David Allen's GettingThingsDone has been enormously helpful to me in the last few weeks.
The basic idea is that humans simply have not evolved to keep a large number of tasks in their heads, and that doing so causes stress. Which leads to performance problems - dropped tasks, badly scheduled tasks, defeatism, procrastination - which leads to performance anxiety and then more problems.
Allen's solution is to get the process of Time Management externalized. He suggests
| • | most people have several dozen projects of various lengths - think of them as UserStories if you like |
| • | each project is composed of a sequence of atomic actions - think of them as EngineeringTasks |
| • | most people can only perform one action at a time |
| • | most people have less than a double handful of ways of doing things. Phone calls for example. |
By a very simple (happily programmable) workflow you can arrange to have a list of just the next actions for your various projects available at all times. Then when you happen to be by the phone you do some calls; when you happen to be online you handle some email. And so on.
What's astonishing about Allen's method is that it actually works. You no longer have a mental list of things to juggle. You no longer worry about dropping things or handling them out of order or doing them poorly. You just keep feeding the process and as if by magic the damn things get done.
I learned most of this stuff by trying to do it; I started with the d3 TiddlyWiki which you can find at http://www.dcubed.ca/ . I've since chucked that because a coworker showed me how they integrate the system into their MS Outlook environment. I've done something very similar with OSX Mail.app/Ical and described it at http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?GettingThingsDoneSystems .
--Pete.