I’ve recently seen some good ol’ time-management (and self-management) lifehacks flowing across the wires – what is it with spring that makes people want to tighten up their personal productivity? Whatever the reason for it, I thought I’d share some time management hacks that work for me, much in the same vein as The Simple Dollar did. Everyone’s different, after all.

1. Clear your head and keep it clear

This is a GTD hack. (If you haven’t read David Allen’s book, do so.)

It’s amazing how clearly you can operate when all the fluff that’s been piling up in corners of your mind has been thoroughly cleaned out and dealt with. However, more important is stopping it from piling up again. You do not need to remember everything. Get a decent calendar system – a desk diary, Moleskine, iCal, Google Calendar, whatever – and use it.

Of course this is nowhere near as easy as it looks, but knowing that you don’t need to think about upcoming events because they’re going to be sitting ready in your calendar when you do have to think about them clears them from your current stack.

Part of this hack obviously involves setting up a calendar, figuring out a system that works for you, etc. I understand the sceptics. I didn’t use a calendar system at all until about a year ago – literally everything I needed to remember was in my head. Then the stuff I had to remember got more complicated and I realised I didn’t need to keep track of any of it. Pop it off the stack and there’s far less chance of overflow.

No need to set up the most complex system in the world. I’ve found solace in RTM, primarily because you can a) tweet to it, b) enter stuff in English, and c) add it to Gmail as an always-present widget. C) really makes this system work for me. I put things that are in The Nebulous Future in RTM, and forget about them. If I think I’ll need to prep something – maybe it’s a deadline – I’ll add something else at the rough time when I want reminded of it. As that week approaches, I see the task in the Gmail gadget and re-apportion it to a more specific time. Then when the day comes up, I deal with it. It’s a sort of simplified 43-folders technique that is a lot less fiddly.

2. Break stuff up into small, easily digested, easily started tasks – ideally with a solid outcome

The GTD approach here is pretty much ‘work out what the next task is, and worry about everything else once it’s done’. This works for linear systems and can be made to work for more complex ones.

I like to draw boxes around everything, visualising a clear start point – even to the point of mentally walking through the task in my head: getting to the office, sitting at a computer, opening a terminal, typing… What works for me is also keeping things small and self-contained. I hate big fluffy undefined projects that a) you don’t know where to begin but b) you don’t know when you’re at the end.

It’s easy to keep stuff as a wobbly vague shape looming rather than something you have to do now. It’s also very easy to procrastinate and feel anything from fear and guilt through to panic and despair at the thought of tackling this big monster under the bed. Well, guess what – the monster’s just made of shoeboxes and old socks. Pick it apart, tackle it one bit at a time, and somehow it all starts to be a lot less scary.

Something that works personally for me is to really focus on defined end points and output. Whether it’s time-based or milestone-based, or simply ‘my block of code will do x’, knowing when you’re done means you’re sure to actually feel the positive stuff that comes with finishing a task, even a small step on a much longer path.

3. Be accountable

As a freelancer or solo worker, it’s really easy to get carried away with things. If you don’t have deadlines to meet (beyond those you set yourself) and time seems infinite – apart from the fact you’re extremely lucky – it’s often hard to see progress, or to keep track of whether the stuff you’re doing is actually useful, going in the right direction, or even if you’re doing the right amount of work.

This more comes from my PhD-student hat, where I found – especially with a project I had no motivation to work on – time would ebb away, being spent on countless interesting things but ultimately getting me no closer to that elusive degree. What rescues a lot of PhD students is external factors, i.e. accountability. Meeting with a supervisor, whether your relationship is the student-teacher sort or more one of colleagues, helps you keep on track as you are forced to explain to someone else just what you’ve been doing.

Similarly, in the ‘real world’, telling other people – business partners, mentors, even your diary – what you’ve been up to and what you intend to achieve before you see them next can really keep you on track. You get a chance to review what you’ve done and hear how it sounds from the outside – do you gloss over an uncomfortable patch where you know you wasted time?

Telling others you intend to achieve something by a certain date also motivates you to meet that goal, adding an element of time pressure that most people find is a spur – but it’s important to set realistic goals for yourself. If you miss the deadline, try to figure out why, and with practice you can guess better.

4. Find productivity at unusual times

The Simple Dollar says ‘don’t overwork‘; Steve Demaio advocates the joy of mornings. Here’s the deal: work when you work best.

If you’re overflowing with ideas about a project, wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it, and only jolt out of a work trance when you realise you haven’t eaten for eight hours, who cares? If that’s a productive spurt for you, grab on to it with both hands. Pushing yourself to finish something up or go that extra mile might work better for you than hanging up your hat at 5pm and twitching all evening.

The mornings tip is great. If you’re a night owl, try getting up early and seeing what happens (scheduling meetings to be in the morning makes this easier!). It’s really amazing to do a quick mental tally at lunchtime and realise that by the time you usually would be getting up, you’ve already done two-thirds of your todo list. But don’t let that stop you from leaping on to a surge of late night inspiration and sleeping in to compensate.

As an entrepreneur, freelancer, or other lucky person with a flexible schedule, you’re ideally placed to fully take advantage of productive spurts. So do it, no matter what the clock says or how many hours you’ve already put in. Listen to yourself.

5. Know when to say no

Sometimes something’s taken up a load of your time and attention and, really, you didn’t need to do it at all. Perhaps your calendar is crammed full of networking events, interesting-looking seminars or World of Warcraft raids. There’s no time left to, like, actually work.

This is really more ‘learn to prioritise’ wrapped up in a nicer form, but the basic principle is sound. You don’t need to do everything. Delegate. Even if it’s delegating to a future-you, in the form of sticking an idea fully-formed into a notebook somewhere, the process of getting something out of your mental stack and signing it off leaves you with more time and space to manoeuvre.

Don’t be afraid to reschedule, or to let someone know that you have other priorities. Ask for notes from the seminars or read the paper, rather than go yourself. Pick one of the three similar-sounding events and go to that, not all of them. If you do go, multitask!

There will be times when you can’t, or shouldn’t, say no to everything – and that’s to be expected. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that everything that falls under a ‘work’ umbrella is actually getting your projects advanced. Treading water and wasting time happens, so look back and catch it in hindsight if nothing else.

6. Stick to your goals and be satisfied when they’re done

Don’t get carried away with spurious on-the-fly acts of brilliance, such as deciding that a five-item list needs a sixth. Define the length beforehand, and give yourself a pat on the back when you’re done.

Anything else is just a freebie – be happy with the delicious efficiency of setting a goal and meeting it, and if you overshoot, perhaps you should break that off into a sub-task that you can farm out to a future self. Such as part two of this article, coming soon!