The other day, my friend Jason Imms complained:
I can't find the time to come up with and implement a time management solution :/
At the time, I wasn't willing to give advice. Someone in that situation needs support & hands-on help more than they need random 140 character pontifications from want-to-be time management gurus like myself.
However, I've been giving the matter some thought, and want to share what I think of as an emergency triage approach to time management.
Start saying 'no'...
The absolute first thing to do is to stop making the situation any worse, and the way to do this is to stop agreeing to new things.
Saying 'no' can be difficult, but there are plenty of websites out there with tips on how to do it.
A favourite of mine is "I'd love to do that, but can't right now. Could you get back to me in a couple of weeks if you still need it done?" This puts the onus on the requester to get back to me, and still shows my willingness to help.
Genuinely busy people who are asking you for things would much prefer a swift & honest 'no' instead of a 'yes' without follow-through.
Of course, the trickiest person to say 'no' to is yourself. However, the part of you that wants to do things and has great ideas is what got you into this mess, so you have to be ruthless with it. When you catch yourself starting something, say 'no'. Write down the thing you were starting and stick it in a drawer. We'll get back to it later.
The other main source of new work is things going wrong.
If your car breaks, you probably have to fix it asap. But maybe if you're really busy and can afford it you can take cabs or public transport until your workload eases up?
If the wall clock in your lounge room breaks, it'd be good to fix it, but maybe you don't have to? Probably everyone who needs to know the time has a portable time keeper anyway.
When things go wrong, you normally have to fix them. This sucks, because you have to expend precious time, energy, and attention to maintain the status quo.
Before you do this, ask yourself if the status quo is really worth all that.
You can frame it as an experiment: how about we try without a second car/lounge-room clock for a week and see if we miss it?
The next, easiest step for getting organized is to use a calendar, and use it properly.
If you're using something like iCal or Google Calendar then you want to have at least two calendars, which I'm going to call Appointments and Information.
If you have separate personal & work calendars, set things up so you can see them both in the one app.
The Appointments calendar should have exactly all the things on it which are things that you intend to go to, whether virtually or physically. It should have every obligation that you've have that must be fulfilled at a certain time and a certain place, and it should have nothing else.
Examples of good appointments:
Examples of bad appointments:
All of the good appointments have specific places and people. If you don't go to those appointments, someone will notice. If you want to change those appointments, you have to talk to someone else.
By contrast, the bad appointments are just things that you want to do with some vague intent to do them at a certain time.
Having "Gym" down on your calendar at 11am on Tuesday might nudge you to get up from your desk & go work out, but it might not. It's just an intent to go to the gym at roughly 11am. Having an appointment to meet a friend at the gym to train together is an entirely different thing.
Why bother with this discipline? Because then your Appointments calendar provides a hard landscape to your day. You can look at your calendar and immediately see all of the things you have to do without having to do any mental filtering. You can entirely offload thinking about what the time is and how long you have until a thing, freeing up valuable head space to get things done.
By contrast, the Information calendar is just a way of storing any time-bound information that you have. e.g.
As soon as you notice either calendar deviate from reality, fix either the calendar or reality.
Once all this is done, you'll want to check your calendar first thing every day.
If all of this is obvious, and you're already doing it, then congratulations, you're already ahead of many people I've spoken with and clearly understand one of the key elements of time management: having a reliable exobrain.
I've got too much on to want to do this.
Where I'd like to go from here is:
Here's a quick dump of what I'd like to cover:
Probably other stuff too. But this is going to have to be it.