trendpreneur

I love this productivity tip from Mark Twain via Gina Trapani (amongst others): eat your frog!

What this means is to do your worst task first, every day. Identify the day before what you really don’t want to get around to doing the next day, the task you secretly hope you’ll run out of time for so you don’t have to do it. Do it at the start of the day (it can’t be worse than eating a live frog) and then it’s done, you feel great, and you don’t have it dragging you down all day.

A couple of modifications: I don’t do this every single day (I don’t always have a particularly unpleasant frog!) so the days when I do do it, it really feels good. Also, making a list of the one or two things I really want to get done the next day, the night before, really helps. And finally, think GTD-style – maybe the task is so big and horrible because it’s large, amorphous and uncontrolled. If you only have half an hour before that morning meeting, why not break the task down into small pieces, do anything that’s quick and easy, and come back to it later? You’ll feel good because you’ve met your frog head-on.

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Not only did I commit the cardinal sin of writing a “N Things” article, I even promised a part two that never surfaced. So, here’s the long-promised followup to “5 Time Management Hacks Worth Noting” from March this year, inspired by a recent Dumb Little Man post about creating more time in your day.

As I’ve become more enmeshed in running my company and trying to maintain a healthy interest in the surrounding world, keep a grip on the big picture, stay in touch with what’s around the corner while also ensuring I have clean underwear, my mum remembers she has a daughter and (dare I say it) getting some “me time”, the keen reader may have noticed I’ve had less time to blog over recent months. Poor time management in practice! However, I’ve managed to find a little more time in the day of late.

The key things have been setting a regular time and goal to do things (“blog once a day, first thing”), and scheduling in tasks. Rather than expect I’ll “go for a run sometime this week”, I’ll actually schedule it in for Tuesday afternoon, and suddenly… it gets done.

I’ve also suffered from multitask-focus-drift of late, branching off from task to task in a Choose Your Own Adventure style escapade, then forgetting what the overarching goal was. I started writing down my goal for the morning and afternoon (I operate on a maker’s schedule) and even writing down major sub-goals or separate tasks. Glancing at this notepad when I have thirty-seven tabs open and forget what I was doing really helps. It also helps to use multiple desktops within OS X to ‘hide’ unproductive stuff that can time-sink – I have two separate Firefox windows, TweetDeck and IRC are hidden, etc.

At the very least I’ve also learned to procrastinate productively; it’s got to the stage where pretty much everything I need to be doing has some productive value, so even if I’m procrastinating by answering emails, they’re emails that needed to be answered.

Until I invent a time machine, this will have to do.

There’s one thing entrepreneurs have, and have to manage with the utmost precision: time.

It’s all too easy to get beguiled by the promise of events, networking, pitching, business development, seminars, courses, lectures, speakers, dinners, lunches, breakfasts, workshops, clinics and one-to-ones.

But it’s also easy to end up running around from one reasonably-pointless event to another, without spending time on the important stuff, like actually running the business. It’s the classic problem, it feels like work, but it isn’t.

The important thing is to learn to say no – and initially, it’s hard to figure out which are the opportunities you should be saying no to. After all, isn’t that what entrepreneurship is all about? Seizing opportunities? Well, yes.

So how do you balance? How do you deal with the fact that even at the most useless of events, you’ll probably meet someone useful? How do you weigh the constant need for networking and creating awareness of your business with the need to code, to sell, to design?

Sadly, there isn’t a perfect answer. If there was, I’d be rich. But the easiest thing is to practice – to carry out post-mortems, figure out why event X was good and event Y disappointing, keep track of who’s going to which events, send others on your behalf, watch online, take notes, do a cost/benefit analysis (in your head!) of travelling and time out.

Recognise when things are more important than free events, no matter how much your internal voice says “free! It must be good!”.

But also recognise that if you work in a darkened room for months on end, without learning, socialising, mingling, spreading, selling, getting feedback, asking for help… you’re setting yourself up for failure before you’ve even started. There’s a balance for each of us – and each of us has to find it ourselves.

(This doesn’t just apply to events, of course. Even opportunities, odd jobs, guest-speaking, article-writing, etc, etc, can sap time and energy away from the core of business. However, it’s easier to get flattered into, or oversold on, free events that turn out to be a waste of time.)

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. [...]