12 Hours to Better Time Management - Stepcase Lifehack.

The article above has some really great suggestions for all of us that are way too busy for our own good. In particular, I have been using the suggestion of creating a reminder for everything in my life for a while now and it is fantastic. I use the task feature in Microsoft Outlook and I leave the task bar up on the side of my screen at all times. It serves as my To Do list and I only set reminders for the really important stuff so I don’t get desensitized.

Afraid of taking the time of setting up all the events only to lose it in the event of a computer crash? May I recommend Plaxo? Its free and keeps a record of all your events, tasks and contacts online as a back up just in case. Also helpful for syncing between laptop and desktop or home and work.

I also read another article that basically said don’t feel badly about just doing “good enough.” If you gave 100% on every single thing you did, you would never have time to get everything done so do a good job, but don’t obsess.

Remember this idea the next time you get an email from me that only makes marginal sense. Part of my time management policy is to try not to re-read emails before I sent them. Otherwise I make it into an essay and it takes way too long.

Another great idea, that I personally need to adapt in my own life, is to set yourself specific times to work on some things instead of doing them all the time.This way you devote your full attention to one task instead of trying to do several willy nilly all at once (this is my life story).

The perfect example is email. I leave my email open all day and, as soon as work related message comes in, I drop whatever I am doing and deal with it ASAP. A better way to handle this would be to just pick 3 times during the day to check email and deal with all emails then. Then whatever I dropped to deal with the email doesn’t suffer and I get to give my emails my full attention.

Now, the problem for me is that I know how to manage, I just don’t know what to manage. For instance, after reading the article above, I mapped out the 6 basic categories that everything I have to do in life fits into. I will spare you my list but this is where I trip up. I will start something from the 1st Category, for instance, and then obsess over it and do nothing else until it is done.

What I need to do is set up some kind of alarm that “dings!” to tell me to stop work on one thing and move onto another. For instance, if there was a little “ding” that told me “Stop working on eBay and do some Lulu work” that would be a huge help for me. Otherwise I try to work on each huge projct to completion when if I just did a little on each they would all get done.

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