Time Management

Help Me Figure Out How to Spend 12 More Hours a Week

wood.tang — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:16:13 -0500

Minor milestone in my household coming soon: my son is starting preschool, meaning I’ll suddenly have more time on my hands. It’s only three mornings a week though; as much as I’d like to hire someone to read to me, it’s not enough time to start anything major. But it is enough that I can’t waste the opportunity. Four hours of quiet, non-Sprout time in the morning is perfect for getting the high-priority stuff out of the way. I need to come up with a game plan so I don’t end up watching SportsCenter and fiddling with iTunes the whole time.

I have my own strategy, of course, but I wanted to ask the wise elders here how I should spend an extra 12 hours a week, and see if we can spot any holes in my plan.

Here is the “real” work I try to accomplish in a given week:

A weekly sports column, which is a compilation of national coverage of the local teams, so it involves a lot of Google News searching and some stitching together Monday mornings before I file it.
Intermittent freelance writing, which usually means phone calls, interviews, transcription, and research too.
Accounting, bookkeeping, and various paperwork for my wife’s real estate business. This can suck up a lot of time if I neglect it, so I need to peck away at it day by day.
A handful of brilliant, insightful, and unforgettable posts here, naturally.
And if I have any time left, more “creative” writing like essays and a book proposal that’s been sorely neglected for the past six months.

In my current situation, I try to do most of this stuff early in the morning before my son gets up, during the afternoon naps, or on the one or two days a week we get a babysitter. He’s going to keep going to Grandma’s once a week, so I’ll still have one full day to work with in addition to the three mornings. My wife works a lot, with many evenings and weekends, so when she is around I try not to dump the kid on her and run downstairs to the man cave. This means working at night is out of the question unless I’m on deadline; besides, I have a lot of stuff to do, but I’m not that important.

The column and freelancing gigs are non-negotiable, so they’re obvious candidates to occupy my newfound free time. The bookkeeping is also high-priority, but I don’t necessarily need dead-quiet solitude to do it. This is a good candidate for non-school days or early evenings when my son is absorbed in his toys. I should probably lump the blogging and creative writing together, because they both operate on the same brain functions. For whatever reason, I feel like I do these best in the afternoon, either because of how my process works—i.e. I feel like I have to get the required, “chore” items out of the way first—or because of the nap-time habit.

I’m not looking to overhaul the whole regime, just work in those extra mornings. As a benchmark, I’m satisfied with what I get done, except for the more creative stuff. I’m sure this is because I relegate it to garbage time, and by then I usually need a break.

So, given that workload and those time constraints, how should I rearrange my week to take advantage of an extra 12 hours?

”Help Me Figure Out How to Spend 12 More Hours a Week” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 21, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Why Are You Reading All That News?

wood.tang — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:41:54 -0500

When I wrote about my method for controlling RSS overload a couple weeks ago, 43 Folders user terceiro left a comment that put me in my place:

You’re feeling stress about your RSS feeds? Talk about self-created problems. The real solution to managing RSS feeds is to stop reading RSS feeds. It’s simple … when a purely optional “convenience” technology is causing stress, it’s time to re-evaluate at a pretty fundamental level.

I read this and thrashed and spluttered like Yosemite Sam for a while before I admitted it: he’s right. It is a self-created problem, and I need to understand what makes me feel the need to consume the equivalent of a Carnegie library every day, instead of just finding a more efficient way to choke it down.

When I read discussions about managing RSS and information overload, I tend to see three justifications for why people “need” to subscribe to 842 news feeds:

I want to stay informed about the world - Meaning, I never want to be one of those idiots on Jay Leno who can’t name the Vice President. I identify with this impulse the most strongly.
I need to for my job - Particularly for IT folk, usually along the lines of, “I need to stay on top of developments in programming/web design/cat herding so I can advance my career.”
I need to for my blog - As in, “I need to follow all these different feeds to find interesting stuff to pass along to my readers.” Everybody wants to be Jason Kottke or John Gruber.

After thinking about my own motivations and admitting that I’ve uttered all three of those at some point as well, my answer to every one would be, “Really?” Are you really going to miss that promotion if you didn’t hear about the JDK update the second it was released? Are you really going to lose readers if you don’t link to that third Boing Boing post? And are you really going to turn into a sheltered, mouth-breathing Epsilon if you happen to skip the news cycle one day?

For me, it’s always been a matter of identity. I like to view myself as an informed, plugged in, man of the digital world, and to be this person, I think I need to see all the latest news, comment on the hot blogs, post things on del.icio.us. That’s all fine and dandy if that’s the person I want to be, but within reason. I should know by now from experiences with other jobs, other vocations, and other vices, that if they start to cause me this kind of concern, something needs to change.

“The world won’t end without you knowing it. Trust me, your mom will call.”

This isn’t to say that we should all chuck our newsreaders and smash our TVs, but that we should, like terceiro said in that comment, keep a little perspective. In terms of those first two reasons above, we don’t give ourselves enough credit for being the smart, inquisitive people that we are. Even if you shut down the RSS reader for a few days, you’ll still know everything you need to know to do your job right. The fact that you possess such a powerful thirst for knowledge will cause you to absorb it passively wherever you go, from snatches of overheard conversations, TV, and radio. It will be enough until you have more time and energy to read it yourself. And the world won’t end without you knowing it. Trust me, your mom will call.

In regards to #3, we can also get a little full of ourselves at times. Despite wishful thinking, there aren’t many bloggers who would be missed if they took a day off here and there. Take this site for instance; I bet you didn’t even notice Merlin was gone. Unless it really is your job, you should probably pull up short when it starts to feel like one.

Here’s a suggestion: over the holidays when you’re traveling, or when things are slow because everyone else is traveling, remove yourself from the news cycle for a few days and see if you don’t shrivel up and die. Take long walks. Cancel something. And when you come back and open your newsreader again, hit that “Mark All as Read” button and start from scratch. I’ve started doing that 2-3 times a week now, and it feels glorious.

”Why Are You Reading All That News?” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 11, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups

wood.tang — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:03:03 -0500

Besides baseball, coffee, and my music collection, I probably obsess over how I read RSS feeds more than anything. Sometimes it feels like I tinker with the setup more than I actually read the news, but I’m making progress. I won’t claim to be completely satisfied with how or why I try to consume so much information from the internet, but lately I’ve been as content with the process as I can hope.

Bailing Out

Trying to stay on top of dozens of feeds can feel like trying to squeeze a river through a kitchen strainer. I used to be a NetNewsWire guy, but I switched to Google Reader this summer to simplify switching between multiple computers. At first it exacerbated the feeling that for what little info I could process through that strainer, I might as well just give up and let it flood the place.

Unlike more powerful desktop readers like NNW, Google Reader doesn’t give you any options to control the refresh rate of feeds, how long they stay in your queue before disappearing, etc. So if I missed a day, or even a few hours without checking in, hundreds of unread items would keep piling up, with no chance of my ever finishing them. So I started marking hundreds of items at a time as read, and sure enough I felt better. It was like dipping a bucket in the river instead of trying to drink the whole thing, and after a few days I realized it was okay to let a few things pass me by.

Group Them the Way You Read Them

The magic trick for me though, has to do with how I group the feeds in Google Reader. This can be accomplished with any modern news reader, but the Google’s does things in a particular way that really hits a sweet spot.

When given the option to group things, we tend to do it topically, with labels like “Sports,” “Technology,” “Blogs,” etc. For years, I lumped my feeds into folders like this, thinking it would help me manage them, but all it did was help me ignore just how many I’d subscribed to by tucking them away in folders. I still looked at the growing numbers of unread items and felt that endless sense of dread that I would never finish.

Knowing how to cut my losses when I got behind was nice, but it was also making me miss a lot of stuff that I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t mind skipping through some feeds, like standard news or high-frequency group blogs, but I felt bad missing my friend’s weekly update, or that new column from one of my favorite writers. So it dawned on me to group my feeds by the way in which I want to read them, not by topic. If there were some feeds that I didn’t mind missing, and some of which I wanted to read every single word, I should organize them that way, not by their putative subject areas. Here’s what I came up with:

News - Self-explanatory, but specifically feeds from traditional news outlets like the New York Times, BBC, et al that pump out so much stuff I can’t possibly hope to keep up. I usually read this group starting with the newest items first, and stop and delete the rest when I get tired. I won’t miss anything; if I get behind, most of those items are either updates on breaking stories, or tidbits I’ve already heard elsewhere on TV or the radio.
Can’t Miss - Again, pretty obvious, but these are my favorite sites, ones where I want to at least scan every single item, like blogs of friends, publications where I write, etc. Not just anything can go in here—this group has a high barrier to entry to keep its volume manageable.
Skip ‘Em - The aforementioned feeds that I like to read when I have time, but don’t mind missing either. Grouping them together like this makes it easy to dump them en masse on one of those days where I just don’t have the time or energy. However, this shouldn’t be an excuse to subscribe to every bleeping feed you see; I still try to keep this bunch to a minimum.
Not News - This is a combination of the Can’t Miss and Skip ‘Em groups. I usually like to read the standard news over breakfast, then save this one for later. It also makes a nice subset to peruse later in the day when I’ve had my fill of the ticker tape feeds. This is another area where Google Reader helped out, because it uses a tagging model that makes it easy to group things in multiple folders.

Again, nothing revolutionary, but it’s made my daily information gathering process more manageable, namely because it gives me an easy way out when I’ve fallen behind.

Process Your Pleasure

The obvious alternative to all this would be to simply cut the number of feeds I try to follow, and I wholeheartedly agree. Like I said, I have a pretty high threshold for what gets into the club, and keeping things in that Skip ‘Em folder makes it easy to identify which ones might be on the chopping block. But this approach gives me the latitude to read broadly in a number of subject areas and still focus on the most important stuff.

The fact that I felt compelled to write about this is quite ridiculous, really. I’ve taken what should be a leisurely activity and turned it into a dull process. But I also realized that I derive a lot of pleasure from reading all these news sites and blogs, and there was no sense in depriving myself. The dull process has kept it enjoyable.

”Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 27, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Populi: Reasons to Quit

grant — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:41:55 -0500

I have a lot of trouble keeping track of what I'm supposed to be doing. It's not that I necessarily have trouble prioritizing my tasks or scheduling things - I mean I do, but that's not the main problem.

The main problem is that I've got too many things I really need (want) to do - too many long-term projects with potential - and I'm never exactly sure when they're a few weeks away from a grand payoff and when they're just wasting my time.

I suppose this is a crisis of faith.

Here's the thing: I'm creative for a living, which means I always have two or three (or 20 or 30) things going on at once, none of which are guaranteed to actually create anything, but all of which could - provided I can focus enough attention to them. You know the kind of thing I'm talking about. Finishing that screenplay. Practicing with the band. Re-editing that short story. Spending the weekend on a film shoot. Learning Photoshop. These are all things that have that point in the middle - the "desperate hour," a creative journalist friend of mine called it - when you're absolutely not sure why you're even there.

And sometimes, the sad truth is, that doubting voice is absolutely right - sometimes, this thing you're sweating over really is just wasting your time.

So here's my question:

How do you know when it's time to move on? What makes you make up your mind?

Because I really need to know.

”Vox Populi: Reasons to Quit” was written by grant balfour for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 12, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The 7 deadly sins of instant messaging

Chanpory — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:02:04 -0500

I heart instant messaging, but I heart it too much. If you’re a chat addict like me, you understand the lure. It’s convenient, connecting you to faraway buddies with little cost. It’s safe, releasing you from the worry of looking pretty or sounding sexy. And its deliciously fun. How can you not love video effects, screensharing, and presentation-hosting in Leopard’s iChat?

Despite the benefits, instant messaging can turn you into a mindless chat drone. Too much chatting replaces real interactions and, soon, people turn into pixels.

To bring richer conversations back into your life, here are 7 bad chatting habits to stop right now. I’ve formatted them as a “not-to-do” list:

Do not use it
It’s hard to envision, but life without IM is possible. Remember the phone? Remember face-to-face conversations? They still exist.
Do not make yourself available 24/7
If you really can’t let go of chat, designate IM office hours. Limit yourself to two hours maximum a day and give yourself a curfew. You’ll get fewer interruptions and maybe even get to bed earlier. Remember, not chatting every moment means you’ll have more to talk about when you see your friends again.
Do not expect a response
After sending someone an IM, never expect a quick response or any at all. The beauty of IM is that it lets you have “slow conversations,” allowing people to respond whenever they want.
Do not send urgent requests
Just because someone is online at 2am doesn’t mean that person is available for a work or family emergency. If you’re not willing to make a phone call, then maybe it’s not a real emergency.
Do not be a buddy slut
Is your buddy list as long as Heidi Fleiss’s black book? According to the Pareto principle, you spend 80 percent of your chat time with 20 percent of your buddies. Identify the buddies you don’t chat with anymore and delete them. If your buddy list is still overflowing, organize them into groups by level of importance or frequency of conversations.
Do not broadcast your screen name
Never ever put your screen name on a website, blog, or social networking profile. This keeps your buddy list short and prevents stalkers from creeping you out.
Do not forward chat messages to your phone
AOL Instant Messenger now lets you forward IM messages you receive to your phone when you’re not at a computer. I call this the electronic dog leash feature. If you have it on, turn it off now. Free yourself, run wild, and go play.

Am I missing other deadly sins? What terrible chat habits are you overcoming?

”The 7 deadly sins of instant messaging” was written by Chanpory Rith for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 09, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Ain't Nothin' Wrong With a Little Free Time

wood.tang — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:06:25 -0500

Since my days are set to the sleeping patterns of a toddler and the biorhythms of a dog, I have to squeeze my “work,” i.e. writing, interviews, blogging, etc, into naptime and the few hours after the boy goes to bed and before I collapse. I’m pretty good about getting the important, bill-paying stuff done, but unfortunately that means what suffers is Me Time, things like reading books or watching a ballgame on TV without a computer in my lap. When I just spent most of my day stressing out about what I wasn’t getting done because I was at the playground or reading Richard Scarry books 49 consecutive times, I can’t very well justify not doing my stuff when I’m back home and books are put away.

One day this week, the boy was at Grandma’s for the day, so I lined up a ton of things to knock out. Most of my afternoon was going to be spent dealing with some carpenters installing a cabinet in our house, so I also knew I had to get busy in the morning. As any time-constrained person knows, feeling squeezed is the best way to make yourself efficient, and I finished everything I needed to by lunch. Then, lo and behold, the furniture guys called and said they couldn’t make it, so I was faced with a free afternoon.

Now, I could have looked at the remaining items on my to-do list and just kept on truckin’. But, nothing else on my list was all that urgent, and I really wanted to dig into that book sitting on my nightstand, the one taunting me every night when I conked out without turning page. So that’s what I did. I took advantage of four quiet, uninterrupted hours in my house, and read a book. And when my son came home that evening, I enjoyed my time with him that much more because I wasn’t feeling ragged and worn out from working nonstop all day.

“Caring for our stressed out lumps of grey matter by indulging in personal pleasures every once in a while isn’t a bad thing.”

This is a trick I learned from Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play. That bit of the subtitle about “guilt-free” play means that we have to recognize how important our Me Time is, that caring for our stressed out lumps of grey matter by indulging in personal pleasures every once in a while isn’t a bad thing, and that we should actually plan for it.

I had been feeling stressed out this week, which is why I felt like I needed to accomplish so much that day. But when I was faced with that unexpected block of free time, I looked at what I had left on my plate and realized I was on top of it. What was really bothering me was how that book was going unread. Even though I routinely list reading as one of my top priorities, I wasn’t doing it, and after I finally put a good-sized dent in it, I felt 100% better.

Of course, the next day, 892 screaming, blinking, high-priority things hit my inbox, and for a half-second I felt like I could use that four hours back. But I knew I couldn’t. More importantly, I reminded myself that I wouldn’t have wanted to spend that time differently anyway.

”Ain't Nothin' Wrong With a Little Free Time” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 08, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Pmarca productivity: Excellent tips for getting through the day

Merlin Mann — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 06:18:10 -0400

blog.pmarca.com: The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity

What a fantastic post. And so many great suggestions that I’m hesitant to choose a sample…so I’ll limit myself to three:

Each night before you go to bed, prepare a 3x5 index card with a short list of 3 to 5 things that you will do the next day.

And then, the next day, do those things…

Don’t answer the phone.

Let it go to voicemail, and then every few hours, screen your voicemails and batch the return calls.

Say, twice a day…

Only agree to new commitments when both your head and your heart say yes.

In my experience, it takes time to tell the difference between your head saying yes and your heart saying yes.

I think the key is whether you’re really excited about it.

If you get that little adrenaline spike (in a good way) when you think about it, then your heart is saying yes….

Most of the tips on this page strike me as being very practical, real-world, battlefield advice that works. And even if you can’t totally avoid a schedule or totally keep email checking down to twice a day, it won’t hurt to soak up the spirit of these ideas and let them move by osmosis into the places where they can do you some good. Shake it up a little.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes 43-folders-esque stuff.

(And triple credit for the Robert Evans reference. Did it make me happy? You bet your ass it did.)

”Pmarca productivity: Excellent tips for getting through the day” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Brian Oberkirch on reducing noise and stealing back attention

Merlin Mann — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:03:53 -0400

Trimming the attention sails at Like It Matters

The 4-Hour Workweek
by Timothy Ferriss

Friend of the Folders, Brian Oberkirch, has gone on a tempo-attentional crash diet:

I had a “no mas” moment. I have a project generating a ridiculous amount of non-productive email. I have social networking service emails crufting up my inbox. I burned time in online ‘debates’ I just shouldn’t have gotten involved in. And I read Tim Ferris’ 4 Hour Work Week, which unhinged my mind and helped me think totally differently about goals, workflow, and being a stringent gatekeeper of your time.

I’ve met with Tim Ferriss a couple times (fascinating guy) and have a galley copy of his new book sitting on my desk right now. With what Brian says (combined with the raves for the book I heard from a couple folks I trust last night), I expect I’ll be starting into it today.

Back to Brian’s project: while you may not necessarily need to make your world as completely devoid of noise and distraction as Brian has, I encourage you to review his list. There’s a gold mine of tips in there for ways you might also choose to wrest back your attention and start responsibly firewalling your time.

Loathe as I am to admit it, I’ve recently had to adopt one of Brian’s dicta and have already used it twice today:

Make ‘no’ the default answer for new project/app review/etc. requests. New things should earn their way into the attention field.

Anything you’d add? Got a felonious time burglar you’ve recently arrested?

”Brian Oberkirch on reducing noise and stealing back attention” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 20, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Merlin & Leo: Gentle introduction to GTD

Merlin Mann — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 07:20:46 -0400

The Tech Guy Labs - Leo Laporte, “The Tech Guy” [2007-03-31]

On last Saturday’s Tech Guy radio show, Leo Laporte and I talked about some of the basics of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. For most regular visitors to 43 Folders, this is going to be very introductory stuff, but I think it may be useful to folks who are getting started or are just curious about what “GTD” even means.

My segment appears from about 00:59:30 to about 1:08:45. Here’s a link to an MP3 of the show, plus a few of the items that were mentioned in the segment:

Tech Guy Labs: 64k MP3 of the 3/31 show
43 Folders: Getting Started with ‘Getting Things Done’
43 Folders: Description of ‘43 Folders’ (tickler file)
43 Folders: Introducing ‘The Hipster PDA’
43 Folders: 8-Part audio interview with GTD’s David Allen
43 Folders: Best of GTD posts
Amazon.com: Getting Things Done, which is David Allen’s book that started it all

”Merlin & Leo: Gentle introduction to GTD” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 09, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Brian Kim: Teach kids time management

Merlin Mann — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:17:40 -0400

Top 5 Things That Should Be Taught In Every School

I enjoyed reading this list and was especially into number five:

#5: Time Management

Speaking of other skills that can be utilized in any job and career is time management. The majority of students never really learn to value their time and mange it while in school. Procrastination is all too rampant (studying right before class, doing homework and essays the day it’s due, partying the night before the exam). This lack of time management often carries over into adulthood, which becomes a major liability.

Learn to make a to do list. Learn to prioritize. Learn to break things down into 30 minute blocks of time. Learn about actionable items. David Allen’s GTD system is your best friend here along with Dan Kennedy’s No B.S Time Management. Again if you’re unfamiliar with these people, Google is your best friend, but I’m sure the majority of readers will know what I’m talking about.

What would you add to the list of skills you think should be taught in school?

[ via: Anarchaia (3/14/07) ]

”Brian Kim: Teach kids time management” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 14, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"