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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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I found this article (”Making Peace with Time“) by Michael Gilbert while doing some research on another topic. It is a concise and valuable approach to time management that has eerie similarities to Getting Things Done, by David Allen. As the material will be familiar to those involved in the GTD community, I thought it would make a good fit. The article is actually reprinted from In Context Magazine (1994!), but the timeless technique is still very relevant today, in the 21st century.

As part of our time management practice, Gilbert asks us to do a few things to gain some perspective as to how we use our time. That is, how we would like to spend our time vs. how we actually spend our time, and how we can create a program for reconciling those two ideas. First he talks about the pressures of managing time and activities:

…few of us have a peaceful relationship with time.

But where do we begin to transform this relationship? Most of us start by trying to “get things under control.” We use the very same emotional time pressure that we resent to force ourselves to get things done. We make lists and lists of lists. We put Post-It notes everywhere. We make appointments and create deadlines. We surround ourselves with messages screaming “DO ME, DO ME,” all in an effort to control our desires and behavior.

But control does not work. Control is what a guard does to a prisoner. Control only turns joyful commitments into tedious obligations. This is the major fallacy of traditional time management systems.

Time management should be a tool for reflection and making choices…[Emphasis mine, Ed.]

This is the beauty of the Getting Things Done practice, it’s very essence is comprised of “reflection” (Organize & Review) and “making choices” (Process & Do). Putting our Next Actions in the proper context so that we know exactly what to do right at this moment. Gilbert describes a workshop in which he would teach a three-part decision-making process:

1. How do we really spend our time?
2. What is truly important to us?
3. How can we make our committments more effective?

Following these steps, Gilbert says, will give us a clear picture of the real time-management situation that we are in. In order to discover how we truly spend our time, Gilbert recommends creating a time log, a blank piece of paper divided into three columns: Time, Activity, and Interruption. Carry this paper with you for an entire day, recording your actions and activities, according to these instructions:

Part I: Time Well Spent?

1. Every time you take on a new activity, make an entry on the Time Log. You may feel foolish. It will interrupt your work. Do it anyway and do it for the entire day. Pick a happy medium in defining what constitutes a new activity. (Don’t stop to note every pen stroke, but don’t have only large blocks of time entered as a single activity.)

2. Under “time,” enter the time you start the new activity, to the minute. Under “activity,” enter a brief description of what you’re doing. Under “interruption,” explain why the activity felt like an interruption of your time, if it did. This last column is totally subjective.

Tracking your day like this will allow you to see exactly what it is that you have been doing, so be honest and disciplined about it. You may be surprised at how different it is from what you think that you have been doing. It also allows you to track the types of interruptions that you experience, and when. I would recommend that if you do this excercise, put the completed time tracker in your Tickler File for four weeks later and do it again then. This will enable you to track your progress on staying productive, and managing those interruptions (if possible).

Look over your actions and activities for the day with a hi-lighter in your hand. Hi-light the entries that you consider to be “important”, and make a list of them on a second sheet of paper. Then make a list of the “unimportant” or “interruption” entries. Staple these together and file them in your Tickler for comparison four weeks from now. You may want to write the “interruptions” on a 3″x5″ card and keep it in your organizer so that you can be reminded of what activities you are working on eliminating.

My favorite quote from this article is in the second portion, “To say that everything is important is just as useless as saying that nothing is important”. There must be an order of things, a priority list. Obviously we prioritize things every day, but to paraphrase Stephen Covey, “Are we doing the right things?” To this end, Gilbert adds two more excercises for finding out what our priorities are, and just how valuable our everyday activities are to us:

Part II: Importance Revealed

Exercise I - Good News: Starting tomorrow, you have four extra hours a day! Take five minutes to answer this question: What would you want to add?

Don’t get down on yourself with pessimistic predictions based on how you actually spend your time right now.

Don’t get technical. There are no restrictions on the four hours. They are an invitation to creativity. But don’t accumulate the hours and give yourself extra days off; the point is to focus on daily life.

Take a blank calendar page and fill in a week’s worth of activities and actions, based on what you normally do in the course of a week, but with 28 hours in a day. How much more could you get done? How would you spend that extra time?

Exercise II - Bad News: Starting tomorrow you have four fewer hours a day! Take ten minutes to answer this question: What would you want to cut?

Use the same guidelines as the first exercise. Give in to your ideals and don’t get too technical. This second exercise is difficult. It involves saying no to things, something few of us are good at. But it is an essential complement to the first exercise. Time management is about making choices and there are only 24 hours in a day.

Repeat the excercise with the blank calendar page, only now you must get everything done in 20 hours per day. What has to go?

This can be a tremendously useful method for drilling down into your psyche and finding out what really is important to you. What would you do if you had just four more hours? What would you stop doing if you had to give up four hours? Indeed, important questions that generate more important answers for ourselves and the future of our commitments.

Gilbert prepares us for this type of analysis with this warning about perserverance and responsibility to ourselves. It seems especially relevant in the context of Getting Things Done:

Part III: Committments Made:

But first, before we get intrigued by tickler files and to-do lists, we need to make a fundamental commitment: To improve our relationship with time, we must devote time to time management! But the commitment doesn’t have to be huge: fifteen minutes each day, forty-five minutes once a week, and an occasional longer period of introspection would be an excellent foundation for change.

This is the description of setting your Most Important Tasks*, your Weekly Review, and sets the stage for the Monthly and Quarterly reviews as well. In conclusion, Gilbert sums up with a statement that is right after my own heart, “Make a Habit of Learning“. I will let Gilbert have the last word:

There are several things to remember as you work on changing your relationship with time: First, that it’s a never-ending cycle of learning, and that cycle includes all three of the parts described above. Second, that these are tools for reflection, not control. Third, nothing changes until you get started. When you finish this article, make an appointment with yourself [emphasis mine, one of the most important time management tips! Ed.] to do the Time Log, or any other exercise or tool that caught your interest.

Finally, be willing to pay the price of change. Realize that you cannot do everything and that real life is about choices. Be willing to experience the short-term stress of learning and you will avoid the long-term stress of living a life that is untrue.

*(Thanks, Leo!)

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/2wam5w. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

There is a problem that is shared by many of us in the busy, busy world of Web 2.0 - how to read everything that we get our hands on. Whether this reading is a book, magazine, article, blog post, or PDF we have downloaded there is a lot to keep up with and only so much time. Here are 4.5 tips for managing these stacks that just never seem to get smaller:

1. Dedicate a space to collect them. In the real world, you need a physical spot that is dedicted to the storage of your incoming reading material. Your Inbox is no place for the new Vince Flynn novel! In the digital realm, set up a folder in your email program and send yourself a copy of the blog post, PDF, or e-book. Gmail makes this very easy, as you can add the category to your normal email address with a “plus” (name+reading@gmail.com) .
2. Get these materials organized. Just because your reading materials are now in a container, does not mean that they are organized. Put the books and magazines in an appropriate order for your needs, and put a sticky-note on each one with an estimated time for reading. If it is just a magazine article and you don’t need the rest, then rip off the cover, tear out the article pages, staple them all together and put them in a file folder. Tag the sticky note or folder with the date it went into the system.
3. Cull while you organize. Have you collected some books or magazines that you thought that you should/would read but you know that you won’t, or don’t need to?  Get rid of them. Take them to the local used bookstore or Goodwill. Apply your GTD Workflow principles in order to maximize your reading investment. During the Weekly Review check the dates on each piece, this will make it easier to decide if something is worth reading or has simply aged out of the queue due to your disinterest.
4. Make an appointment for reading. I am a firm believer in setting appointments with yourself. You will always have bits of time here and there for reading, which is perfect for those magazine articles in the file folders. Your greatest efficiency, however, will come through making an appointment with yourself for getting the heavy-lifting done. First thing in the morning and just after dinner are the best times for me, your mileage will vary.

Bonus Tip: Carry a short list of the titles and authors of books you are interested in adding to your collection with you all the time. You never know when you may come across a reference to a new title, get a recommendation from a friend or associate, or (worst of all) find yourself in a bookstore unexpectedly. It is a terrible thing to be at the bookstore and have your mind go blank. What was the title of that book about blogging?

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6p7jkt. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I use the GTD workflow process to choose my Next Actions, and I am getting much better at it. In order to know exactly what action is next on your list, it is important to know the Context of your current situation. “Where am I?” is a key question, as is “How much time/energy do I have?” Knowing the answers is not always easy, but it is a learned behavior that can become a habit. Once this happens, your methodology becomes more transparent, and easier to use.

The Flexible Manager has more on the subject of Contexts:

For Getting Things Done the killer app. is context. Context is the label that is applied to the action or project (more than one action).

The best thing about context, and in general the GTD framework, is that it’s personal to you and not a system that you have to adjust yourself to.

For example I use my laptop a lot and a logical context might be @computer. However there are some tasks I need to be on the internet for some I need to be on the corporate network.

This then allows me to plan for @VPN or @www. If I’m on a plane and there are somethings that I can do without a connection at all, this becomes @pc.

The granularity of your Contexts is up to you, which is the beauty of the GTD system. What level of granularity do you use? Simply @Work, or @Computer, @Deadlines, @Monthly Newsletter, etc.

Leave a comment.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5psvgy. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Good afternoon,

One of the commenters on my previous post suggested a tutorial on setting goals and planning for their completion.  I have been using it to lay out my 1-2 year and 3-5 year goals over the past couple of days. There will be a big update on the results of this work shortly. I do recommend Ellesse’s blog at Goal Setting College. There is a ton of useful information there.

Also, if you are not in the practice of doing a Quarterly Review, I highly recommend it. That execise is exactly the tool that exposed my (previously unknown) open loops in the long-term goals and @Project contexts.

I leave you with a quote from Hans Margolius that expresses the result we are all working on with our GTD:

“Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.”

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5gn8pt. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen