“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.

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