Do It Tomorrow

For almost any initiative, the route to success is regular, focused action.

Exercise
Take a sheet of paper and make a list of all the things you intend to get around to some day. Include your work and your private life. Don’t include anything that you have to get done by a certain date. Ideally they should be the sort of things that won’t get done at all unless you make a conscious resolve to do them.

. One of the great secrets of time management is not to give things more urgency than they deserve. Never react to anything immediately unless it is a genuine emergency or your job is to provide immediate responses and you are organised to do s

We have to train ourselves to put distance between ourselves and the thing that needs a quick response. We need a buffer so that we can impose some order.

management point of view.
For my purposes I define a ‘same-day’ response as a response that isn’t immediate but needs to take place sometime within the same day.

Exercise
Observe yourself during the course of a working day. Look out for the occasions when you are tempted to do something random. This may be in response to a sudden impulse. Or it may be the result of a request by someone else, or something unexpected occurring. Make a note of the times you are tempted, whether you actually do the random action or not.

A pseudo-emergency is one that is an emergency only because you have not done it earlier

When you are trying to cut down your workload, the place to look is not at your individual tasks, but at your commitments. When we feel the need to cut our workload, there is a marked tendency to do it by cutting the time we allocate to each commitment, rather than by cutting the commitments themselves. It is much more sensible to cut our commitments so we have adequate time to complete them all. Commitments are like bushes – they need regular pruning.

want to make it clear here that I am only unhappy about the concept of prioritising one’s tasks by importance. Prioritising tasks is to be prioritising at the wrong level. The right place for prioritising is at the level of goals and commitments. Since all your work flows from your commitments, it is absolutely essential to be selective about which commitments you are going to take on. The only sensible way of doing this is to decide which are the really important ones for your life and work.

Next, ask yourself how many days’ work your to-do list would take to clear if you did nothing but work on it until every item on the list was crossed off. The easiest way to do this is to make a time estimate in minutes for each item on the list, add them all together, divide by sixty to give you the number of hours, and then divide again by the number of hours you work a day to tell you how many days’ worth of work you have.