Time Management Weblog on AcePlanner

Dear Readers,

We wish you many nice and plesant impressions this year! We hope all of your goals become real this year and all of your dreams became your new goals.

Thanks for staying with us.

Anna and Alexander.

Recently I found a short article “Manage Your Time – Don’t Let It Manage You” by Maud Purcell from psychologist community site. I’m quite interesting in their practical knowledge because time management is more about managing ourselves: controlling our mood, identifying when we are most productive, what kind of work we can do in particular time, how to manage stress and prevent external factors interrupting our work, what planning style is more natural for us, and many more other “why” and “what”.

Ok, here are some of their answers.

First of all Maud suggests to clarify what time management really is. It’s not about doing one hour long task in 5 minutes, but it’s about managing our life and saving time for taking some fun from it.

Second, but not less important, she said what we all have our prime time hours when we concentrate best. For most people it’s early morning, but there are still people who most concentrated and intuitive late afternoon and even in the middle of the night. She suggests to block this time for most important and urgent activities. In AcePlanner it’s A priority. However she doesn’t described methods of identifying the prime time and what most productive time on Monday may not match the prime time on Friday. So my couple of words is here. Most time management books and teachers from time management courses suggest tracking emotional state with colors for a week or two. It’s simple, just prepare sheet on paper: on the X-axes draw days of week, on the Y day hours, half of an hour resolution is enough. Associate colors with your emotional states and mark it in the sheet if your mood changed. Otherwise periodically stop for a second and reflect what you are feeling in the sheet. Our time-management tool also provides this functionality.

Next, she points on time reflection. She suggests to stop for a minute if you find yourself doing some kind of treadmill. Ask yourself if you really need this, if yes, compare it with your priorities and life goals. Yes, this is the central time management tip.

As psychologist she also points us for a valuable mistake, from time-management point of view, absorbing others problems. As usual we need to think twice before putting the power to resolve it.

She also touched procrastination theme. She suggests to not sit “near the task”, just workout it right away. Don’t try to do it perfectly. Good is usually better than perfect. Here Paretto principle is also applicable: 20% of work dedicated for perfectness usually eat 80% of time.

Not surprising for me, she suggests to take time breaks for relaxation. This will ultimately help us being effective not only in the morning.

Here is nothing special, but these tips are quite applicable for our life and work. So let’s save our time for more fun and better life. Don’t hesitate to post comments here. See you next week.

In one of the previous articles I provided an overview of various to-do lists. This time I would like to concentrate on simplest to-do list: plain or sequential list of tasks.

Let’s start with a real example from the life of an AcePlanner customer. His name is Thomas and he is manager in a small company in München, Germany. In overall he usually has 6-7 appointments per week, 4-5 meetings, and some amount of none-repeating tasks, including phone calls, support tickets and urgent assignments.

He told me the story of how it can help. Managing a to-do list is a daily ritual for him. He starts a to-do list in the road to the office. No, he doesn’t take Palm or PDA, or a paper and pencil. He thinks about upcoming and non-completed tasks, ideas he is going to work today or this week. In the office he can simply write everything down to the clear page of his copy book. Additionally he has two markers: red and yellow. With the red color he marks time sensitive tasks, like meetings and appointments, and urgent or important tasks.

Completed tasks he crosses out. New tasks he adds to the list. He rewrites his paper planner usually once per 2-3 days to see if it’s accurate. You can imagine what happens with paper document after some crossing and correction. This is very important because a good-looking plan usually adds more positive emotions to our work. His new plan consists of incomplete tasks from the previous version and new tasks. Some tasks are obsolete or can be omitted, some already crossed out, thus will not be added to the new leaf. However time can turn an unimportant task to urgent one. In this case red marker is very helpful.

This method helps him to find few daily recurring tasks. And first time he tried to dedicate a separate leaf of paper for a list of recurring tasks. This was an indication what he is ready to move to an advanced to-do list or electronic planning system.

Recently he has moved the workflow to-do list to the electronic form in AcePlanner and quite happy with it. AcePlanner is a higher level of to-do list. It provides separate views for tasks and daily plan, automatically manages recurring tasks.

We will continue investigating various to-do lists in the next article.

If you have your own story of using a to-do list, please share it with the community by placing a comment.

Balance. It’s a nice word but the reality is hard to pin down. It may not even put us on the right track in our 21st century quest for fulfillment and happiness. In this article we will talk about the integration of work and family life, beginning not with the workplace and the employer’s role in sorting things out, but with the person and her priorities.

Generally than people talk about work-life balance they mean the challenge of managing their family commitment when they’ve got children, while juggling the demands of a career. That’s the traditional focus, but the concept has evolved quite a bit. There are now many younger people in the workforce, in their late 20s and early 30s, who may not even have children but they want a sense of balance in their life.

Often we are thinking of some sort of perfection, where nothing is out of place, there’s no stress, and this of course is unrealistic. It automatically means a trade-off between work and life. If I give more time to my family I won’t be able to do my job properly, or if I spend more time on the job my family will suffer. Yet I want to be able to have it all, to do it all, right now.

Let’s think about integration, which means bringing the various pieces of our lives into a cohesive whole. We each have many roles, goals, responsibilities and life plans. We have to get it together. The attractive idea of finding ways to bring life into a unity will give us the harmony and happiness we seek.

Experience shows what people who have very clear priorities and their own clear definition of success succeed best at balancing their lives. They know what’s most important in their lives. These are people who can say, before it happens: If I have to make a choice, if work and family come head to head, I know what my biggest priority is. People who realize it may have slow their career for a period of time, perhaps while a child is younger, and have a less demanding job so they can have more time at home. And they can be at peace with that, because their definition of success is not necessarily the one that society tells them.

Usually we have to just go through life and let the new promotion or the new demands of the job dictate what you do, to feel you don’t have a choice. This is not balanced life road. We need to stop and reflect, communicate more with your husband, your wife, your manager at work, and basically be more pro-active.

The today’s truth is that we have too much to do. Technology has changed things and made people accessible 24 hours a day, encroaching on the peaceful time people used to have. Yet some things don’t change. We still have 24 hours a day. We all have the same amount of time and how we use it comes down to a personal choice.

The disorganization traits usually come from avoiding the choice and try to do too much. Even a simple thing like, What are we going to have for dinner tonight? can become a huge job if we feel, Oh, I’ve a lot of work and will not be able to do grocery shopping. Obviously, if we have the knowledge and skills to make something simpler than we’re going to gain more time. This is what AcePlanner is built on - using good systems to simplify daily tasks so you don’t spend inordinate amounts of time on work.

For balanced life planning and other basic management skills have to be used at home as well as in the workplace. One of the reasons why many people prefer going out to work to working at home is what we’re very organized in the workplace, we use time management there, and then we come home and just ride the waves, consuming ourselves with the latest problem that has cropped up.

However there’s nothing wrong with wanting to go out to work. We do need multiple interests to enrich our lives and many times we have talents that we need to give to the workplace and to the world. But it is true that work on the job is often more attractive because it is more project-oriented and very linear, and at the end of that piece of work we get the praise and a sense of accomplishment, whereas at home every day it’s the same thing.

Human beings have certain basic needs that have to be taken care of every day, and although we can feel a sense of accomplishment that we have organized something at home, it’s soon going to be dirtied again, or another meal is going to have to be put on the table. And this means changing your sense of where you get your satisfaction - not just from accomplishing the task or from the process of doing it, but from the motive.

We usually faced with so many needs to be done. This relates to job, social activities, as well as personal life. Sometimes we do not know what to do and sometimes we have a headache of huge amount of work required to work on. These cases are forcing us to use a to-do list.

The goal of a to-do list

To get most of to-do lists let’s think about goals of using it. We all know what we can not do something effectively while our mind is thinking about anything else. Remember situation then you worry about an upcoming event or about speaking on meeting. This rarely allows completing other tasks and usually significantly increases time spending.

We need a tool to help us avoiding worry about anything except the current task and to keep concentration on one task a time. Is writing tasks into a to-do list help us forgetting about these items until we have to do something about them? If yes, that is our desired goal of using to-do list.

To conclude the basic idea of a to-do list I have to say: let to do list worry about upcoming tasks, release your mind to complete the current one.

Types of to-do lists

To-do lists are widely used. It is so natural what many people not require any special training or manual. However some education can help. Everyone is unique and approaches of using to-do list are different. Let’s highlight three commonly used to-do list types:

1. Plain or sequential to-do list

Everyone at least once used this kind of to-do list. It looks like a numbered list of tasks to be done. Such to-do list user works on these tasks starting with most important first. Every completed task marked appropriately.

2. One day to-do list

This type of to-do list is used for collecting most important and time sensitive tasks. This includes meetings, phone calls and events. These tasks are usually written in sticky notes and placed on a visible place. In addition to task title it contains scheduled time.

3. To-do list with scheduling

This one list is most effective and can benefit user with an additional info, such as time spending reports, data for timesheets, planned vs. spent comparison tables. This to-do list is only available in electronic form, as software like AcePlanner.

Effective to-do list is not just a plain of things to be done. It is an instrument for collecting tasks and selecting most important to work on.

We will come back next week and cover in details how-to, pros and cons of each to-do list.

We frequently hear term balanced life. But how is it looks like? How to understand where is a balance and where is a shortest way to it?

There is no simple answer what fits all, because we are all unique. But here is a set of leading questions what can help you understand a style to keep up balancing.

1. Write down tasks what you most likely do in the next one or two days. Set importance of each task using ABC or Covey’s scheme, where A - tasks that must be done, and soon; B - important tasks as A, but can wait; C - tasks what require immediate attention, but can be skipped without a risk; and D - nice to have tasks.
2. Are the A, B, C and D priorities produce the order what you most likely do them? If not, where is a trick?
3. Are there tasks essential for your personal and professional goals and career?
4. Do you have tasks to learn something new?
5. Is there a time for breakfast, fitness and relaxation? Do you usually have regular breakfast and meals?
6. What percentage of tasks written above will provide a value for your company, colleagues or for your boss?
7. Do you have a time for D-tasks, what you would really like to get done?
8. Imagine, if tomorrow is not a workday. How many A, B, C and D tasks, what you written above, can be applied for holiday?
9. Create a new list of personal tasks for these holidays. How many of them would include family, friends and hobby?
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Here is a place for more questions. Keep writing in this list more tests, suitable personally for you. Do it regularly, for example, one question every Monday. This list is like a book with a new content every time you read. Continue asking yourself these questions and find balance and happiness.

Please don’t forget to leave a comment.

After a while we noticed what some people goes panic if faced with difficulties of any kind. But other people became even better if difficulties come. Such people usually fill themselves pretty happy. The secret everyone knows I think. It is a positive thinking.

Becoming a positive thinker is easy. Just tell yourself one of the following phrases in case if something goes wrong:

• I know what bad things will not go with me always.
• Bad things happen only to help me understand what is really good for me and illuminate my real goals.
• This is not my failure; this is only one more step to my success.
• This one difficulty is just one more exercise to keep me in a good form.
• Do you fill badly? Yes, I do. Is there a space for worse to come? No. That’s good!
• The item is broken. That’s good, I’ll use released parts for something else. Or even better: this will free up more space in my room.

I covered only few examples of positive thinking here. But best results we can expect with our own positive thinking ideas. Try to write down yours on the scratch or better in the comment.

We are starting this weblog to share our way of positive thinking, tips of searching goals we really desire and methods of getting things done.

Stay on topic and we will open all our secrets of happier and balanced life.