Sometimes people ask me how I find time to do everything I do. I  juggle working for two companies, academia, family, music, writing, property management, social life and more, so time is often scarce. Over the years a few strategies have become part of my routine so I thought I’d share with you six that have definitely helped me achieve my goals keep all those balls in the air.

Turn off the Television. 

This is not a joke. Television is a passive, one-way form of media consumption that is highly inefficient. Use the internet as a source of daily news if you need it and catch the shows you’d like with on-demand services. The quality of modern television programming is average and populist and usually buoyed by relentless advertising. There is culture, and stimulation and knowledge beyond television. Switch it off, you won’t regret it.

Inbox Zero 

This one is very popular among workflow “hackers” and for good reason. Email has become the hub of our work lives and it makes sense to treat it like your TODO list. As soon as you start thinking about it that way, your workflow will improve. Every email that arrives needs to be actioned OR delegated OR scheduled OR filed OR deleted. As soon as they arrive, assign one of these things and keep your inbox as close to empty as possible. For more information on inbox zero see Merlin Mann’s 2007 video.

Shortest Job First 

Maybe it’s just me, and maybe its a symptom of inbox zero but I find that doing the shortest jobs first keeps your overall task list down and works well systematically. Originally I learned this idea as an Operating System CPU scheduling method, but it works great in the real world too. Short jobs are easy to knock over quickly, thereby keeping you on top of the pile. This means of course that longer jobs tend to back up, so you also need to dedicate time to those. If something “easy” comes through though, you feel better for attending quickly and can return to your longer jobs straight after.

Notes 

As a developer I often need to reference a number of code snippets or information at any given time. I have a few notes (I use stickies on OS X) to collect the most common of these but I also have a number of text documents I use a “scratchpads” for information I may need to know for a few days but not permanently. Things like phone numbers, lists, temporary passwords & code end up on these and they are deleted regularly or updated. It’s great to be able to flick back to these notes as I need them or purge them as necessary.  I usually end up with a few stickies and 2 or 3 working “scratchpad” text documents.

Batching

Batching is the idea that certain tasks can be done all at once periodically instead of “as they happen”. An example of batching I use is letting bills pile up for about a fortnight then paying them all at once. Or to collect the mail from the post office once a week instead of once a day. There’s no great benefit for doing either of these things every time you get a single bill, or piece of mail. So, periodically I just churn through all the bills at once, or visit the post office to collect mail. This saves me valuable daily time and sell ensures those tasks are attended to regularly. The mere act of batching also makes the processes easier, since you are typically churning through a single repetitive process many times at once.

So there are some of mine, let me know about yours in the comments. How do you hack your workflow?