You need better time management. You're looking for time-saving tips. Whether you're in a huge organization, a team of 30, or a solo practitioner, it's fairly guaranteed that you have more work to do than you have time to complete it. Further, the effort it takes to keep up with people in social media and do it like a human being takes some time. In this chapter, I'll talk about how to do more with less time. Part of this will be about the philosophy behind it, and the next part will be about the tools.
I'm finding that there are two keys: (1) Have a simple system, and (2) automate everything you can. In both cases, this allows for more time to do the work that matters to you. Remember, a good chunk of our day is spent doing things that don't really pay us back (in any sense of the word). Part of this comes with a philosophical perspective to consider, and the other is pure business reasoning. Let's talk about the mind-set behind a simple system first.
I'm a lifelong fan of Dr. Stephen R. Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and also his later book, The 8th Habit. To that end, I work hard to begin with an end in mind. That helps me center on what I should be doing. For those of you who haven't read it, the point is essentially this: The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Sounds simple, but it's not. If you have big things to do and little things to do, focus on the bigger ones. If you fill your day with answering e-mail, your in-box will be empty but your important work won't be done.
If I were to sum up what I think about to keep my day flowing well, it's this: What's going to move me closer toward my goals? (My goals include company goals, personal goals, and family goals.)
Now, let's move on to the tools.
Once you have a sense of what you want to do with your time, you have to start guarding it. There are many opportunities in a given day when people will ask for some of your time. Distractions will chisel away at your time; and idle time will shift from a refreshing pause to a wallowing gap. Time is the one variable you can work with more than any other. Here are some ways to give yourself a bit more time.
AwayFind[263] is Jared Goralnick's tool to help you keep your less urgent e-mails at bay. I've been using it ever since going through Stever Robbins's You Are Not Your Inbox[264] program. Essentially, AwayFind lets you set up a small gate on your in-box. People receive an autoresponder message (you customize it) saying that you've received their mail and that you'll respond when you can; however, if it's something urgent, they can just click a link to fill out a quick form.
This gives me a way to tell people that I saw their e-mail come in, that I'll get right to them when I have a moment, and that they can alert me if it's something urgent. (By the way, four people have submitted via the "urgent" form simply to say, "I just sent you e-mail. Did you get it?" Not exactly urgent, so I tweaked my message to hopefully clean up that matter.)
Jott lets you call a number, record a brief voice message, and that message comes out in text format. You can import your contact book in there, and thus you can both send messages to yourself as reminders, and later retrieve the information. You can also send quick voice messages to others as text e-mails. It's a great way to get back some time while driving in the car.
Google Voice[265] is a voice-mail service that translates speech to text. I've been using it for months on my cell phone, and I'm loving what it does for me. I'm often in an area where I can't pick up my phone (meetings, webinars, etc.), but I can usually scan a text reproduction of someone's voice message very quickly. I get back lots of time using Google Voice to cover my voice-mail messages.
Google Reader is my RSS reader of choice. I use it for reading blogs and news sources, and also for tracking social media information from other places. For example, Twitter Search has an RSS subscription button for the searches you cook up, so if you need to dashboard some social media activity, throwing it into a capable, fast-paced reader is important. I save lots of time reading blogs and scanning information rapidly through Google Reader.
Firefox is a fast, flexible, customizable Web browser. I use it more than any other application on my computer. To that end, I use it smartly as well. I use the tabs feature to keep up a few pages that I need throughout a day (my RSS reader, some search information, etc.). I also use all the keyboard shortcuts so that I can move even faster.
Evernote is a great tool for capturing snippets of information. It's a lot more powerful than that, including letting you snap photos and having a built-in optical character recognition system. It also has a mobile client for iPhone and Windows Mobile, a stand-alone client for Mac and Windows, and a Web sync. This saves me time in lots of ways, including making sure I have important notes at the ready wherever I am.
Also, use some kind of text replacement application. I use TextExpander[266] for the Mac all the time when typing. I have complete e-mails stored and at the ready in there, as well as all kinds of nifty HTML replacement information to help me with repetitive tasks.
If you can afford it, get a wireless cellular modem for your computer. I got one from work, and now I have no idea why I wasn't doing this all along.
Giving you a list of applications and saying this will make your life better is like sending you a box of paint and wishing you well on your new portrait career. Let's go through a few ideas about how to do more with less time and how I use my philosophy, methods, and tools to do that:
Guard your time. If you have work to do, ask yourself repeatedly if this work advances your main goals. Learn how to minimize the work that doesn't.
Work toward checking e-mail less frequently in a day and also not being a slave to your phone. We forget all the time that these tools are supposed to be helpful, not constant distractions.
One trick there: Kill notifier lights, buttons, sounds, and other indicators; instead, schedule a task on your calendar (or in whatever way you keep your appointments) to check your mail. (I haven't gotten that far yet, but I'm working on it.)
Find pockets of idle time and use them for something productive. When I'm grocery shopping, I Jott little audio reminders to myself about things to follow up on later. When I'm sitting in a waiting room, I read books on subject matter that nourishes my career. I use drive time for lots of things that you can do while driving.
Build your projects to be modular, so that you can work on them when time comes up. Blog posts are a great example. I keep a text file where I can jot ideas for future posts. Then I go back and flesh those out from time to time (or delete them, if I can't remember what my notes meant).
Learn polite ways to decline things. We say yes to way to many things. Learn very warm and polite ways to say no. (There's a great audio podcast by Stever Robbins[267] about saying no that I need to listen to often.)
Decide how much of your downtime is really recharging you and whether some of it is just idling for idle's sake.
I know that some folks are going to retort that rest is important, that overworking oneself is a bad thing, and the like. You're absolutely right. All those things are true. I love relaxation and rest. I love finding time to rest and recharge, play with my kids, that kind of thing. My point is, if you need to find more time, there are ways to go about doing it.