has free courses as YouTube playlists. One of them is Personal Productivity and it contains over 30 videos on all aspects of personal productivity and time management. This includes videos tackling common personal time management challenges, and descriptions of a wide number of models, tools, and systems. The easiest way to access this course is on our Management Courses website.

Personal Time Management and Productivity Books

This is an area where I have written extensively, so check out my books on the topic:

• How to Manage Your Time (2nd edition of Brilliant Time Management)
• The Time Management Pocketbook
• Powerhouse (more about personal effectiveness than pure time management)
• The Yes/No Book (how to get more time and be more effective by choosing when to say ‘yes’ and when to say ‘no’ – and also how to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ effectively)

Delegation as a way to Boost your Productivity

Free videos

• Get More Done: Amplify Your Abilities, Productivity, and Power
• What is Delegation? | Video
• How to Delegate | Video
• Delegation: How to Get People to Do What They Say They Say They Will

Full Premium Course: How to Delegate without Stress

Multiply your Effectiveness, Build Team Resilience, and Increase Your Team’s Motivation.

Delegation is such a critical skill for Project Managers, I do strongly recommend you consider this full delegation course. It is based on my live training that gets new managers, supervisors, project managers, and leaders at all levels delegating with confidence.

Finally, one more bonus video…