You all voted today on what we should talk about next. Time Management edged out Self-Editing by one vote.

So we’ll be talking about “Best Practices in Time Management” for the next few days.

I’m glad this topic won, because it’s something that I’ve been trying desperately to get better at for the last year and a half. When I was laid off from my day job 2 years ago, I thought I’d have all the time in the world to do all the projects I’d ever wanted to do.

I was half right. I started working on all the projects I’d ever wanted to do — all at the same time. But I still had exactly as much time as I had before. And I got defocused pretty quickly.

After about six months, I realized that I needed to learn to manage my time better. So I started looking. And thinking. And looking some more.

There really aren’t any deep secrets here. The key things everyone tells you to do are these:
1) Prioritize
2) Focus
3) Take Action

I’ve gotten better at those, and have written several columns in my e-zine on various facets of time-management. But one thing I really wanted was some software to help me out with the boring, repetitive parts. I couldn’t find what I wanted.

Here is what I wanted my software to do:
1) Help me decide my priorities.
2) Help me sort out the Big Picture from the Little Picture.
3) Keep track of tasks for the future, but hide them until I’m ready to do them.
4) Roll over items that I didn’t do yesterday to today.
5) Keep track of tasks I’ve delegated.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any software to do that. So I came up with my own scheme using a series of To Do Lists on paper that manage my life in smaller and smaller time increments (years, quarters, months, weeks, and days). That’s worked well for #1, #2, and #3 above, but I couldn’t easily roll over daily tasks on paper (I had to copy them by hand) and I didn’t have a good scheme to track tasks that I’d delegated. And it was ON PAPER, which is a hassle.

For awhile, I was seriously considering writing my own software so it would do exactly what I want it to do.

Then I found a tool that’s ALREADY WRITTEN that meets all 5 of my requirements above and it has a few other advantages:
1) It’s web based, so I can manage my time from any computer connected to the web.
2) It comes with a 20-day training program to teach me time management skills.
3) Every day it walks me through a procedure to set my goals for that day.

The funny thing is that I’ve known about this tool for about six months, but I didn’t start using it until recently because I didn’t like the name: “Simpleology 101“. I thought it sounded too simplistic to be useful. And I hate simplistic solutions to complex problems. But I finally decided to give it a whirl, even if I didn’t like the name.

I love this program! I’ve been using it for the last 5 weeks, and I have suddenly become a LOT more focused. Simpleology 101 helped me define all the things I really want in life and then it asked me to choose one to work on RIGHT NOW. I did, and . . . that was the key to getting me focused.

Of course, Simpleology 101 isn’t magic. It’s a little bit of work every day. I spend my first 10 minutes every morning going through a procedure to set my goals. But I actually enjoy doing it, because the program walks me through each step and keeps track of all my decisions. I don’t have to remember the process. I don’t have write anything on paper. All I have to do is make executive decisions.

Here’s the best part of it. Simpleology 101 is FREE. (Simpleology 101 is about Time-Management. There are some followup courses on managing your money and increasing your energy that you have to pay for. But those are optional. I liked Simpleology 101 so much that I bought 102 and am working through that right now.) Quite simply, I think Simpleology 101 is the best thing going in time management.

So I hereby declare Simpleology 101 to be a “Best Practice in Time Management.”

Here’s a link to Simpleology 101.

In the next few days, I’ll talk more about what I love about Simpleology 101.

We’ve been talking for the last week or so on that pesky scheduling problem and how we writers can manage our lives so we have more time to write.

Carrie wrote:

Of course, the real problem is that I’ve accidentally overscheduled myself. I’m having to finish up old projects I’m not interested in anymore. I took on one that seemed fun but isn’t quite as good as an almost identical project a friend brought me, but now I’m committed.

The things I want to do and the things I’ve agreed to do are not the same thing. Now if I can just figure out how to want to do the things I’ve obligated myself to do, I’ll be doing ok.

Overscheduling happens. The questions I’d be asking myself here are the following:
1) Do those old projects bring in revenue? If so, then they’re Good Things, because we all have to eat and pay the mortgage.
2) Do those old projects help your writing career in any way? If so, then they’re Good Things, whether they’re fun or not.
3) Do those old projects meet your Mission Statement for your writing career? If so, then they’re Good Things. However, if you’re finding them boring, maybe your Mission Statement is too broad.

And if they don’t fit in your Mission Statement, then maybe . . . you should escape them. I don’t know in what sense you’re obligated to do them. There are of course different levels of obligation. One thing I learned in the last year was that I needed to trim my projects down to fit my Mission Statement. In a couple of cases, that meant disappointing friends by backing away from projects that I had wanted to do with them. But the truth is that a project you’re doing that you’re not enjoying may be a project you’re not doing very well.

I’m not encouraging you to back out of firm commitments. But if the commitment is kind of fuzzy, you might do best to find a way to trim it out of your life. And definitely think twice in the future about making commitments that don’t match your Mission Statement. I didn’t have one until this year, and once I wrote it down, I suddenly had a solid reason to say “no” to things that I shouldn’t get involved in. And I continue to say “no” when people come to me with things that sound great but that I shouldn’t be doing because they defocus my efforts.

As many of you know, I learned about Mission Statements (and a whole lot more) from Allison Bottke, who helped me clean up my pesky act and start acting like I was serious about my writing business.

Mary asked today if I could talk about how to write a synopsis for a book proposal. Since I think we’ve about chewed all the sugar out of time management, I think we’ll transition smoothly into synopses tomorrow. If you’ve got questions or comments, post them here and I’ll respond to them.

Several of you had questions after my post yesterday:

Greg wrote:

So my question, then, is this: Do you, or anyone else reading this, know of a good program to use to keep track of all these different time management aids? I’m thinking maybe even just an Excel workbook or an organized series of Word files, but maybe there’s some other productivity tool (for Mac, of course! that would work better?

Randy sez: For awhile I was using a program called “Life Balance” on my Mac. (I think there’s a Windows version too.) It works well for creating multiple To Do Lists, and maybe I should go back to using it. It doesn’t do tracking of time spent on various tasks at all. And furthermore, the computer has to be logged in and the program has to be running in order to use it. So I actually prefer the low-tech way on paper. There’s something viscerally satisfying about crossing out a Task on the ol’ To Do List that you just don’t get with software. I’m tempted to write a program that will just do what I want–no less and no more. (And it’ll make a loud crossing-out noise when I knock off a task, and it’ll do weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual totals of time, so I know where all my hours go. And it’ll learn how much I can handle in a day and insist on scheduling Fun when I start overworking.)

Several of you asked for examples. OK, here’s some detail on how I do it. This is not “The One Right Way To Do It.” This is how I do it, and it works for me. I bet you all can make suggestions to improve it, and many of you will just feel like doing it differently. May a thousand different styles of To Do Lists bloom. But here’s what I’m doing this year:

I bought a bunch of cheap tablets at Office Depot. They’re about 50 sheets apiece, which is plenty. One of them contains my Annual To Do List, along with all the Quarterly and Monthly To Do Lists. On the top sheet, I wrote “Goals for 2007” and it has six high-level Projects. Here are the first few lines:
1) Do consulting for Vala Sciences
2) Launch Fiction 301 and Fiction 401 products
3) Write one new book

So you can see that these are all high-level. The consulting thing is a continuing project that consumes an average of 10 hours per week. So this will appear on all the other lists, Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, and Daily. If I’m out of town, then I don’t put it on the list for that week. If I’m spending a day doing something special, then I won’t put it on the list for that day. But most days, I put in a couple of hours of consulting time.

The Fiction 301 project has been on my lists for Q1 and Q2, but it got bumped because of other things that were higher priority. It’s high on my priority list for Q3, and I expect it to be done by the end of September or early October. So one of the items on my August list is to do the research for Fiction 301. And this week, there’s a line item that says “Work 10 hours on Fiction 301.” Today, there’s a line item (i.e., a Task) that says, “Work 2 hours on Fiction 301.”

As for the book, I’m still composting that idea, so it’s got a line item for August that says to work on the research for the book.

So you can see that the items on my Annual To Do List trickle down to the Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, and Daily lists. If that were all, then those lists would be pretty simple. But each of those lists has some shorter-term Projects on them that don’t rate a line in the Annual list. For example, my Q3 list has a line that says: “Teach on the Alaska cruise, OCW, and ACFW.” This is a reminder to myself to schedule time for three big teaching slots. I didn’t want to clutter up my Annual list with this, because that’s too much detail to put in an Annual list. But it makes sense to put it in a Quarterly list.

Another line item in my Q3 list is “Create teleseminar series with Mary.” That’s a commitment to myself that this quarter I’ll be doing a series of teleseminars with a very accomplished speaker, Mary Byers, on how to create a speaking platform (something that many successful authors use to help sell their books and to earn money). Again, that’s too much detail to go in the Annual list, but it makes perfect sense to put it in the Q3 list, because Mary and I plan to create the content in August and September and then do the teleseminars in October. (My Annual list did have a line item on creating teleseminars, but it didn’t specify with whom or when.)

I have about 10 line items in my Q3 list, and it contains more items like those above. They’re generally more detailed than those on my Annual list (except for those that are recurring items, such as the consulting for Vala Sciences, which always appears all the way down the line.)

My August To Do List is even more detailed. Of course it reminds me to do my consulting. But now it reminds me to redo my 2006 taxes, because there was a tax deduction I forgot to take. And it reminds me to read a certain manuscript by a friend of mine. And it reminds me to negotiate the rights to a certain e-book I want to sell on my web site. And it reminds me to work on the research for Fiction 301. There are 12 items on my August list.

Some of you were concerned about how to prioritize things. The beauty of this cascading series of lists is that it almost prioritizes itself. For example, with 12 items on my August list, I can’t work on all of them all at once. So at the beginning of every week, I look at the August list and choose which ones to work on this week. And this week, there are only six items on my list. Some of them are quite detailed and some are more general. But the important thing is that I automatically chose those items that are most important to work on this week. And last night when I made my To Do List for today, I chose items from the weekly list that were most important to do today.

And if it doesn’t get done today, I bump it to tomorrow’s list. That happens a lot, because life happens. Do your best to knock the most important Tasks off the list every day; have some Fun; push the rest to manana; don’t beat yourself up. That’s the formula for having a good day, every day.

Likewise, if it doesn’t get done this week, bump it to next week. Ditto for the monthly list, the quarterly list, the annual list. As long as you are getting the most important things done on your list, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, who really cares about the other stuff? We all overschedule ourselves. By definition, that means some stuff won’t get done. If you manage your life using cascading lists, the important stuff will get done (eventually) and the unimportant stuff will get bumped. As it should.

I talked to a writer this week who had a To Do List with 100 items on it. How the heck do you prioritize THAT? You can’t. You can barely read the thing. You can’t really maintain a list that size. It’s too much to take in. It’s better to manage multiple lists that cover multiple levels of detail, from the highest strategic level right down to the lowest tactical level.

That’s my theory, anyway. If anyone knows of software that lets you track all of this, then please let us know. I may just have to write it myself.

Yesterday, I talked about the importance of not going at 100% speed all the time. Give yourself some breathing room! If you run your life at an 80% pace, you’ll have gas in the engine when a crisis hits and you need to put out 100% for awhile.

I want to tie up one loose string. Neva asked today in a comment if feeding a horse in the middle of the day counts as a Task. Yes, it does. We all have chores that pop up periodically, whether it’s daily, weekly, or whatever. They’re Tasks. Somebody has to do them. If that’s you, then you have to schedule it. I would guess feeding the horse might even qualify as Fun, but I don’t know. For sure, riding the horse counts as Fun.

I want to talk about those To Do Lists a bit more. I’ve mentioned that I spend all of about 5 minutes every night making the To Do List for the next day. My theory is that my subconscious can start gearing up overnight for those Tasks. A lot of times in the morning, I’ll go soak in the jacuzzi first thing. (Yes, we have a jacuzzi. It’s a luxury I’d never have bought for myself, but it came with the house, and it just didn’t make sense to ask the previous owners to take it away merely because it was too good for us proletarians.) What I find is that sitting in the hot water for a few minutes in the morning gets my brain revved up. Often, I’ll get new and creative ideas in the water and will then be ready to go for the day. (Kind of like Archimedes, who ran out of the bath buck naked yelling “Eureka!”)

But a daily To Do List isn’t really enough to manage my life. I also have a weekly To Do List, which I write in 5 minutes on Sunday nights. Typically, this will list the Projects I’m working on for the week, and any important Tasks. This week’s list has 6 items on it. 3 of those are Projects I’m working on, and I budgeted 10 hours apiece for each one. 2 items are Fun things to do (a book to read, and my Secret Project X). 1 item is to do my email/blogging every day.

I use my weekly To Do List to help me construct my daily To Do List every night. And if there are things that pop up unexpectedly, those also get added to the daily To Do List. I had a few of those this week which I added to my lists as they appeared.

At the beginning of every month, I also write out a monthly To Do List. This typically lists the major projects I want to work on or complete in the month. I use this list every week to guide me in creating my weekly To Do List.

And there is a quarterly To Do List, which I create four times per year, in January, April, July, and October, to list the big projects I want to work on for the quarter. This obviously helps me set my monthly To Do List.

Finally, I have an annual To Do List, which guides me in choosing my quarterly lists.

It should be obvious that the longer the time period that a To Do List covers, the less detailed it is. So my annual To Do List is very strategic, whereas my daily To Do List is very tactical. By using a cascading series of lists, I can manage my life without spending a lot of time micromanaging it. There just isn’t any way to see six months ahead, so it’s important to keep flexible. By using lists with increasing fine details, I manage my life at both the Big Picture and the Little Picture. If you think about it for a second, that’s the Snowflake Method applied to scheduling. In the computer software world, this general method is often called “divide and conquer” and for a certain class of problems, it’s known to be optimal. I can’t prove that it’s optimal for time management or novel design, but I think it works pretty well.

OK, any questions on time management? I probably can’t answer them, but you all are very smart, and I’ll bet that some of you have answers for any question that might be asked.

I talked yesterday about the importance of breaking off chunks of Projects into Tasks, and scheduling them along with all the other “urgent” but unimportant” Tasks in your life. I also talked about scheduling Fun, right along with everything else.

Why is Fun important? Because it’s your reward for doing your Tasks for the day. Lately, I’ve been scheduling fewer Tasks for myself–usually just 3 or 4, and limiting the time scheduled for them to 1 or 2 hours apiece. If I get “most” of those Tasks done in a day (say 3 out of 4), then the Fun is my reward.

You may be saying, “Whoa, Randy, are you only working 4 or 5 hours a day? How could you possibly get anything done?”

The answer is that I’m SCHEDULING about 6 hours per day. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I only WORK that much. (Oh how I wish!) The fact is that crap happens. Oops, spelling error there. I meant “crises happen.”

There was a crisis Monday and I had an extra task thrown on me that burned a couple of extra hours. I had to push aside one Task to the next day. In fact, the crisis persisted on through Tuesday, and I had to again reschedule a Task from yesterday to today because more time got siphoned away on something unexpected. And of course there were several other “small” interruptions — not crises, just little things — that burned up more hours.

If you think about it, that happens to you all the time too. I know it does to me. Crises happen often. Little things pop up all the time. When you’ve got 12 hours of work scheduled for the day, a 2-hour crisis plus 4 hours of interruptions are going to send you right over the top. But if you’ve got only 6 hours scheduled, then there’s room for the little interruptions and a normal, garden-variety crisis. And you still have time for a little Fun. (Despite the crisis on Monday, I still took 2 hours to watch a movie — TWISTER — which was Fun for me.)

All of this brings me to what I call “the 80% solution.” I used to do a lot of long-distance running when I was younger and fitter. And I learned that if you run all-out, you can maintain that pace for only about 100 yards — 10 to 15 seconds. After that, your capacity for anaerobic exercise is drained and you have to stop. However, if you slow down just a bit so that you’re exercising aerobically, you can run a lot longer. If you run at 90% of your top speed, you can last for a mile or so.

If you run at 80% of your top speed, you can go practically forever. (By which I mean you can run a full marathon.)

When I used to have a day job working for Bossbert, crises came up with annoying regularity. So we were “encouraged” to work 10 or 12 hours per day, routinely. I didn’t particularly care for that, especially since I wanted to write some too. It seemed like Bossbert wanted us all to sprint for a marathon. Can’t be done. People wear out. So I made it a point to ignore Bossbert’s request for routine sprints. Once in a while, there was a genuine crisis that called for an all-nighter. Guess who had gas in the tank when that happened? And guess who worked most efficiently during the normal times?

I’ll say it again. If you run at 80% of your top speed, you can go practically forever.

That’s my 80% solution. Schedule yourself to work at 80% of your capacity. When a real crisis happens, you’ll have gas in the tank.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about longer-term planning — because a daily To Do List is tactical, not strategic. It’s short-term, and you really want a long-term plan for your big and important Projects.

Until then, have some Fun!