Time management

Seven golden rules of time management

I’m finishing The Last Lecture, a book I advice to any and all. Truly a life changing experience. Following paragraph is a synthesis from a chapter.

1. Time must be explicitly managed, like money.
2. You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.
3. Learn to delegate.
4. Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things. Prioritize and filter.
5. Develop a good file system. Order is efficient.
6. Rethink the telephone: do it either standing up or with a time pressure. Don’t spend your time with calling all the time.
7. Take time outs. Real timeouts without interruption.

Keep your inbox clean!

I’m a big fan of GTD. Especially when applied to organizing your inbox. I spend quite a lot of time reading and writing mails, taking action on them, etc. My Outlook client is open all the time.

Before I worked with GTD, my inbox was staggering, mails could not always be responded within appropriate times or actions got lost. It’s not very pro if you have to receive reminder-mails.

Now my best advice is to follow these simple rules (copy/paste from the Wikipedia article ):

• Start at the top (In case of mails, this would be the oldest mail)
• Deal with one item at a time.
• Never put anything back into ‘in’.
• If an item requires action:

• Do it (if it takes less than two minutes), OR
• Delegate it, OR
• Defer it.

• If an item does not require action:

• File it for reference, OR
• Throw it away, OR
• Incubate it for possible action later.

If it takes under two minutes to do something, it should be done immediately. The two-minute rule is a guideline, encompassing roughly the time it would take to formally defer the action.

My inbox is in the end of the day almost always empty. More importantly, the easy-respond mails get done very fast, which gives a much faster average time on processing the mail. It really does!

If you like to see more on GTD, start with the wikipedia page. Also the book by David Allen is very good, so I’ve been told.

Until the next,

Andries