Book Bytes

“Do we have a shortage of time? No, we don’t. Time is the medium in which we exist. To complain about a shortage of time is like a fish in the sea complaining that it has a shortage of water.” — Mark Forster

Seven Principles of Good Time Management from “Do It Tomorrow” by Mark Forster.

The book lays down the following seven principles of time management:

• Have a clear vision to bring clarity and focus to everything you do. Your vision allows you to decide what to do, as much as it helps you to decide what not to do. This is because once you choose a course of action you’re rejecting all other alternative courses of action.

• Do one thing at a time. Establishing limits is an important way to get things done, and one important limit is to do one thing at a time. Forster explains that most unsuccessful people don’t sit around doing nothing all day; instead, they try to do so many things at once that they never get anything done. It’s much more effective to focus on one task, and when you’re done, move on to the next.

• Little and often. It is more effective to exercise five times a week for forty minutes each day than it is to do nothing for two weeks and then exercise for four hours. At the same time, it’s more effective to work on a report for a couple of hours each day than it is to leave it all for the weekend before it’s due.
• Define your limits. We’ve already discussed setting the limit of doing one thing at a time. Another limit is to work on clearly defined goals with clearly defined boundaries. Still another is to give yourself a definite period of time in which to complete tasks instead of leaving it open-ended. There are many ways in which you can set limits to make sure that you get things done.

• Closed lists. A closed list is any list that has a line drawn on the bottom so that nothing more can be added to it. For example, deal with your email in batches once a day instead of checking your email each time a new message comes in. Another example is to create checklists for tasks that you carry out repeatedly so that you can clearly see which steps you’ve taken and how many more you have left to complete the task.

• Reduce random factors. Interruptions, or random factors, are the main reason people don’t complete their work during the day. Although you can’t get rid of all random factors, the goal is to eliminate as many of them as possible.
• Commitment v. Interest. Nothing much is likely to come out of an interest unless it turns into a commitment. There’s no limit to the amount of things you can be interested in, while there is a limited number of things you can be committed to.