10 Tips and Tools for Harnessing Fleeting Time

Yesterday, a department head stopped in, looking for some recommendations to better manage his email, projects, and calendar. Here are some things that I suggest to help manage a fleeting commodity — time.

Block Off Your Calendar

The idea of blocking off your calendar is to focus your attention on a single task such as answering email, project management, relationship management, or article writing. It typically takes 15 minutes of uninterrupted work to get into the “flow” and a single distraction to get out of it. Blocking off your calendar to focus on tasks such as reviewing email will increase your chance of task completion. If you have the luxury of blocking off your calendar for meetings and other personnel appointments, try to do it. You should also block your calendar to work on projects.

Pomodoro Technique

This is a technique that I recently adopted. I have discussed in a previous post. It uses a countdown timer to measure 25-minute work periods with a 5-minute break in between periods. I have found that my productivity has increased since using this technique.

Don’t File Email

I read an interesting post that recommended don’t file your email into folders. An IBM Research study found that people locate email messages more quickly when they do not place the message in a sub-folder. Instead, learn to become more efficient at searching. Tagging and categories can also aid in locating messages. Also, offload email messages you need to retain into a program like Evernote so that you can find them easier and weave them into your project or relationship management system.

Close Your Email During the Day

Rather than keep your email running all day, open it for processing only two to three times per day. Block off time to focus solely on this task. Having email run in the background constantly distracts you. You can better spend your time by focusing on reducing your to-do list.

Strive for a Zero Inbox

Many people advocate for a zero inbox or an email inbox with no messages. Daniel Gold provides good advice in his article “Five Ways to Control Your Inbox.” He advocates making one of five decisions on an email message and moving on. These decisions are: do it, defer it, delegate it, delete it, or incubate it. While I essentially do this in theory, my inbox is never empty. This is something I need to work on.

Schedule Meetings Early in the Day

According to time management gurus, scheduling meetings early in the day will result in saving hours of otherwise wasted time. If you have a meeting looming in the afternoon, you will avoid scheduling a block of time to work on a project because you will prepare physically and mentally for the meeting. An early morning meeting frees up your day for productive work.

Find a Great Note-Taking System

Almost everything we do requires a written record, from staff meetings to project management to relationship management. I used to have notes everywhere and in countless formats until I started using Evernote. If I need to keep an email because of the valuable content, I send it to Evernote. I keep all meeting notes in Evernote. I have also tracked relationships with clients and vendors in Evernote. The nice thing about Evernote is its ability to create a master note and subsequently link other notes to the master note. You can link to notes, images, documents, etc. If you write your notes in a notebook, you can scan them in as a PDF or take a picture and send them to Evernote. The notes are then searchable… depending on your handwriting. Finally, you can use Evernote on computers, the web, smartphones, and tablets. The flexibility of platforms and what it can capture is fantastic. You can even capture audio notes and webcasts.

Tools to Automate

If possible, try to automate processes. For example, there are tools like IFTTT that will automate tasks such as when you “Star” an email in Gmail, it will automatically go to Evernote. Here is a list of IFTTT recipes that use Evernote. I recently got a ScanSnap scanner that will scan documents directly to Evernote. I can then incorporate those documents into project or relationship management notes. Set up folders in Dropbox to upload documents automatically to Evernote or print to your remote printer.

Find a Calendar to Share

While typical calendars like Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar are not project management tools, they can help keep you on task. You can monitor deadlines and share calendars with project teams. When possible, I use colors to identify my tasks and appointments at a glance.

There is a new program available called Zendone that seems to be a marriage between Evernote, GTD, and Google Calendar. I will explore it soon.

Here are good instructions for using calendars to manage your projects:

• How to Use Google Calendar as a Project Management Tool
• Maximize Your Productivity with Outlook 2010 Part 2 – Task Management

Learn to Say No

Sometimes, you simply have to say no. If you do not, you can spread yourself too thin and simply not deliver your best work.

Well, that is my list for the day. I am now going to set my Pomodairo timer and explore Zendone. If you have any suggestions for better managing your time and tasks, please leave a comment.

Additional Reading

• Book Review: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
• Book Review: Evernote: Your Second Brain: Evernote User Guide to Organize Your Life Clutter, Double Productivity and Achieve More in Less Time
• Take Time to Make Time
• #ATD2015 Session: Time Management is Dead & Get Control of Email and Outlook
• Save Time and Energy With Autotext
• Book Review: Get It Done: The 21-Day Mind Hack System to Double Your Productivity and Finish What You Start
• Mastering My Email With Boomerang and a Couple of Other Tweaks

• In the spirit of full disclosure, this is an affiliate link, so if you purchase this item through my link, I will earn a commission. You will not pay more when buying a product through my link. I only recommend products & systems that I use and love myself, so I know you’ll be in good hands.
  Plus, when you order through my link, it helps me to continue to offer you a lot of free stuff. 🙂 Thank you in advance for your support!