Merlin Mann is an expert on productivity and speaks about how to think about time management.
Have you asked yourself recently if your time is going toward things that matter and bring value to your life? Merlin suggests that we should be examining how we are spending our time and questioning our decisions on how we allocate the fixed 168 hours we have each week. To save you 35 minutes, I have summarized some of the key takeaways from Merlin’s presentation.
An interesting concept he talks about is that when we don’t understand how valuable our time is, we are more likely to allow it to be wasted on unimportant things. For instance if someone asks you for a hundred dollars you will probably question it, but people often don’t question when someone asks you to attend an hour long meeting.
Merlin also says we should question the defaults in life, like why is it that when you schedule a meeting in a calendar app like Google Calendar, the default is 1 hour?
He also suggested to view the time you have in a week as a box: you don’t want to allow stupid things into the box. Also we should be careful about what things we allow to fall into your life. This means thinking before you say yes to a commitment. We should be able to decide who has access to your time and when. A team should share their email culture to save each other time, such as agreeing on a signal for when an email is not time sensitive or even designating a certain time of the day when team members should not expect a response to emails.
Merlin highlights the importance of renegotiation, which he borrowed from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Tweaking a project for instance can mean the difference between dreading working on it or being engaged and behind it 100%.
Bill Gates swears by his three monitors for greatly enhancing his workspace productivity. Now a new study suggests that using two monitors instead of one can increase the speed of certain computer tasks.
In a study commissioned by the electronics company NEC, researchers at the University of Utah recently asked office workers to perform several common tasks using various monitor configurations. They found that people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive at certain text-editing operations than people using a single 18-inch monitor.
People have gone to a multiple monitor setup say they will never go back. With the low cost of flat LCD monitors, it is a no brainer that you should use two monitors, or maybe three.
One of the best benefits of multiple screens is to able to view multiple applications at once instead of having to switch back and forth. You could keep an internet browser open on one monitor and your word processing application on the other.
PC World has a great video that explains exactly how to set up dual monitors.
If you struggle to keep your inbox clean and free of unread items, consider yourself one of many. With Gmail growing 43 percent in users and visits last year alone, Google developers were smart to help users stay organized by developing a “send and archive” feature allowing users to archive items immediately after sending them. Inboxes shrink, productivity increases. Brilliant.
Adam Ostrow of Mashable explains further, “Yet another new feature in Gmail Labs to report: a “send and archive” button, that, when enabled (from the “Labs” page under “Settings”), allows you to reply to a thread and have it immediately archived.
Like all archived messages, these threads will still be available in the “All Mail” folder of Gmail, which also includes labeled messages that you filter out of the Inbox.”
Visit the article on Mashable here to continue reading.
The article entitled “The Man’s Guide to Getting Productive” in January 2009 edition of GQ had some very good productivity tips.
Make a Deal with Yourself
Stephen King will go to a quiet place and make a deal with himself that he will just 5 pages done. He says that once he gets started he will often want to do a little more. Often getting started is the hardest part so setting a goal can help motivate you to get the work over with.
Get Sufficient Sleep
According to the article “missing just a few hours of sleep every night for a week will give you the wordaday cognitive ability of someone who just chugged five beers.” They suggest that the average 35 year-old needs 8 hours of sleep a night. You may think if you sleep 4 hours a night, you will have more time to get things done, but everyone knows what it is like to try to think when you are dead tired. It is not effective and you will be better off if you take time to get rested.
Prioritize Tasks
The author of the story had a coach from David Allen’s Getting Things Done company come to help him become more productive. One of the first things the coach did was to set him up on a system of prioritizing tasks that the author had deemed important in his life. She had him write down everything that he wanted or needed to do. “This is your in-box. Now we take action on each item in the in-box.” If an item can not be acted upon at that time it goes into the “file for future reference”. Next, you start executing tasks in the “in-box” that will take 2 minutes or less. The next step is to take the tasks that will take longer and organize them in managable lists like “home”, “errands” and “office”.
You can learn more about becoming a more productive executive by reading “The Man’s Guide to Getting Productive” in the latest edition of GQ.
It is not hard for executives to spend a lot of time on unimportant tasks if they don’t track where their time is going. One simple way to find out where time is going is by keeping a time journal to record exactly how your time is being allocated. Once you have enough data, you can analyze how your time is being allocated, and figure out what tasks are consuming excess amounts of your valuable time.
Tracy Carter writes on suite101.com that “You should maintain a time journal for one week if you have a somewhat routine schedule and for two weeks if your schedule is less predictable such as the schedule of a courier, performer, freelancer, or independent contractor.”
Once you have this data, it makes it easier to allocate time toward tasks that will maximize your productivity in reaching your high level goals. You can also eliminate tasks that are chronic time wasters such as watching television. It is good to question whether activities that you are in the habit of following are worth doing.
Time Tracker is a good application to track how much time you spend on tasks.
The late Randy Pausch’s presentation on time management is one that every executive should see to improve their management of our most important scarce resource. Pausch points out that most people don’t equate time to money, but it is simple to get a fairly accurate idea of what an hour of your time is worth. If you are spending your time on low value activities, then you are not maximizing the use of time. An important tidbit of advice is to allocate more time to activities that help accomplish urgent and important goals, though a lot of people spend too much time on non-urgent unimportant goals. That’s probably part of the reason the typical office worker wastes 2 hours a day. Learn more by checking out this great lecture.
Randy Pausch’s Top Time Management Tips
1. Do the ugliest thing first.
2. Focus on the important urgent tasks.
3. Think about time in terms of money.
4. A filing system is essential.
5. Use multiple computer monitors.
6. Have some system to know where you have to be when (it saves brain power).
7. Get a speaker phone for your desk.
8. Stand during phone calls.
9. Start by announcing goals for the call.
10. Call people right before lunch or right before the end of the day.
11. Learn to say no.
12. Find your creative/productive time and defend it ruthlessly.
13. Find your dead time.
14. Turn phone calls into email.
15. Monitor where your time is going. Keep a time journal.
16. Make up a fake deadline and act like it’s real.
17. Empower those to whom you delegate.
18. When you delegate, do the ugliest job yourself.
19. Treat your secretary well.
20. Give people objectives, not procedures.
21. Have someone record what was decided at the meeting and who will do what when.
22. Take away everyone’s Blackberrys.
23. Require meetings to have an agenda.
24. Don’t delete emails.
25. If you want something done, don’t send it to 5 people.
