Time management gurus (original) (raw)
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April 22 2010, 08:07
My time management sucks. By the end of any average day, I'm feeling flattened by events but I don't actually have a clue what I've been up to for most of the day, except that most of it involved doing whatever came my way.
I have a time management method and it's called Do It Now. You look at it, you do it—don't stuff it in a "get done sometime" folder, don't waste time "prioritising", just Do It Now and then forget about it. Unfortunately I learned it from a chap called L. Ron Hubbard, who tended to crib a lot of good ideas without attribution and then mix them in with some byzantinely horrible ones and a fat dose of his own WASPish bigotry. Alas, in our zeal to To It Now, both Ron and I forgot the important corollary of Don't Do It At All.
The correct response to most things that come your way in a business setting is, not Do, but Ignore. Seriously, just bin it and forget about it. It's just people yammering anyway.
Moving on from Mr Hubbard, I've started leafing through the opinions of other time management gurus. God help me, I've even ordered a copy of Getting Things Done. So far, I've drawn two conclusions:
- all time management gurus have a Sacred Method with a Holy Name,
- they typically make L. Ron Hubbard look straightforward, and
- they take an incredible amount of my precious time to describe it.
Example: Inbox Zero. It's very simple: treat each email as a short-lived message. Then, as soon as you look at it, decide whether to ignore it, or pass it to someone else, or deal with it on the spot, or feed it into some other job-management system you may have. And then delete it (or archive it, just get it out of your life). That's it. It doesn't take an hour to explain this stuff. But no, it has to have a flash name, and it has to have bulleted lists, and an endless moralising rationale. Otherwise it's apparently not worth my time.
So far, the only time-management advice I've found that I really like is http://five.sentenc.es/. Oh, and of course the "do it now" that I first heard from L. Ron Hubbard.