How Can You Pinpoint Your Time Management Gaps with AGENT?
Where is the best place to start when it comes to improving your time management? That depends on what is going on in your professional life or your personal life. To help you figure out where to start and where to focus your improvement goals, you can use my acronym, AGENT. AGENT stands for the five parts of the workday that you can assess for time leaks.
Click the graphic to watch my explanation or scroll down to read:
The A in AGENT stands for Assignment and task completion. If you’re struggling with short-term or long-term projects, maybe you need to take a look at your planning, your reminder system, or your task management platform.
The G in AGENT stands for your Go-bag and workspace layout. Whether you are working from home only, from the office only, a hybrid, or you are mobile, it’s important to have an organized workspace. So, is that where you’re losing time, because you can’t find what you need when you need it?
The E in AGENT stands for Electronic communication. Are you being very intentional about when and how you’re communicating through e-mail, text, Slack, or whatever type of communication platform you use? Track your time to see if that is where your time leaks are.
The N in AGENT stands for Notes, document, and file management. If you’re completely digital, it’s great that you don’t have to worry about papers floating around, but can you find those digital documents that you need in under 30 seconds? On the flip side, if you are paper-based, can you find those paper documents when you need them? And if you’re a hybrid, it’s even more important to be organized.
Take a look at where you are fumbling when it comes to that document management. Is it because you don’t have a file system set up, whether it is digital or paper-based? Is it that you can’t find things because you’re not sure how to use the search function? Or maybe it is how you are naming the documents; there aren’t key terms in there and that’s why you have a harder time finding them?
And then finally, the T in AGENT stands for Time protection. There is only one person on Earth who is going to protect your time, and that is you. That’s why it’s very important when you are planning for the week, you have an idea of where you want your time to go. Hopefully for you, that starts with self-care and time spent with the most important people in your life, because when you make sure that your cup is filled, then you can be of service even better to others.
If you’re struggling to figure out where you should start with your time management journey, take a run through AGENT and observe where your specific time challenges are.
What part of your workday would you like to focus on first?
For a deeper dive into AGENT, check out The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Longer.
