Time Management Coaching


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A Quick Way to Save 1.3Gb of Space on OS X

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If you bought iLife 09, you’ll know that it’s filled with lots of new features. One of these is videos in GarageBand of professional musicians teaching you how to make better music.

If you’re not a music person, these are just taking up space on your hard drive — lots of space. 1.3 gigs of space to be exact. Here’s how to reclaim that space:

  1. Delete the GarageBand Application. Go to the applications folder of your computer, scroll down to GarageBand and drag it to the trash. You be asked to enter your password.
  2. Delete The Support Files. Go to the finder. Open the ‘Macintosh HD’, then ‘Library’ then ‘Application Support’. Here is where most of the big files are hiding. Scroll down to the ‘GarageBand’ folder and drag that to the trash as well. Ditto for your password.
  3. Don’t Forget to Empty Your Trash

Now you’re done, and with 1.3 more gigs of space to fill with the files that matter to you.

If you’re still looking for more space saving tips, you should give monolingual and grandperspective a try.

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Header photograph by notsogoodphotography

Decimate Your To-Do List

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Has your to-do list grown too large and cumbersome? Do you dread looking at all the work it represents? Then take a tip for culling your tasks from the Roman army: decimate your to-do list.

In Roman times, decimation was a tool to keep the military obedient. If a legion became mutinous, commanders executed one out of every ten soldiers to punish the group. (deci- from the Latin meaning ‘one tenth’).

Your to-do list is a tool that should work for you — it should help you get stuff done. If your to-do list no longer follows your orders, decimate it: kill off one in ten of the tasks lurking there. While the Romans forced the troops to randomly draw lots to decide their fate, you’re intentionally looking for two kinds of targets: low-value tasks and time-consuming tasks.

First, the low value items. Is there something on your list that won’t bring you much benefit? Kill it. You should limit your to-do list to tasks that must get done and tasks that you want to get done. Kill off to-do items that are just there because you feel that you should do them.

Second, the time-consuming items. Look for big, fat, slow-moving tasks. If an item on your to-do list will take a long time to complete ask yourself a difficult question: ‘is there something better I could do with this time instead?’ If there is, knock that item off.

If you can find a task that’s both low value and time consuming, don’t hesitate to strike the mortal blow.

After decimation you’ll find, as the Romans did, that your newer, slimmer list is much more useful and ready to follow your orders.

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Header photograph by Dave-F

Get More Done in The Morning: Join the Great Early Wake-up Challenge

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At the start of the year, I created for myself The Great Early Wake-up Challenge. I’d been trying unsuccessfully to wake up early in the morning for some time and decided I needed to try a different strategy.

Using Paul Graham’s idea that the threat of public and humiliating failure leads to success, I decided to keep a record of my wake-up times on twitter. It’s amazing what a motivator it’s been knowing that people will notice if I get up late — and often send me messages asking why.

I set myself the goal of getting up by 05:15 every day so that I’d have enough time before the day began to work on my most important projects first. It’s not perfect, but I am learning tricks that I plan to post in an article later.

Since starting this project, I’ve gotten several emails from people who wanted to join the challenge and some who have already publicly stated their goals like kasterma, wakeymcwake, amphibios, mrdude1228 , nebopolis & aliented. Given this enthusiasm I’ve decided to make this a public challenge.

Want to wake up earlier and get more done? Then join the Great Early Wake-up Challenge. Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Make a resolution to change your habit of waking up early and set a goal.
  2. Create a twitter account (if you don’t have one already) and publicly declare what your wake-up goal is.
  3. First thing in the morning tweet what time you got out of bed.
  4. Optional: send me an email or an @reply and let me know you’ve joined. For bonus points, use the hashtag #earlyup so that others can follow your progress and the conversation about waking up early in general.

Get started and good luck!

(Two suggestions from experience: if you’re easily distracted by the shiny things on the Internet, tweet your wake-up time via your phone. If you have the strength to resist the pull of the Internet then use textexpander to make the morning update easier. For example, I type ‘imup’ into twitter and textexpander automatically writes the date, time and #earlyup hashtag for me.)

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Header photograph by prakhar

How To Say ‘No’

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The fastest way to free time in your schedule is also the hardest: learning to say ‘no’. It’s a tricky endeavor, doubly so when the person asking is in a position of authority. Here are some suggestions to make the process of saying ‘no’ less painful:

  1. Repeat the ‘No’. People expect conversations to go this way:

    “Can you help with with project X?”

    “I’m sorry I can’t.”

    “Oh please? I’m really in over my head.”

    “Alright, what do you need?”

    Do not give in to this. When you say no, hold your ground. Politely repeat your ‘no’ answer.

  2. No Excuses. Never give an excuse for why you can’t do something. If you give an excuse, it puts you on the defensive. The person asking will launch into an attack on why your excuse isn’t (to them) satisfactory. Stick with rule #1. (Not offering excuses, is a good rule in general, not just for saying ‘no’.)
  3. Not Enough time. “I’m sorry, I’d like to be able to help right now, but my current projects take up all of my available time and I can’t afford to drop any of them.” This is not an excuse, this is the truth. You currently use all your available hours on something and if you’re prioritizing your life correctly all these tasks matter to you. You must not over schedule yourself and, more importantly, you must not let others over schedule you.
  4. The Conditional ‘no’. Agree to help, but only if X number of other people will also join in the project. This method works well for friends who want to move house, or other home projects. Moving house with ten people is accomplishable in a reasonable amount of time. Moving house with two is not.
  5. The Switch ‘no’. With bosses, often there isn’t a way to say ‘no’ to taking on an additional project. It’s best to keep a projects list and ask your supervisor what project you should stop working on to dedicate time to the new one. This serves two purposes: it reminds your boss of the things you are working on, and it also reminds them that if you start something new, something else must be delayed.
  6. Do an Excellent Job When You DO Help. Do your best job on the projects you do say ‘yes’ to. It will help build your reputation as a person who does great work, but has limited time.

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Header photograph by Daquella manera

What Computers Know About Time Management That You Don’t: Batch Processing

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On your desk lies a stack of miscellaneous papers, some are forms to fill out, others reports to scan. Your computer monitor is surrounded by a sunflower of yellow post-it notes: stuff to google, people to call, errands to run. And the morning tide of email and voicemail is coming.

If you start attacking these tasks at random, you’ll have a frazzled day and you won’t finish. But, with a little clever re-arranging, you can get all this work done and have time to spare. To do this you need to borrow an old trick from the world of computers: batch processing.

Back when computers were room-sized, expensive and slow, researchers couldn’t afford to use them inefficiently. Rather than have the computer work on different tasks as they randomly came in, the computer collected similar tasks into batches. When a batch got large enough, then the computer would tackle all the similar tasks at once. This was the most time-efficient use of the computer’s scarce resources.

If you want to use your time most efficiently, you should do the same thing. In the example of your desk given above, the first thing you should do is sort your tasks into batches. Make separate piles for the forms, reports, Internet-related post-its errands and phone calls. Only then, pick a batch to work through.

If you’re filling out from and suddenly remember a phone call you need to make, drop a note in the ‘phone call’ pile, but don’t stop filling out the form. Keep plowing through those forms until they’re done. Then pick a new batch to start work on.

As a rule, you should let similar tasks build up until there are enough of them to do, rather than trying to tackle everything as it comes in. It’s much easier to grind through all the jobs of one type before moving on to the next. By using batch processing in this way you don’t lose time switching your brain from one kind of job to another. This is similar to the benefits derived from monotasking vs multitasking).

Many kinds of work are perfect for batch processing, such as mail, both electronic and snail. When letters come in, throw them into a box and take care of them once a week. It’s the rare letter that can’t wait a few days to get responded to. Check your email as infrequently as possible and only tackle it in batches.

People are also batchable. If there is an individual that you communicate with frequently, keep a list of things that you want to discuss with them. It’s more efficient to batch questions and harass them all at once rather than interrupting them throughout the day. Making someone, your boss or your spouse, into batchable work may seem cold-hearted, but it shows the other person that you respect their time.

Limit yourself to checking your social networks every other day (or as long as you can reasonably go) and then deal with all those invitations, wall posts and notifications at once. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can get through them.

Essentially, anything that has a large number of items to deal with, each of which may only take a small amount of time to do is a prime candidate for batching. Start collecting and batching tasks today and see how much more you can get done.

Header photograph by flygraphix



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