A Commitment to Time Management

It’s time for me to take Time Management more serious.

In recent months I have struggled to manage the vast amount of email, paperwork and other stuff on my to-do list that is coming at me from all sides including work but also as the result of our property investments, my dabbling with some online business ventures etc. When you also want to spend enough quality time with your family and have some time for yourself to exercise it sometimes just seems impossible to do what needs to be done.

Years ago I read Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and tried to put it to good use. Over time I didn’t manage to keep it up. A few months ago I read Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen and had a go at that. I like the essence of it, but his methodology could be summarized to a handful of pages and doesn’t require the 250+ pages David took to write it all down. I still use elements of GTD but not consistently and without a system. So I guess it won’t last either unless I do something about it.

Bottom line is – I guess I am like many others in that I have tried various time management approaches but have not succeeded to make anyone of them really work for.

That is about to change. I have committed myself to making a system that suits my needs and to make it work. To make it stick. And I started yesterday. Really.

Here’s what I’m going to be doing:

First. I’m re-reading Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits because I feel this is the material I should use as the foundation of my approach. Over the next few weeks I will read the book chapter by chapter and as soon as I have completed a chapter I am going to analyze it and post a summary here at Time Management HQ. The main reason I am doing that is because I have found that when I summarize what I read and try to explain it to others it simply sticks with me much better.

Second. Once I have completed enough of the 7 Habits I am going back to the core of Getting Things Done by David Allen and set-up a simplified system in such a way that it will work. I need to make it stick. This includes finding a solution to both all my hardcopy filing and managing all my emails and electronic files in a much better approach. To that extend I expect to use bits and pieces from Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy and other sources.
 

Third. I am going to keep Time Management HQ as a public journal of what I am doing and why. I will write what works for me and what doesn’t. I hope that because of the public nature of the site I can use it to hold myself accountable.

I hope the journey will pay off and meet my expectations. And yes, it is a journey. In fact it’s a marathon not a sprint. It will involve changing my views and working on my habits. It won’t be easy and it will take time.

Just to manage expectations, myself more than anybody else’s, I won’t be updating this on a daily or even weekly basis. I will aim for two updates per month.