Posts Tagged ‘time-management’

Scoring 100% in Time Management

"Most people who attempt to learn a new time management system fail." I can't prove the above statement with hard facts, but I have a sense that it's true, based on my personal experience and observations.  If success is defined as 100% successful implementation, then that statistic is most certainly true. On the other hand, perhaps 99% of the people who take a time management program put down the book, or drive… Continue reading

Impressing Your Boss with Time Management 2.0

You know you are in a bit of trouble when your boss tells you that you need to improve your time management skills. In times past, when training budgets were somewhat normal the solution was easy. Sign up for a class in New Jersey, make sure that the boss is involved in the planning, offer a one page post-course "summary," and email a thank-you for the… Continue reading

A Quick Guide to Email: Not Being “That Guy”

If you're reading this, odds are you are a knowledge worker whose time is very valuable and who requires large chunks of uninterrupted time in order to do whatever it is you are being paid to do.  You aren't cranking widgets.  Instead, you're trying to discover the history and social significance of widgets across cultural contexts, or you're trying to design a revolutionary new machine to produce widgets, or you're… Continue reading

Blackberry Slavery

A participant in one of my time management workshops recently shared that her corporate culture has evolved to the point where a manager who owns a Blackberry is expected to respond to email within the hour. In a few of those instances in which she took too long to respond, the results was an email to her boss's boss with a complaint. This made me wonder... What happens when an employee receives… Continue reading

GTD Refresh: Contexts and Calendar

In my first post in this series , I discussed the steps I had begun to take in putting my GTD system back in order. I started by outlining my life at the moment (especially my Areas of Focus") and sketching out a vision of myself in 3-5 years. The next step in my return to an orthodox GTD system is to reset… Continue reading

Time Management For Anarchists

A while back, Jim Munroe started giving a talk called 'Time Management for Anarchists.' The talk evolved into a Flash adaptation, complete with historic anarchists Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin. From there, Jim teamed up with Marc Ngui and turned the whole concept into a comic book, now available as a PDF. The comic, the talk and the Flash presentation all focus on a surprisingly simple dilemma… Continue reading

How to Be Awesome at Followup

Photo by Marloes Most people are unexceptional at following up: it sounds obvious, but it shouldn't be this way, because followup (I spell it as a single word) is key to combining smaller achievements into bigger ones. Actively following up on conversation is also a trait of people who're successful, focused, and relentless about living their dreams. Lofty yet elegant — and if you excel at followup, you can be… Continue reading

8 Essential Skills They Didn’t Teach You In School

Lately, I've been simultaneously using less and less of what I learned in school while discovering more and more skills that are vital to success which were never even offered in school! If I were to be 100% honest, probably the most valuable skill I learned in college was how to talk to girls (certainly a vital skill for happiness and success, but not what I was there to learn). The economics… Continue reading

Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Managing Multiple Jobs At Once

Some of us take on second jobs to make ends meet. Some do it for a chance to do the work they actually enjoy. And some of us create our own second jobs to build a business or create our own projects. No matter what the reason, though, juggling more than one job is guaranteed to be a crash course in time management. If you're not careful, the word… Continue reading

Working at Night is for Raccoons – Not You!

If you’re packing your computer or briefcase and lugging it home to do more work most days you gotta ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” When you’re sitting in front of the keyboard writing an email to someone at the office at midnight would your friends ask, “Aren’t there other things you’d rather be doing?” When you get your paycheck do you think, “I sure get paid well, that’s… Continue reading

How to Use Parkinson’s Law to Your Advantage

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you're into productivity, you'll know this proverb as Parkinson's Law. This interesting statement was made by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the famous British historian and author, in 1955 - first appearing as the opening line in an article for The Economist and later becoming the focus of one of Parkinson's books, Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress. Parkinson was qualified to… Continue reading

Time Striping: A Different Approach to Time Management

As a university instructor, I often have weeks-long stretches of unscheduled time in between sessions, which I need to use to catch up on all the projects I've let slide during the hectic second half of the semester. As a freelance writer, I always have a stack of little projects as well as ongoing commitments (like my thrice-weekly posts here at Lifehack) that need to get done.

The Trouble… Continue reading

How to Be On Time Every Time

In my last post, I talked about why being punctual matters. The short version: people who are habitually late (or are late even once, when it counts) project incompetence, self-centeredness, and even a lack of integrity.

In the comments, lapka asked if there were any tricks for people who have a hard time showing up on time, and through a little bit of research and a little bit of… Continue reading

8 Ways to Be Ruthless With Your Time

There are a million and one demands on your time and, whether or not those demands are legitimate, it’s hard to carve out the time necessary to take care of your responsibilities. You have to be ruthless with your time — you have to take care of important tasks before handling issues that just aren’t crucial. You have to set up your own rules for deciding how to spend… Continue reading

Do You Read Too Many Blogs?

Ades of AdesBlog.com has a theory: that top bloggers don't read other people's blogs. To test his theory, he asked several big-name bloggers -- Michael Arrington, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Yaro Starak -- about their blog-reading habits. Except for Darren Rowse, they all said they read few or no blogs; Rowse said he subscribes to 700 but only skims the whole list occasionally… Continue reading

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