Coaching Topic: Time Management

In the coaching room, this topic might show up in the form of someone wanting help with their time management, or it be that they are wanting to work on:

• overwhelm,
• needing to prioritise,
• work-life balance,
• decision making, perhaps taking on something new, or changing work patterns or commitments.

Our coaching doctors talk a lot about the pressures of time, of their job, of their families, of trying to juggle everything, and that it’s very difficult to find the time to do what they would like to do. It’s highly likely that you will have coachees come into the room that are struggling with having enough time to do all the things they would like to do or have agreed to do, perhaps without thinking about the amount of time it would take.

Is It Time Management or Is It Something Else?

Sometimes the issue requires work on setting boundaries rather than managing the time, or around being able to say no. Sometimes it is important that the coachee gets to knowing more about themselves, their values, and what’s important to them.

Avoidance and Procrastination

What often comes up is avoidance in the form of procrastination, fear, or perfectionism. We might be then looking to coach people around the drivers that they have. This is concept that comes from Transactional Analysis. If we’ve got that perfectionist driver, then that is going to eat into our time because we’re going to spend time trying to make it perfect before we release it to the world. People-pleasing will probably mean that we’re going to spend more of our time doing things for others that aren’t necessarily our role. But we do it because we want people to like us.

You can find out more about coaching for perfectionism here: https://yourcoachingjourney.com/topics-for-coaching-perfectionism/

or People pleasing here: https://yourcoachingjourney.com/topics-for-coaching-people-pleasing/

In terms of procrastination, exploring whether someone might be putting something off, and why, and then whether they are using a lack of time as a reason or excuse. But it might be worth exploring what it is they’re actually procrastinating about and what the actual reason for the procrastination is. 

Helping clients to understand what motivates and energises them can also help. People are much more likely to find time for those things than the activities that drain them.

Wellbeing and energy also need to be considered in the coaching space when it comes to time management issues. Are they just exhausted? What are they doing to rest and replenish?  How much energy do they have for those extra things? What time of the day do they have the energy for certain things.

As a coach, we’re going to want to explore, if time management is at the surface, the presenting issue, what lies underneath?

We might want to ask:

• What feels hardest about managing your time right now?
• What are you avoiding when things get busy?
• How clear you are on your goals?
• How motivated you are?
• For what reason are you putting this off?

Time Management Tools in the Coaching Room

The Reality Check

(From Helen)

This is one way of approaching time management that can really bring about some light-bulb moments. I’ve often coached individuals where they’ve perhaps wanted to add something to their work or their commitments, and they aren’t sure whether to do it, whether it will fit in. So, my go-to is The Reality Check.

Let’s say that you’re considering a voluntary role and you’re not sure whether you’ve got all the time and energy to do it. I might draw out a bit of a timetable to fill in, or I get them to do it just roughly. Then we’ll work through their average week:

How many hours a week are you contracted at work for?

What hours and days do they occupy? (Fill them in on the timetable, add in lunch breaks – or include them if they work through.)

What other commitments do you have in the week?

They could have things like an exercise class, school run, visiting an elderly parent, shopping, cleaning, cooking, a class or tutorial that they take, an voluntary roles.

Once we’ve completed the timetable for that typical week, I’ll play that back and say, This is the time that we’ve got for each thing. If they haven’t got any free time, they might say that, otherwise, follow up with questions about the activity that we’re discussing:

What spare time do you have?

Let’s think about that voluntary role. What commitment are they looking for there?

Where could that fit in?

How does it feel now that’s in?

What other time do you have available?

And at that point, that’s when they’ll say something like, ‘I’ve just realised that I don’t have the time for this’, ‘I’m going to have to give something else up’, or ‘I just can’t do this’. Or they might say, ‘Well, I could just do two hours a month every other Saturday’. And we can check in with them. How would it feel if you’re committed to those two hours a month? Just a bit of an ecology check. Sometimes people don’t realise that they need some downtime, that replenishment time.

Clients might decide to do it, decide to trial it, decide to put it off, or something else entirely.

People are generally over-optimistic about time in general, and especially when they take on new roles, and how long things will take, and rarely allow for the extras, so a good honest reality check is important, but often overlooked. 

How Are They Using Their Time At The Moment?

(From Tom)

Alternatively: you could have a template for a week broken down into 15 minutes that a client takes away and fills that in over the next week – an old fashioned time and motion study.

Tom says:

“I had someone once who reckoned she was working 70 hours a week. And I do accept some people do work 70 hours a week, but this lady really wasn’t. I got her to do a very involved time plan for the week of what she was doing. Some of the time that she said she spent working was spent travelling to work, she also included her lunch hour, which she didn’t work through. This was a nice gentle challenge to the story she was telling herself.

Coachees will either find that they haven’t got the time to do the thing that they’re considering, or they’ll find that they’ve got pockets of time that they didn’t realise they had, and perhaps are filling/wasting with ‘busy work’ or doomscrolling.”

Time Management Tools

Get everything out of your head

If you’re client is overwhelmed and facing a large list of things to do, they may not even want to start, or may be procrastinating and doing something that isn’t helpful.

Asking them to write down everything that is in their head, and getting it on to paper is a good way to help with the sense of cognitive overload.

Then you can help them to prioritise them with one of the following tools:

The Eisenhower Matrix:

From the list of everything they have to do, have your client assign each job or activity to one of the boxes based on how urgent and important they are.

Box 1: Important and Urgent.

There are time-sensitive actions that you need to do soon. If you spend all your time in this box, you’ll be probably feeling like you’re firefighting all the time, but they’re the important and urgent and need to be done first.

Box 2: Important, not urgent.

These are things that you know are important and should make time for. In business, they’re things like generating new clients or work. Personally, it might be exercise, meal prep, anything that’s important to you. This is the gold, the value, the purpose, the money, depending on the perspective or the role that you’re in.

Box 3: Not important, but Urgent.

These are things that typically interrupt you, like an urgent email from someone else, something that happens that’s out of your control, other people’s important stuff that you get drawn into.

If you get drawn into this box, you’ll probably just running around after everyone else. And you’re in a danger of staying there if you can’t say no and focus on your own things that are more important to you.

Box 4: Not important and not urgent

These are the things that are distractions, busy work, tidying of the email inbox, colour coding your files, checking social media or scrolling online. We often stay here to preserve our energy or because other work takes too much energy, or maybe we’re not inspired by the other work that we want to do. We can stay here scrolling, but it’s not getting anything done. The firefighting box (1) is still there, and is probably being added to, especially if time passes and actions from box 2 migrate over.

What Next?

Once the tasks are in the boxes, then the coachee can number them in order of preference or deadline within the boxes and start to work through them (box 1 first, then 2) with more focus because they know where to start. It might even be as bad as they think.

A Slightly Different Matrix: ABCD

This is great when you’re in total overwhelm! . When you’ve got a lot on your plate that you think you’ve got to get it all done today, using those four labels just makes it a little bit different, and often, far more manageable.

In this matrix, top left is A, top right is B, bottom left is C, bottom right is D, and they stand for this.

• Box A: Absolutely has to be done today.
• Box B: Be Bloody nice if it was done today.
• Box C: Could do tomorrow
• Box D: Ditch, delegate, delay, or diarise

Arguably, the things that are important but not urgent, need to be put in our diary to ensure it gets done, and then stick to that. But life isn’t always like that, in which case, this tool can be useful in combatting overwhelm. Also, doing it yourself, once you know about it, can give you a bit of a breather, a bit of space outside of the ‘doing’, to maybe get some perspective.

Again, once they’ve got everything in those boxes, then they can choose. They can number those things and choose the order that they want to do them in, starting with box A. Some people, if they actually haven’t got anything in that box A, which might happen, might want to take a bit of a rest, sit back and regroup because that might then give them the energy to move on to box B.

Final Thought:

Sometimes people need to take some action in the moment rather than mapping it out and planning. Helen has been in a coaching session with someone who said, ‘I really need to do X, and I’ve been putting it off’, It was a two minute job, so I said, ‘How useful would it be to do it now?’ They though ti would be, so I just went silent and let get on with it and tick it off their list.

These tools are less about the conversations and deep work that we can have with a transformational coaching approach, they are really useful practical tools that sit at the surface of this topic, and they might be helpful for your coaching clients.

Find out more about our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma  and get in touch if you have any questions about either.