1DayLater - The Blog

Time Management Tips - no.1 

Aggressive Prioritizing / extreme time management

Here’s one of the most effective ways to boost your work productivity. I do this every day and seriously - it works!

Bend time to your will…

Step 1-Create a to-do list every morning

First thing in the morning (after you’ve had your morning cuppa of course) spend 15 minutes constructing a to-do list of activities you feel should get done that day. This won’t be wasted time.

You now have a list of activities

eg.

• 20 activities

• 5 really need doing

Step 2-Use aggressive prioritizing.

If you had to pick just one of these to do today - which one would it be? That is your number 1. Repeat this exercise to find number 2, and so on.

Step 3-Get working!

Stick to the order of your list and make sure you complete each task as much as possible before moving onto the next.

Now if you only get some things done in your day, they will have been the most important ones. Simple but truly effective!

- coming soon: time management for programmers

Developing a business mindset - Mental activity modelling

In order to start acting like a businessman you need to start thinking like one. A neat idea we picked up from one of our excellent mentors, Richard Hanage is to create and follow a mental activity model. The reason I love this is that it’s proactive rather than reactive!

The idea is that you create a complete list (or mindmap) of things which are necessary to the general running & development of your business. Depending on the nature of your business, your tasks might be something like:

• Make an appointment
• Make a sales visit
• Write a proposal
• Take an order
• Deliver some work
• Raise an invoice
• Update finances

Then SET SOME TARGETS & commit them to memory

For example: You could aim to complete one thing off your list every day, and all of them in a normal week. Or devise some practical targets for your own business.

Following this mental model will help you improve cashflow, organisation and working efficiency in the long run. If you’re focused on doing it properly it can also prevent you from neglecting those less fun but important aspects of your business.

I would love to hear about the kinds of mental activity models you all operate. Including any personal experiences with them!

Later!

Paul

Scrap your lists, use a mindmap

As we’ve mentioned before, a huge part of good motivation is to have obtainable, clearly defined goals - and that’s why I love writing lists. A decent list is a wonderful thing, it can:

• Aid your memory
• Help you prioritise tasks
• Improved your focus
• Stop you wasting time

Of course, once you try to show what needs to be done with the usual tools (adding notes*, dates, bolding, underlining, crossing things off) they can quickly become more of a messy hindrance than the lovely list you originally wrote.

Mindmaps help solve this problem by giving you the visual freedom that lists lack, they can help you group together ideas and tasks in a way your brain can comprehend - probably why they’re called MIND maps - good times!

There’s loads of mindmap applications you can use, I recently started using an open source (free) mindmap software called Freemind. I’ve managed to get to grips with it fairly quickly and it’s now one of those integral programs I couldn’t do without. The lists are long gone.

My mindmap for PR & Marketing opportunities

Be warned though…when I figured out you can make giant gnarly mindmaps that look like spiders I got a bit carried away ha! Hoping that won’t become a permanent distraction…