Time Management Weblog on AcePlanner

It’s already an autumn on the street and new student year begins. There are a lot of staff occupied students: new classes, new impressions, new teachers, new knowledge. It’s always difficult to find a minute in the morning for some sleep and nights are always short. Who knows, maybe it’s a best time of our life and that’s a good way to spend it.
However there are some simple tips to get even more this autumn.

Organize Your Time

The more organized you are, the more you will be able to accomplish today. Don’t be in hurry to do everything at once.
For a good start you can opt to organize papers on your desk, or keep them in a file drawer. Some options for organization include: Papers to be graded, Papers to be copied, Things to do, Things to File, etc. Whatever you find to be common categories for your personal style of working will be useful in organizing your work.
Use file folders to keep yourself organized. Use one folder for each lesson or unit, and this will enable you to easily know what you need, and what you should prepare for the lesson, and easily file the lesson or unit when you are finished studying it.

Have a list of tasks

If you have a list of tasks and if you can quickly modify this list, either add or remove something, you will not spend a time for seeking what to do next. This will also prevent you from forgetting something important.
Use a small notepad for this what you can simply bring with you in the pocket. Otherwise you can take only one leaf of paper with all your tasks printed down. (I’d suggest to use something electronic for printing it, for example you can print a To-Do tasks or Daily time plan reports from your AcePlanner).

Prioritize Your Tasks

All of us are willing to get most important tasks done first. However for students there are always so many important staff what it’s simply not possible to find a time for a lengthy course work required next month. Don’t forget to add such tasks to the daily route.

Lunch time

Whenever there is not enough time in the day to accomplish everything that must be done, don’t consider using your lunch time. Spend this time with other students, relax and have some meal to power up your brain.

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.

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.