The first thing you need to do is to make a clear and thorough list of every single job or task that you do. These are the routine, ‘process’ tasks as well as the more decision-based tasks that you complete on a regular basis. Then, remembering the principle from the earlier article whereby we identified the very best use of our time, we can whittle down this list so that we know which items of work we don’t need to do personally.

The next step is to analyse these less than important tasks and decide to follow one of four courses of action: to delegate, systematise, automate or delete them.

This means being clear and being objective. You should know what your time is worth after looking through the earlier work you did. Now it is time to trim down your workload according to this new way of doing things.

Deleting is the first process we will look at. Here we are talking about those tasks that are just so meaningless in the grand scheme of things that there really is no need to let them linger on in your work. They simply clog up your workload and make it very difficult for you to get things done in the long term. So the simple thing to do here is to delete them.

This may be a more controversial idea than most, but it will allow you to gain a great and clear perspective. There are a lot of things that we can delete which are not important. And, for some, deleting those smaller clients can be part of this process, so that we can concentrate much more on larger clients. The day-to-day stuff is another area in which you can delete much of the time-wasting activity you have been involved in. For example, if you spend ten minutes every hour checking through emails, this adds up to a lot of time by the end of the day.

Now you may think that stopping checking your emails is not practical, but reducing the amount of time you spend looking at them or getting someone else to monitor them will free up your time considerably. When you are going through the process of deleting actions from your list, it does not always mean that these actions go away completely, some of them do, but some of them can also be handled in a different way and this is what we will discuss in the next article, as we look at the other processes you can put in place to help you generate a personal time policy.