Hacking Your Time Management System

When it comes to time management, I’m a double-faced man. From one side, I like to know what I should do and plan the day ahead. On the other side tough, I hate most time management systems out there (and I’ve tried many). In particular, this is what I don’t like about many existing systems:

• They’re rigid. The first thing I don’t like about most systems is that they have huge rules. For example with certain systems you must have a certain number of lists, or you have to use contexts to prioritize your day.
• They don’t focus on the big picture. Most time management systems I know focus on getting things done like a robot. I don’t like it. There’s no point in my opinion of completing 100 tasks in a day if are no valuable for me in the long term. Sure, there are things that you absolutely must do like going to the groceries store, but it’s easy to get a false sense of accomplishment without a long term vision.
• They don’t focus on habits. As you probably already know I’m a huge fan of habits. For me, developing good habits is the basis of personal development. Unfortunately, most systems don’t focus on developing habits at all, so it’s hard to keep track of how you’re doing.

So what I’m really looking for is a system that focuses on planning for the long term and on developing good habits. The good news is that such system exists.

I was introduced to this system by Giles Bowkett, who invented it (both calendar and daily list) and was kind enough to show me how it works in every detail.

How to keep track of habits

The first part of this system uses a calendar for keeping track of your daily and weekly habits.

The idea is that by drawing a line for each habit that you did on a given day, you can easily see how much productive you were. The video below was recorded by Giles and it shows this concept very well:

youtube link

As you can see, you can easily track multiple habits every month thanks to this system.

By the way, don’t worry if you don’t have a calendar available for this system, indeed you can print out each month from a website like this.

Keeping track of things to do

Of course, habits are not everything, as you still have to keep track of things that you have to do.

Old fashioned lists (with a twist) work very well for this. See the example below:

How that list works is very simple. When I wake up in the morning (or the evening before), I write down everything I want to do that day, along with the time I plan to do it. Then during the day I mark which tasks I complete and which I don’t, but I also track if I did it at a different time than the one I planned. This has the added benefit that I’m actively improving my planning abilities.

I like to have two of these lists. One for day planning and one for monthly planning. On the monthly list, I put big tasks I want to accomplish during this month. For example I might write that I want to redesign a website by the end of next week.

Other than this I also use an inbox system for writing down every idea that I have during the day, and other things that might come to mind. And yes, I also use a calendar for keeping track of appointments.

I want to talk more about how you can use this system to dramatically change certain areas of your life, so stay tuned if you want more.

Posted on May 04 2010

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