Time Management
A Personal Time-Management Self-Assessment
Posted in Productivity
As you hone and improve your productivity skills and systems, it’s a good idea to pause from time to time and assess how well you are implementing your time-management strategies.
Ask yourself the following questions:
How much control do you have over the use of your time?
How severely are you locked in to demands [...]
How to exorcise your demons of disorganization
Posted in Productivity Wednesday
Time is money, the adage goes, and lots of money gets lost in being disorganization. Disorganization is so prevalent in the workplace that the Professional Organizers in Canada estimates a typical office worker wastes 150 hours a year - almost one month - searching for misplaced information. For someone earning $50,000 a [...]
6 quick tips for managing paper
Posted in Productivity Wednesday
Close your eyes and picture the Zen-like state of your desk in a paperless world. When you need data from the last quarter, you speak to your computer and a soothing voice responds with the information. When it’s time to pay the bills, you instruct your computer where the payments are to [...]
Procrastinators are liars
This is post 5 of my series: Inside the Mind of a Procrastinator.
Specifically, we lie to ourselves.
Procrastinators tell lies to themselves. Such as, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” Or “I work best under pressure.” But in fact they do not get the urge the next day or work best under pressure. In addition, they [...]
Some ways to overcome procrastination through self-regulation
This is post 5 of my series: Inside the Mind of a Procrastinator.
Procrastinators are alcoholics. Okay, procrastinators are not alcoholics (at least, not all of them), but it makes an eye-catching statement.
Procrastination predicts higher levels of consumption of alcohol among those people who drink. Procrastinators drink more than they intend to—a manifestation of generalized problems in [...]
Procrastination is not a time management problem
This is post 3 of my series Inside the Mind of a Procrastinator.
I have three, high-end Day-Timer binders on my shelf at home. I own three PDA’s, two Palms and a BlackBerry. I have printed templates from D*I*Y Planner, Hipster PDA Edition, and many others. I can’t begin to count the number of time-management/PIM software titles [...]
Outline of time management principles
I’ve yet to find a pithy quip that summarizes time management. Until that time, here’s my outline of time management principles.
Identify time over which you have control
Set systems for routine tasks
Use technology
Make best use of the 80/20 rule
Identify and use your energy cycle
High energy tasks scheduled during high-energy peaks
Save less intensive tasks for the low-energy periods
Set [...]
An overview of the GTD system
If this was shareware, this post would be titled YAOGS (Yet another overview of the GTD system.) There are likely dozens of overviews of this system, available on the Internet, but none of them by me.
Background of the GTD System
Some version of David Allen’s “work-life management” system has been around for almost 25 [...]
Time Management Tip - Guard your schedule
Learn to say no. We can be quick to ‘respect’ time demands from others while putting personal requirements on hold. Recognize the importance of your schedule and develop respect for your own time demands.
2 Key measures of effective productivity systems
that I learned from my mother.
When the Instigator blog was compiling tips for The Ultimate Guide to Productivity I posted my best tip, use the productivity system that works for you.
“There are people that make getting ready to get things done an art form. They have the slickest looking DayTimers, the latest PDAs and the most powerful software, [...]
