What To Do When There's Too Much To Do Read Online Free Page B

misleading, but the basic concepts underlying it are sound. You may never cut your workweek back to just four hours by following it, especially if you’re someone else’s employee, but you can certainly trim a lot of unnecessary fat from your schedule. Bottom line, you know you must fully commit to making the changes necessary to take control of your time.
Follow Basic Scheduling Principles
    Delegate or outsource whenever possible. Get rid of the tasks other people can do more cheaply and more effectively than you can. Get over the idea that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself; this could be one of the reasons you’re stuck in your office all the time. Trust your direct reports to do their jobs, until they prove they can’t; don’t hover over them or waste time nitpicking their work. If you can delegate without micromanaging, you’ll be able to recapture a significant portion of your lost time.
    Create your own deadlines . If someone hands you a casual project with no official deadline, set one for yourself. Determine how long the full project will take. Then calculate how many days and how much time you’ll need to complete it by your deadline by planning backward. If necessary, schedule personal milestones—that is, self-imposed intermediate dead-lines—and break large tasks into segments. They’ll help you stay on track and keep an eye on the big picture, especially if the final deadline is far in the future.
    Set priorities but be flexible . Construct your HIT and Master lists based on the value-weighted priorities you define. Try to maintain these priorities once you have them sorted, but realize you’ll have to reprioritize on the fly occasionally. For example, if you fall behind on a deadline, you may have to schedule extra time for that task on a particular day, and/or reprioritize the task to earlier in the day. Allow a little flexibility into your calendar, so you can productively deal with crises and other unexpected events—but not too much! If you use up that time on a particular day, fine; if not, then you can leave the office on time.
    If someone hands you a project without a deadline, set one yourself to help you stay on track.
    Take the time of day into account . Think about the time of day you should work on certain tasks to get them done most efficiently and effectively, based on your personal biological cycles. Most productivity experts tell you to tackle the most critical and difficult tasks early in the day, and I have no beef with that if you’re a “morning person.” However, I also think you should save some of these tasks for the time of day when you have the most energy. For most of us, this is during the morning hours; but for others, the peak energy period occurs before or after lunch or even in the evening. You’re the expert on
you
, so keep track of your daily peak energy period, and hammer on some of your tough tasks during those periods, when your brain functions better. Leave simpler tasks for low-energy, “secondary time.”
    Practice purposeful abandonment, letting low-priority tasks drop off your list—at least temporarily.
Establish Routines
    Many athletes have intricate routines for every little thing, such as a free throw in basketball (how many times to dribble the ball, timing, positioning, type of motion, and so on). Once they’ve fine-tuned everything to their satisfaction, they no longer have to think about the perfunctory portion of their game, and simply execute against it. Albert Einstein took routines to an extreme. For example, he had five identical suits in his closet, so he didn’t have to waste mental energy deciding what he was going to wear each day. He just grabbed a clean suit.
    I don’t mean to undervalue spontaneity, as there’s a time and a place for it, but without a routine, other people will happily dictate your day for you. In other words, if you