Here are the two great difficulties of Time Management:
| 1 | Finding a good way to spend your time. |
| 2 | Getting yourself to actually spend your time that way. |
Most people in need of Time Management probably have little or no formal techniques for getting stuff done. It's usually a case of doing that which is either most fun or which has reached critical priority. I'd recommend the following steps to clean up the act:
| • | Gather Tasks |
| • | Analyse Tasks |
| • | Plan Tasks |
Perhaps the only reason time management is hard is because it's difficult to mentally switch context to do a task that you want to do at an appropriate time. It's very easy to write down in your Day-Timer that you want to write a draft of a business proposal from 9:00 to 11:00, learn how HTTP cookies work from 11:00 to 1:00, and answer email from 2:00 to 3:00, and so on. What's hard is doing these things at the appointed times.
How can context-switching be made easier?
Fast context-switch only to familiar tasks
Focus on chosen tiny task for two minutes
Give yourself a carrot
Physical exercise makes context-switching easier
Cycle between 30-minute chunks
Avoid people who interrupt a lot
Choose a focal point
Ramp up
Always include slack in the budget
Do it wrong and then change it later
Inventing tiny tasks
I think the reason a lot of time management books/techniques fail for people with any amout of intellectual curiosity is that it's not about "how much time" to devote to something, but rather that all things are equally interesting to us at any one moment.
For example, last night, I started and finished a great new book. (It was indeed great; heck, I even went well out of my way to get it since it's not on Amazon yet.) It was only afterwords that I realized I'd basically used up all of the time when I usually do my Chinese homework. (Uh-oh!) But it doesn't mean that I'm any less interested in Chinese; just that the new book was more compelling in that moment.
Consider also: GettingThingsDone