Time Management Tip–Keep Just Enough Information At Hand
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Managing just enough information at hand is fundamental to being focused, productive, and as a result to saving time. I am sure you hit one or few of following situations:
- You rely on Google to find relevant information but instead you are flooded with ton of noise. You find yourself massively clicking through only to find nothing helpful behind promising links.
- You store all of the information offline and try to categorize in folders. As the information grows you forget what folder it was stored and then find yourself hysterically clicking through folders and falling back to search based on keywords wasting precious time.
- You take notes on stickies and pin them to screen or to the board on your wall. As the stickies multiply you find hard times to keep track what was first or just cannot allocate more room for more stickies realizing this does not scale well.
- You try keeping it all in your head.
I was in all of these situations and they failed me time and again – I kept wasting my time finding relevant piece of information. Here is the approach I found that I can keep up with and it serves me well – keep just enough information at hand, then file it or just dump it.
Zero Item Inbox
Email shuffling is one the biggest time wasters. To avoid wasting time on emails make sure you touch each email as fewer times as possible. Zero Item Inbox is one of the techniques to achieve this.
To have zero items in your inbox I follow the following simple rules:
- Emails with quick asks (example, “What’s John’s email address?”) – respond immediately and delete.
- Action items (example, “Prepare status report.”) – tag with relevant category, and move to the hot plate (see next paragraph for details).
- Info nuggets (example, “Here is the list of links to resources”) – move to personal KB (knowledge base).
- Spam (anything unrelated to what’s important to you) – Shift+Delete.
Read more in Keep Your Inbox Clean , Stay Focused And Productive – My 4 Simple Rules.
Hot plate
Hotplate is a place where just enough actionable items wait to be processed and then to be filed. Think of it as of categorized to-do list for your life/work projects. It should clearly tell you what your life/work projects are and it should clearly tell you what’s need to be done for each project without reshuffling the items. I use Microsoft Outlook and categories for this purpose. I have special folder called Projects, the hot plate, where I move actionable emails after I categorized them. The folder configured to group the items by the categories, the projects. It’s also configured to show the items collapsed. So when I browse into the folder I see plain list of the projects, when I expand the project from the list it shows plain list of unprocessed items. When I process the item, I file it removing it from the hot plate keeping it clean with just enough items and avoiding from growing limitlessly. Saves me ton of time
Read more in Define Your Life projects – Design And Implementation.
Annual, Monthly, Weekly, Daily Outcomes Lists
Another biggest time waster is re-work. Re-work happens when folks go off track when trying to achieve their goals. Most common problems is losing sight of the goal and being drown in unimportant tasks; or keeping on track toward the goal that’s not relevant anymore. My approach to both is mapping my annual, monthly, weekly, and daily outcomes and then precisely executing against them daily with periodic checks. I check for being on track and I check for relevance of the goal. If not, I adjust on the spot or drop it altogether due to lack of relevance.
Read more in Getting Results: From Annual Commitments to Daily Execution
Image by Erik mit k
18 February 2012
You must have been reading my mind when you wrote this. I forever have the long list of Inbox items of things I’ll read “when I get the time”. Invariably, it gets too long and I end up going through and deleting in bulk; obviously, not necessary content I needed to read.
I’m going to use your tips and I’ll let you know how it worked. Thanks.
Lew,
Thank you.
I know you are big fan of agile. Think of emails in similar terms – backlog, prioritization, sprint. What’s not prioritized, falls off the plate – either from the sprint (back to the backlog) or from the backlog altogether (deleted or filed).
Daily standups, this is where you verify your sprint’s items current or need to be pruned on the spot.
Imagine if during each daily standup meeting you would need to go through the whole backlog vs. sprint’s items… agile would be too useful in this case, eh?
Wow! I am in violation of almost all of these! My inbox has +9,000 emails, my desk is a mess, and I get bombarded with unimportant tasks all the time. However, I’ve grown accustomed to my system and learned how to make it work for myself. But I’m always open to suggestions. I’ll have to try out some of your suggestions to get organized!
MyMoneyDesign,
It will be interesting to hear how it works for you.
The idea comes both software engineering, specifically from agile methods – widely adopted in the field, and from manufacturing, specifically lean and Kaizen or 5 S’s strategy. Toyota most widely known to practice Kaizen and 5 S’s. Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S_(methodology)
That really is the trick … keeping just enough information, close at hand, so we don’t get buried, and so we can take a look from the balcony as needed.
Lists have served me well. They are probably the #1 tool of the Program Manager trade.
JD,
I was “PM’ing” quite a few things last few years… think it’s time to get the title officially?
Hi Alik, man, you’re right on the money! We are on information overload! All the time. It used to be that TV ads were the worst, but we’re caught from every angle. And most of the time, we GO SEARCHING FOR IT. And we wonder why we get so distracted! I love your approach to narrow-focusing on our goals.
Bryan,
Well put, “narrow-focusing on our goals”
Love it.
Alik,
This is another great article on productivity. I like your idea about creating hot project or hot plate folder. The more I think about your strategies, I realize that you are not only managing your inbox well but also using outlook as a very effective project management tool.
Shilpan,
Thank you. Yes, indeed, Outlook is my work/life project management tool. The irony that Outlook has so many built in project management tools like Tasks but I don’t use it – in general I am on tools diet and I am using very narrow set of tools but with discipline. The principle is simple – iIneed to look at fewer places and make as few as possible clicks to get something done otherwise it’s death by 1000 paper cuts.
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