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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Time Management

I have a prob­lem. What­ever I do I always seem to be late. Whether it’s an appoint­ment, dead­line, assign­ment, arti­cle, col­umn or the­sis. Sta­tus: late, delayed or can­celled. A few years ago I couldn’t care less about this issue, but life tends to become slightly more seri­ous and I have to pay bills (yes, those are late too, but I’m not about to change that!).

First of all, RSS feeds and aggre­ga­tors are evil. They con­sume so much time. Maybe I should learn speed-reading or some­thing. Today I decided to remove some feeds that either post too much ran­dom bull­shit or are of lim­ited inter­est. Aside from these rather small mea­sures I need to really orga­nize my life.

Being a stu­dent doesn’t really help mat­ters. Stu­dents are so lazy. If an assign­ment is due by Mon­day morn­ing 9:00 AM I’ll be work­ing all night to hand it in at 9:01 AM. Though if I’m late I’ll always blame tech­nol­ogy (“Uhmm, sorry pro­fes­sor, but the upload func­tion was f*cked.”). I don’t think I’ve ever handed in an assign­ment or arti­cle two days or even one day in advance. Nope that’s just not me, got to rush the job.

Work­ing under pres­sure is fine, even stim­u­lat­ing. How­ever with clients time man­age­ment becomes cru­cial. I can’t tell them to bug­ger off and wait for 2 more weeks. That’s just not pro­fes­sional. So my ques­tion is: How do you effec­tively man­age your time?

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Sunday, February 29th, 2004.

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20 comments on “Time Management”

  1. Posted by Adam Bramwell on Sunday, February 29th, 2004.

    Some sim­ple rules/guidelines

    1) go to bed early. after a few days of this, you will be consistently:

    2) get­ting up early. start­ing work early in the day means you are on top of things all day long

    3) pri­ori­tise email. set up work / per­sonal accounts or just use fil­ters. if using the same account, set per­sonal incom­ing emails to not set an alert.

    4) Finally, to the tasks. JDI. Just do it!

    5) Per­sonal things for per­sonal time: after hours.

  2. Posted by Grant on Sunday, February 29th, 2004.

    Firstly — all of the ideas in that pre­vi­ous com­ment are pretty good (except that get up early thing — never could get that to work for me).

    I know this’ll sound naff, but I got tremen­dous value out of read­ing and apply­ing the 7 habits of effec­tive peo­ple. The core prin­ci­ples do make a lot of sense — they’re kinda obvi­ous, but it’s amaz­ing how use­ful they can be in appli­ca­tion. I per­son­ally wouldn’t rec­om­mend all the other crap the Covey mob ped­dle, but some of my friends find them use­ful too. But if there’s one rule I would put for­ward as vital:

    Put first things first

    In other words, do the impor­tant stuff before you get bogged down in daily crap. You know the stuff I mean.

    Also, this arti­cle: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/pickle/ I found was very use­ful. Kinda like “put first things first”, but in wrapped in a great analogy.

  3. Posted by Virginia on Sunday, February 29th, 2004.

    I have two words: tick boxes.

    I have dozens of lists with tick boxes (includ­ing my Mother List in iCal), and it gives me a warm feel­ing every time I get to mark stuff off. I swear, I’ve reformed myself from being an always-late stu­dent into being a rel­a­tively on-timey type. And it only took two years.

    T

    T

  4. Posted by Andrew on Monday, March 1st, 2004.

    I don’t… I think your’re fine the way your are. Oh, and don’t use RSS read­ers they are way to imper­son­ally (as Eric Mey­ers men­tioned last week).

    Also, while i’m talk­ing bs, TextPat­tern doesn’t have any­thing on MT or WP just in case you were wondering.

  5. Posted by Xian on Monday, March 1st, 2004.

    Like Vir­ginia, I find list very help­ful. I don’t get the same kind of joy by tick­ing them, but I do find them help­ful in actu­ally get­ting things done. But only when augmented…

    First I use OmniOut­liner which lets me add hier­ar­chy + etc to my lists.

    Then I add oTimer( http://sourceforge.net/projects/otimer ) to the mix which gives each of my items a sec­ond ‘Active’ check box. And when ever an active box is checked it tracks the time spent on that project and writes it back to the out­line. It also blocks out any time spent in iCal so you can see what you were doing when. Very slick.

    I’ve added extra columns to my out­line for rates and wrote an apple script to total every thing up for invoicing.

    It helps me stay on track when I have a clock running.

    Which is part of it. Then I throw in Adams rules. And any­time it is ‘Work hours’ my goal is to ALWAYS have an ‘Active’ box on some item checked. That way I get things done.

    As far as RSS feeds go. I have forced myself to quit my reader when work time starts. And not start it again until work time is over. It’s hard some­times but it’s worth it.

    And now I have to go, because it’s an hour past my bed­time. A con­cept I’m still get­ting used to, but I’m more pro­duc­tive when I’m consistent.

    And that’s also the final thing. Find a work pat­tern that works for you. And be con­sis­tent. By cre­at­ing a struc­tured and inflex­i­ble sys­tem, you free up your mind and energy to be creative.

    All of these things, I am still work­ing on. Good luck!

  6. Posted by James Lewis on Monday, March 1st, 2004.

    Basic Speed Read­ing 101

    1. Just look at the pages to get a sense of lay­out (page down may help w/ web) and quickly catch sub-headings, titles, and/or diagrams.

    2. Go through the arti­cle again, this time scan­ning each title sentence.

    3. The third time, scan the whole text line by line, catch­ing phrases rather than indi­vid­ual words.

    At first this tech­nique may not sig­nif­i­cantly improve speed (maybe a lit­tle), but as you get prac­tice it’ll def­i­nitely improve speed, com­pre­hen­sion and recall. Yes, improve recall.

    The prin­ci­ple behind why “speed read­ing” works is that a large per­cent­age of your men­tal effort is expended try­ing to under­stand where the author’s argu­ment is headed. By cov­er­ing the text in mul­ti­ple passes, your mind begins to con­sciously and sub­con­sciously index the mate­r­ial, allow­ing you to spend more of your men­tal effort on the actual read­ing. This lends itself to faster read­ing, since now a siz­able major­ity of the think­ing time is spent on the con­tent, rather than on inter­pret­ing the content.

    It’s a bit like html. Nor­mal read­ing is akin to read­ing the html code itself, while speed read­ing is like look­ing at the inter­preted, styled prod­uct in your browser. You don’t need to know all the detail in the code itself; unless, of course, you’re an inde­pen­dent web designer. In which case we’d com­plain about every­one else’s hor­ri­ble web-grammar.

  7. Posted by Mark Hurd on Monday, March 1st, 2004.

    I used to have trou­ble with time man­age­ment, and then when I got to col­lege it *really* came back and bit me in the ass, so I got a pretty good sys­tem going now:

    - I go to bed rel­a­tively early (1 AM, 2 AM at the lat­est), wake up at 8 AM, and head off to the gym. I feel that after get­ting a good work­out for an hour or so I feel bet­ter for the rest of the day. Of course, this requires not sched­ul­ing classes prior to 11 AM.

    - After I eat, shower and stuff I usu­ally have about 30 min­utes to get in touch with my boss, who lets me know if he’s got any work that I need to do. This is *great* because it lets me know early on exactly what I need to accom­plish for the day.

    - Use lists. Like every­one else has been say­ing, I have a white­board that I just list all the stuff I have to do (hell, I’ll even put EAT FOOD on there if I’ve got a busy day), and con­stantly check it off as you do it.

    If you’re really anal reten­tive, you can rate all the things you have to do on a scale of 1 to 5 or what­ever, and knock out all the really low pri­or­ity stuff early on in the day. I used to do this until I didn’t really need to rate them anymore.

    I’m tak­ing 18 class hours this semes­ter and cur­rently have 3 clients in the works as well. Even with a (rel­a­tively) healthy social life, I hon­estly haven’t felt stressed out or low on time once this semes­ter because of the things I listed above.

  8. Posted by KillAllDash9 on Monday, March 1st, 2004.

    The num­ber one way to increase your pro­duc­tive time: stop read­ing com­ments to blog posts! :-) (Yeah, I see that happening.)

  9. Posted by mattymcg on Monday, March 1st, 2004.

    I once worked on a large devel­op­ment project (100 devel­op­ers!!) and remem­ber email­ing the project man­ager some­thing that wasn’t work related — I think I was ask­ing his per­mis­sion to start a col­lec­tion of toys for home­less kids at Christ­mas or something.

    I was astounded that some­one with his respon­si­bil­ity returned my email almost imme­di­ately. I ques­tioned him on this once and his response was:

    “There are dif­fer­ent approaches to time man­age­ment. I deal with things as they come up, and then they are done with.”

    In other words he doesn’t fob peo­ple off because he is deal­ing with more impor­tant things at the time, he just gets it out the way as soon as pos­si­ble and moves back to the impor­tant stuff. A lit­tle dif­fer­ent to the “first things first” approach but clearly as effec­tive if you can keep on top of it.

  10. Posted by nate on Monday, March 1st, 2004.

    I must con­cur with com­men­tor #4 and say that I have not yet mas­tered the art of time man­age­ment… why, just last night I pulled an all-nighter to start and fin­ish a paper I should have started a week ago. Good times.

  11. Posted by Adam on Monday, March 1st, 2004.

    Great com­ments so far and some nice rou­tines to try!

    Like Vir­ginia (#3), I once had and loved a Tick­Box pad. The paper form has its’ advan­tages, as my online ToDo list (Rain­len­dar) doesn’t recog­nise past achieve­ments. Can any­one rec­om­mend other time man­age­ment soft­ware for the PC?

    “it gives me a warm feel­ing every time I get to mark stuff off”

    A nec­es­sary step for large projects is break­ing it into man­age­able chunks, and doing a 20/20/20 for your san­ity and vision. (Look 20m into the dis­tance for 20s every 20min). Vir­ginia, you are right about the value of keep­ing your lists, they’re great for morale.

  12. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004.

    Thanks for shar­ing all your tips and tricks to man­age time. There are these small things I can change, but those are just echos of some­thing big­ger. Lately I’ve been get­ting to bed ear­lier and con­se­quently get­ting up ear­lier. No mat­ter how cliché, it works. Matty (#9) shared an inter­est­ing view on time man­age­ment which, i think, is closer to my gen­eral phi­los­o­phy in life.

    Time man­age­ment is not an exact sci­ence. Dif­fer­ent meth­ods work for dif­fer­ent peo­ple. First of all, in my opin­ion, you need to be com­fort­able and moti­vated to change your lifestyle. It’s a bit like smok­ing. Tough to kick the habit. Keep the com­ments com­ing, and like Adam (#11) I’m curi­ous to know what soft­ware is outthere.

  13. Posted by Clandestino on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004.

    After going through sev­eral time-management classes (time man­age­ment seems to be a very funny seri­ous thing in the com­pany I’m work­ing for) I found that there is no “golden path” to fol­low. On the oppo­site, a lot of con­cepts that are explained in those classes are pretty sim­i­lar to each oth­ers, and can be resumed in a cou­ple of points:

    1) Plan, plan, plan! Setup a sched­ule of your projects, and pri­or­i­tize them from the most impor­tant to the less one

    2) Pri­or­i­tize! Give each project a value from 1 to 5, one bee­ing “stop every­thing and work now”, five bee­ing “nei­ther so impor­tant, nor urgent, but to keep some­where in my mind”

    3) Relax! Avoid bee­ing stressed by last-minute mat­ters. In the “real” pro­fes­sional world, 95% of projects (even the most impor­tant ones) fall (far) behind schedule

    As you high­lighted (#12), time man­age­ment is not an exact sci­ence. It’s rather a mat­ter of self-discipline, which you can get used to very rapidly

  14. Posted by Brent on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004.

    I’ve been using a prod­uct, Tasks, by Alex King (http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/tasks/content.php) ait seems to work well for me to keep track of all my work related project. That and iCal. Tasks is a web based todo list (PHP, MySQL) and I run it on my power­book. It also ties in with iCal.

  15. Posted by DarkBlue on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004.

    Time man­age­ment? Just say no!

    Don’t be a slave to “the man”. Don’t sti­fle your cre­ativ­ity and/or imag­i­na­tion with a sched­ule. To hell with that.

    As Dou­glas Adams once said, “I love dead­lines, I love the whoosh­ing sound they make as they go whizzing by.” (maybe not ver­ba­tim — but you get the idea).

  16. Posted by Starlight on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004.

    I have been strug­gling with the same thing — con­tem­plat­ing it TODAY actu­ally. My abil­ity to per­form under pres­sure means I don’t do ANYTHING in advance until I absolutely have to. Then I just stay up all night to get it done and slack around till then next dead­line exerts unbear­able pres­sure. Thanks for con­fess­ing my con­fes­sion for me. :D

  17. Posted by Piers Young on Thursday, March 4th, 2004.

    An eas­ier said than done thing to bear in mind is try­ing not to mul­ti­task too much.

    There’s been some research recently that shows peo­ple waste time when­ever they “switches” from one task to another — e.g. from writ­ing a the­sis to pick­ing up a phone. basi­cally, your brain has to ramp down and ramp up to move from one task state to another, and while it’s doing that you’re not much use to any­body. What’s worse is that the more com­pli­cated the tasks you’re switch­ing between, the longer the ramp time.

    Some mul­ti­taskers can waste as much as 40% of the work­ing day in this ramp time.

    Which, let’s face it, is a bummer.

  18. Posted by Amit Karmakar on Thursday, March 4th, 2004.

    I agree with Adam and Clan­des­tino. Plan plan plan… or if you wish to see it the tra­di­tional way: Loca­tion, loca­tion, location.

    Mul­ti­task­ing is good but comes at a cost. Though a bit of it is fine… Its pretty much like keep­ing an eye on sys­tem resource and check­ing every now and then how much mem­ory its chugs away… kill tasks that are unim­por­tant and/or can be avoided.(for the time).

    And, yes… the old adage… ‘Early to bed…Early to rise, makes one healty, wealthy(not sure) and wise’. LOL. My $0.02 anyway :)

  19. Posted by andrew on Monday, March 8th, 2004.

    dur­ing col­lege i started to do things as they came to mind. of course, if i decided that i needed to write some email, id stop cod­ing the pro­gram due the next day to do it :) i dont think id be able to keep it up long term, but it did work out for about a year. i fig­ured that think­ing about some­thing else, while doing my work wasnt going to get me any­where, so id just let myself get dis­tracted for a bit.

    i’ve never been able to hand things in late either — when it’s due, it’s due, so i always got it done on time. long nites… lots of them…

  20. Posted by Slip on Tuesday, March 9th, 2004.

    Get an orga­nizer of some sorts so you can try and man­age your time, being able to open it any time and see­ing what you have to do and what to do after that. :)