To do, doing, done...

Following my previous post, the snow over the last week has prevented me from leaving the house very often and I’ve been able to devote a bit of time to looking at the “how” part of managing your time. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll develop this further and provide you with some useful tips for organising yourself in the New Year, as well as helping you overcome common time management pitfalls.

Whatever system you use – Blackberry, iPhone, Filofax, DayPlanner or any of the hundreds of other, similar, systems – it should do four things for you. It should tell you where you need to be (a calendar); who you need to be there with (a contacts list); what you need to do when you’re there (a task list) and remind you what you did afterwards (a place to keep notes). Those four things don’t all have to be in the same place; for instance, I keep my calendar, contacts and task list on my Blackberry, because I find it convenient and it’s portable, which is important given the amount of travelling I do. However, taking notes on the Blackberry is inconvenient, so I use a Moleskine journal for that.

You could have four separate places for those four things – whatever works best for you. The important thing, however, is to only have one place for each of them. For instance, one place for notes, one place for appointments and so on. It often happens that people try to keep multiple calendars going – one for work, one for home, one on the fridge door for the kids and so on. I’m not saying that can’t work – clearly it does for some people – but it involves an awful lot of duplication and immediately invites the possibility that you’ll update one calendar and forget to update the others. Almost inevitably, things fall through the “cracks” between the calendars. If you haven’t already noticed this, I’m a simple man and I like to keep things simple so my advice is to have one place and one place only.

There is an exception to this, however, and that’s your task list. So often, people only run one, ever-increasing task list – it gets longer and longer every day as they add new tasks to it. Stress comes from work you haven’t done, not work you have, and using one task list constantly reminds you that each time tick anything off, there’s still far more to be done. So, when it comes to tasks, one of the smartest things you can do to help improve your productivity is to keep two lists. While this might sound counter-intuitive, it will work in your favour and dramatically increase both your feeling of productivity and your actual productivity.

The first list is your Master Task List: this is the “dumping ground” for all of the things you need to do. Something occurs to you, someone asks you to do something – add it to your Master Task List. This Master Task List can be as long as you like, although I recommend that you review it on a monthly basis. The second, smaller, list is your “To Do” list. You prepare this every day (don’t worry, it’ll only take you a couple of minutes) and it is a sub-set of your Master Task List. Your To Do list should contain only the things you can reasonably expect to do that day, no more and no less. The length of that list is determined by the most important, most life-changing question you will ever ask yourself – and I’ll tell you what that question is next week.