Time management hacks

Look at your TODO list and check if you can:

Eliminate - Is this really needed to be done? What if I just don't do it?

Delegate - Do I have to do it? Is it ok if someone else does it for me?

Automate - Will I have to do this again? If yes, can I automate it?

"Things I wish I'd known at 20: Your time is worth $1000/hour, act like it"

Actually, for most 20 year olds that's not true. For me, for instance, it was absolutely a good tradeoff of time and money for me to catch a train to the airport, taking 1 hour and $10, instead of catching a $50 cab for a half hour trip (therefore, I am saying that half an hour was worth less to me than $40). Clearly he meant this 'metaphorically', but when your metaphor breaks down so easily, it might not be as meaningful as you thought. What did he actually want to say there? Was it something less pithy like 'value your time'? 'Consider the opportunity costs of everything you spend time on'?

My best time management hack was replacing my todo list with a calendar. With todo lists I tended to put things off for later and never got everything done. With a calendar I'm forced to commit to a specific time.

It's missing one slide: "it's more important to be happy than productive". Crossing stuff off your TODO list with maximum possible speed is not the end goal in itself.

Time management is knowing your limits and navigating around them. Or, in HN-speak, "optimizing for your productivity given a constraint of 24 hours."

The biggest hack I have was using 20 minutes countdown clock like http://e.ggtimer.com/20minutes. And it must be easily accesible from the Bookmarks toolbar so I can easily select 20 minutes, etc. and then get going. I think this relates to point #7: "We're always more focused and productive with limited time". :)

The simplest and easiest way to get more important things done:

Ask yourself three times daily, via Outlook reminder or whatever is convenient:

"Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?"

This is from the book The Four Hour Workweek, an excellent, excellent book. I've listened to it twice now (26 hours). This book has changed my mindset and has made me much more efficient and effective at work, and life in general.

Also suggested in the book, time tracking software like rescuetime.com or Manic Time is extremely eye opening. It was astounding how long I was spending writing emails. Now I have various email templates for common issues I face. What a great book.

[Edit]: Well that is quite the coincidence: another article on the front page of HN talks about Tim Ferriss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5470252

The only one I don't agree with is 21 - "Yesterday's home runs don't win today's game".

Whilst you can no longer do anything about what happened yesterday, it can still have a huge influence on how today goes, particularly if you spend much of your day influencing other people, and you often need to keep that in mind.

E.g. - I'm preparing for a presentation with a director - did my last interaction with him go well? If not, I'm probably going to have to work extra hard at getting my message across.

Unfortunately a lot of people don't seem to get this and treat pretty much every interaction as a self-contained thing, not realising what effect existing preconceptions will have on this interaction, and not really thinking about what impact this interaction wil have on future ones.