“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” -Albert Einstein

I think time is the most valuable asset we have. It is scarce, and you can’t control it’s dosage - it just ticks by, waiting for you to make use of it.

I had planned to write this post on Sunday morning. It’s quarter past six in the evening now. So where did all that time go? Well, the most obvious timesink seem to be those emergent tasks.

• Our toilet gave an error (yes, it’s a super-modern electronic thing with a thousand settings) and needed refilling of some cleaning fluid. I went hunting half an hour for a spare bottle.

• My brother asked me to help him with his German homework, and since I’m here only on the weekend, I had to do it then and there.

• Our wireless LAN router went bonkers.

So, in a nutshell, I had to deal with all the urgent stuff while the important things fell behind.

The keys to achieving important tasks which aren’t mission critical are either (1) planning well in advance or (2) making them mission critical. Let’s take a look at both.

Planning well

I had planned ahead to write my blog post, yet I failed terribly. So hadn’t I planned well? Well yes, I hadn’t. The Problem was that I had set the time to finish that task in a spot on my calendar that was far to prone to failure.

That means:

• Plan important tasks at a time you can tell for sure you won’t be interrupted.

• Plan a buffer of at least 30%-50% for completing a task.

The other problem here is that I didn’t know how my Sunday would look. I didn’t expect all the interruptions. That’s where Time Tracking can come in handy.

Time Tracking

The basic idea is to start logging where your time goes. I’ve been using an iCal and Outlook Calendar for a while now, and the hardest part always seems to be the estimation of a task’s length.

That’s why I’ve begun tracking my time. This not only helps me see how I spend my days, but also lets me identify tasks that need to be done, but take far too much time. One such task is the fact that I scan all my paperwork using a flatbed scanner. I realised I could shave off hours from this task if I invested in a scanner that has an automatic feed.

The best option to track time, in my opinion, is the calendar-based variant:

1. Plan your tasks into your electronic calendar.
2. Do them, while keeping an eye on the clock.
3. Re-adjust your initially planned blocks of time to reflect your actual day.

This way, your calendar shows your tasks ahead, but also serves as a log for the past. I like this option as it lets me do my time-management in one single place.

The other option is to use a paper and a good tracking sheet. I don’t recommend dedicated time-tracking software, as my experience with some of those weren’t really good in terms of speed and usablity.

David Seah has an excellent template that I re-functioned as a time tracker, which is also available in an online Flash version.

Making It Mission-Critical

The true challenge you face when being unable to deal with the important things is to redefine what’s important to you.

Sure, my family is important to me. And so is this blog. So, if I haven’t dedicated enough time to my blog, what unimportant things am dealing with then?

You see, my approach here is pretty pragmatic: Track your time, honestly and accurately. Then eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. If you don’t have time for the important things in life, you need rethink what’s important. What fits into your own big picture of life?

Working in my new job as an IT Administrator taught me a lot about this. When team members ask you to install Firefox add-ons for them, you don’t realize that you’re going to dedicate 15 minutes of your time to that single task. You need to go there, authorize him, install the extension, deauthorize. 15 minutes.

I solved the issue by batching tasks. I have two one-hour rounds every week where I help out my team members with their issues. That way I’m more dedicated to them, and I know what I’m up against.

And that way, I’ll get that one hour a week to edit my blog.

You probably have a laptop or desktop computer loaded with files. Students usually hoard tons of videos, music, photos and of course, regular files such as Word documents, PDFs and presentations.

Here’s an experiment: Turn to a low-data lifestyle (LDL). Let’s try to pack our entire life in under 10GB.

4 Reasons to have a LDL

1. Performance Gain: It is a known fact that a hard drive with less data with run faster as it is less fragmented with data, and living life with as little electronic data as possible aids in having a better computing experience.

2. Portability: My ultimate goal is to take my data on the road and be independent of a computer. I want to be able to take my most important data on a thumb drive and walk over to another computer, and feel like I never left home.

3. Back Up Security: A smaller drive is easier to backup and it’s possible to maintain several backups in different forms with ease. I can move my most important data on to an external drive within an hour in case of an emergency. I can back up all my data online for very little money at low cost of bandwidth and time.

4. Focus on What’s Important: Eliminating the unnecessary is common productivity gospel to be spread far and wide. By cutting your files to the essentials, you’ll not only be free of a chaotic mess, but also value the things you have more.

Step One: Clean Up Your Harddrive

The initial step to take is to declare war upon the enormous amount of data that’s occupying your hard drive. For some, this task may be daunting, but it takes a few hours at most to do - in the worst case.

The goal in this step is to eliminate data you basically don’t know, or simply forgot about. It’s about finding old piles of junk and saying “Hey, I forgot I even had that”.

• Analyze Your Drive: Identifying Junk isn’t always easy on a hard drive, which is why I recommend using a utility such as Disk Utility X (Mac) or Sequoia View (Windows). These apps allow you to graphically see what’s taking up all the space on your hard drive. Identify the big chunks, and eliminate what you don’t need anymore. Often, this will be some old videos, or surprisingly huge project files. I once found an iMovie project that was 4GB in size that I had totally forgotten about and could safely discard.

• Uninstall old apps: Once in a while, you’ll find that you’ve installed a bunch of new apps that fill up your hard drive. More often than not I’ll have some old game or shareware app that I didn’t like, finished using or for which the trial expired. Time to to get rid of these. The easiest way to uninstall apps is to use the built-in Add-Remove Programs tool for Windows, to be found in the Control Panel. On a Mac, I suggest using AppZapper or the free alternative AppTrap that actually lives as a preference pane on your Mac. This ensures you remove any excess data on the Mac. While this whole step doesn’t directly help our cause, as you’ll see, it helps in keeping things tidy and under control.

Streamline Your Digital World (With Three Folders)

This is a key We need to rethink our digital lives, and the way we organize them. On a wild guess, how many folders on your computer contain any of your important data?

For most, it’s a lot. Their stuff is strewn all over the drive in vague places and the “My Documents” folder is just a huge mess, cluttered with folders you didn’t create yourself in the first place.

Here’s the thing.

You need to take control of your folder setup, as I’ve extensively covered in this article.

Pruning your life to just three or four folders gives you the freedom of mentally junking everything else. Leave it to the OS, and stop worrying about it. In case of fire, take these three folders and run.

Change The Way You Think About Data

The final step in order to pursue a low-data lifestyle is to change the way you handle data every day. Every file that isn’t half as important to you as the most important file isn’t worth the disk space.

Trash videos once you’ve seen them. Or archive them externally.

Cleanup your photos. Trash the blurries, the embarrassments, and duplicates. You don’t need 4 shots of yourself grinning in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Scan documents at the lowest quality necessary. You don’t need your tax report at a pristine 400dpi resolution. It’s a tax report.

It’s all about getting yourself to value the disk space, and instill an unconscious aversion to hoarding files.

I have more than 10GB of data

That’s bound to happen. Some people have extensive photo libraries, or videos, or huge iTunes collections. Still, the most important part of your life, the Reference folder, shouldn’t be much more than 10GB in the worst case. If so, you’re life is way too complex, or you’re scared of loosing data.

Just keep in mind: A secure backup system that works (meaning: check regularly whether it’s functional and easy to retrieve data) will help you stop worrying about data loss. I love my Time Machine feature in Mac OS X.

I’d like to hear from you: What kind of data do you hoard, and why? Am I the only one feeling this urge to keep my life portable enough to pack up and run within minutes?

I’ve been exploring a lot of folder systems for filing and processing work over the past year, and here’s what I’ve been sticking with for a few months now, and it works well.

I’ve also been asked by readers who read this popular filing system article by me on Productivity501 about my folder setup seen in screenshots.

Let’s take a look at the steps to make this folder system.

The Folders

I have three folders I use for ALL my work on the computer: Inbox, Active Projects and Reference.

You can name these as you like, since Active Projects correspond to what you may know as “Pending” and Reference is often named “Archive”. It really doesn’t matter as long as you get the meaning of each of these folders.

Inbox collects all incoming stuff. Active Projects holds files you need to be working on currently and Reference is your long term storage. I have an A-Z folder system about which you can read in the aforementioned article.

All folders are created freshly in the Home folder of my computer.

Sidebar Setup

Since all my work resides in these folders, I don’t really want to see my home folder anymore. I access photos and music through iPhoto and iTunes, and I don’t watch movies on the computer. Thus, the home folder becomes somewhat redundant.

I only need access to my three folders, which I have dragged to the sidebar. This allows me to eliminate the Home folder, which contains folders like Documents or Downloads, which I don’t need but can’t delete either.

Icons

To make my three folders look a bit nicer, I used some nice GTD Leopard icons.

To change the icons of my new folders, you just click the icon file, hit Command-C to copy it, right-click on the folder you want to patch, choose Get Info…, click on the icon in the top left, and hit Command-V to drop the icon.

See the photostrip below for a closer look.

Control Incoming Streams

The last step to make this system functional is to get all incoming files to automatically go to your new Inbox.

In most Applications such as Mail, Firefox, Safari and Xtorrent (the ones I use most to download things) you can choose the downloads folder in Preferences. Just set this to point to your new Inbox.

That’s it. It’s a simple setup, and it’s a way of simplifying your computers life down to just three folders. In a future episode: How to live life in under 10 Gigabytes.

Group assignments are something we all have to go through during our academic lifetime. It’s not only a real challenge to get good marks from such assignments, but they teach you vital lessons for life, in my opinion.

But alas, getting a good grade while having to deal with morons can bog you down. Here are a few pointers that helped me get the most of my teamwork sessions.

• Know everyone: Dale Carnegie once said, the sweetest sound to anyone in any language is his or her name. Likewise, know your teammates, and know them well. Something as simple as addressing them by their name can take you a long way. Find out about their lives, and connect with them by asking them questions next time you meet about some tiny bit of information you picked up.

• Visuazlize: Learn to visualize. My mentor showed me the power of a flipchart. Just by visually collecting all the results from a team session, you can take the lead and move your team towards productive results. Keep it simple, use connecting lines and structure anything you write down well. My trick: Use a premise-problem-solution technique to hold together information. What’s the premise? What exactly is the problem? What steps can help solve the problem?

  My way of doing this actually evolved over time, and the key is to rake in lots of feedback from more experienced people. Take their feedback seriously but also try to just implement what you think works for you and your audience. I’ve received some loads of crappy advice in my time.

  A good basic structure consists of a nice, big headline followed by 2-3 factoids your audience needs to know. Keep it short. Follow it up with some points about the problem you’re trying to solve, and use the bottom half for outlining a couple of hands-on actions to solve the problem.

  Learn to do this in advance first, then you’ll get good at doing it live during a team session. Be a leader by collecting and caching information while your team does the grinding.

• Summarize what others say: You don’t even have to have the best ideas to lead your team. Simply helping them rephrase their ideas, summarising and bringing everyone to a common level can establish you as the alpha-(fe)male. Ask questions like “Do we agree that /[insert what someone else said/]?” and you’ll often prevent conflict and keep control of the meeting from an elevated level.

• Criticize well: My favorte trick in order to criticize someone else’s idea is the Sandwich Technique. It basically follows the rule of mentioning a criticism by beginning and ending with a praise or positive remark. This way, the criticism will get passed to the person without hurting his or her feelings. Just be frank, or your criticism will lose it’s impact among the praise.

A further idea for dealing with ideas you don’t like is by asking the bright mind who came up with the idea to think the consequences through himself. Instead of asking

“John, that won’t work!”

ask

“John, what do you think will happen with X if we choose Y?” or something along those lines.

In any case, guide team members to good ideas: your ideas.

Structure of Fruitful Meetings

The techniques described above are good for the low-level, “runway”-work, as David Allen would put it. Now, besides being a charismatic chief of meetings, it’s important how you structurally organize and lead through a team session. Let me break it down into phases:

• Arrive early: If you can be at your meeting point earlier than the others, do so. Be sure to prepare for waiting a while, because it can often consume 15-25 minutes (according to my experience) for everyone to collect and be in a place you can finally start working. Be early and make sure everything needed for work is in place: Flipcharts, tables, quietness and some water is a good checklist.

• Small Talk: When people arrive, small talk is not only the obcious thing that many people will engage in, but is vital. Use this phase to create an understanding of each other and establish a common culture over time. I like to call this relationship design.Get a healthy social relationship going with all of you, and don’t overdo it as you’ll run out of time.

• Clarify Expectations: Here’s the leader part. Before beginning work, ask a vital question: What is the goal of the following fifteen minutes/half hour/afternoon? Declare the goals, objectives and topics clearly before diving in. What should be done by the end of this meeting? Often, we need to write a group paper. One goal a meeting will usually have is that we should clarify who will write what by the end of the meeting. That’s a good goal, because it requires us to structure our work and decide what goes in before we can distribute work.

• Work it: Working on the topic usually works the way you’d expect it to. Nothing unusual. But you can get the extra edge by moderating the meeting well. Here’s what I do: 1. Keep summarizing along the way, 2. Ask questions to clarify things for everyone, 3. Be a source of balanced praise and criticism.

• Define next actions: Here’s the deal-breaker. At the point you feel you’ve done your work for the day, dig in and ask what the next steps are for everyone. This is something I learned in Business School as well as David Allen (who probably picked it up from someone who picked it up from business school in the first place). Without this step, your whole meeting might have been pointless. Re-asess whether you met your objectives for the meeting, set a new meeting, clearly define the next steps of action and distribute them among each other. First make fair chunks of work, then ask for preferences. You can’t always get the most fun job, but you can make sure the work load is fair.

• Small Talk Part II: Once the meeting is done, don’t just get up and walk your lvies. This not only keeps your groups relationships very platonic, but also hinders the whole team from working together more efficiently. By developing a common culture and trust, work between people will get done with less talking, more doing, and with more independence of each member. Hence, more efficiently. Take the initiative and go for a coffee with the team. Or lunch. Or just goof around for 5 minutes after the meeting.

How to Keep Meetings Short Yet Extremely Fruitful

Conducting meetings is a pain, in the end. Almost 90% of all meetings could be saved through a bit of smart preperation and leadership. Here’s three dead-simple tricks you can use to make the time together as useful as possible.

• Require an agenda: Unless you’re the initiator of a meeting, ask for an agenda via E-Mail in advance. Before a meeting takes place, the issues and questions that need resolving should be defined. This lets you prepare mentally for the meeting, and gauge the time required. It also allows for some issues to be answered instantly via E-Mail.

• Set an end time: Regardless of results, try capping the meeting time. This creates a sense of urgency, which magnifies the amount of work done immensly.

• Record the meeting well: Taking good notes shouldn’t be a tough job for a student, and having someone make a protocol and record the meeting’s progress can help the whole team later on. This needn’t be you on every occasion, but make sure everyone gets the meeting and can review them.

Stay on Top

Meetings are rarely really necessary. Or, to rephrase that, they usually don’t yield the results you want. That is, unless you apply what you’ve just learned. Go out there and revolutionize what happens in your team sessions. The results will stun you.

Picture this: You’ve been given a writing assignment. You go home, fire up Word, and stare at the blinking cursor waiting for input.

You somehow crank up a working title for your paper and think: “Hey, I should format this at 24pt.”

“Let’s make this Arial.”

And sure enough, you’ll find yourself lost in toying around with Microsoft’s wonderful Word. Here are the tools I use, which complete each other to form a pretty solid workflow.

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Cal Newport from Study Hacks seems to be a pundit on this topic related to students already, but I felt there was some scope for expansion on how to implement GTD for students. Continue Reading

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Let’s take Darwin’s word for real. You’ve been in the situation: You’re running down the hallway, meet some lab work partner, you don’t have your notebook handy to jot down what he’s talking about.

You have to wait an hour for your next class, and don’t have your reading assignment with you, or anything to keep you busy.

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“Be the change that you want to see in the world.” -Mohandas “Mahatma” K. Ghandi

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“One who gets up early has more time to accomplish his tasks as compared to a late riser. He is blessed with good health, beauty and sharp intellect. ”-from the Sama Veda, ancient hindu scripture.

I wanted to become an early riser myself. Here’s how I did it. Continue Reading