Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Time Management Troubles

Since I got a little baby daughter a week ago, I'm obsessing about time management.

My consulting company is almost on autopilot due to my fantastic team, and requires only financial monitoring and the usual rain making or memo writing. But we do have a few different projects that are time intensive mostly in marketing.

Before the birth of my daughter I used to work until 21.00 and then have dinner with my wife, read some books or watch TV.

Now, I would like to spend time from 19.00 on with my family (coincidentally, the little girl has an active phase then!). Somewhere, I also have to fit in my dog. :)

So, if I want to get my work done, I have to be more productive during the shorter day. This post serves to remind me of that goal!
  • I stopped looking at my Google Reader until the evening. I may even switch to read the feeds on the iPhone. I read quite a few feeds and I used to do it around lunch - but it's so unimportant really that I moved it to the late evening.
  • Same for news. I don't need news during the day.
  • I noticed I get pissed off when people show me the usual bullshit videos, funny pictures, and other nonsense. I started to just ignore these.
  • Facebook is a waste of time. I stopped going to it a while ago and switched to Seesmic Desktop, with notifications disabled. The business we get from Facebook is miniscule, so I'll just keep it at it.
  • Same for Twitter, but we use that for business.
  • I stopped using all IM except Skype.
  • Most "social" business meetings (networking, status updates, etc) can be moved to a lunch meeting.
  • I know I'm old, but my primary method of communication is email. I need to unsubscribe from all the BS mailinglists and newsletter that accumulated over the years and that I routinely delete today after a quick glance.
I work with a three monitor setup, having Skype on the left, my main workspace in the middle, and Thunderbird on the right monitor. I don't really use a note taking software - I tried Evernote but didn't get addicted. Maybe it's time to revisit that and to have it on a dedicated monitor.

Do you have any productivity tips for information workers?

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