Time Management Day by Day - Introduction

Introduction

Do you spend your day fully occupied yet get to bed having achieved nothing of consequence?  Do you find yourself dithering away the time on low value tasks, or surfing the internet without even any clear idea of what you are looking for?  Do you prioritise tidying up your desk while urgent actions sit on your to do list getting more and more urgent?

You are not alone.  Everybody faces basically the same problem.  We evolved in a world where things were very different.  Our very biology revolts against the lives we find ourselves leading now.  We once foraged for nuts and berries while chatting with our friends and families, or joined up in teams to hunt tastier prey.  Our survival depended on maintaining good relations with those around us and our goals were clear and generally on four legs.  That is the kind of life we are designed for.  So it isn't surprising that we enjoy conversation, shopping and sports with straight forward objectives.  Nothing in our makeup prepares us for the shear complexity of modern life.

So basically the surprise isn't really that so many of us find ourselves procrastinating and giving in to distractions so much of the time.  It is more of a surprise that any of us succeed at all in holding down an office job or carrying out any of the bizarre tasks that our continually increasing specialisation and division of labour leads us to.

I found myself to be wasting way too much time in my life and resolved to do something about it.  I started by looking for easy solutions from self help books.  These were not a bad place to start as it turned out.  Dave Allen's Getting Things Done and Brian Tracey's Time Power were particularly helpful.  But neither of them were enough to get me where I wanted to be.  Both were very prescriptive and both opened up new vistas of guilt and failure to add to those I was already suffering. In particular they were great at suggestions for increasing how efficiently I could process tasks and make good use of time. But they didn't really help me focus on the things that really matter to me.

Eventually I realised that there was no formula that I could find on the shelf and apply.  I needed to devise my own solution and to continually work on developing it.   This is the story of how I created and continue to improve a system of working that has made me considerably more productive than I have ever been before in my life.  It takes into account the way I am, the way work is and the goals I have set myself.  It is consequently the story of my own personal journey to beat the demons of poor time management.  Some of what has worked for me might well work for you, but you need to adapt it to your own personality and requirements.  I hope you enjoy the ride.

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