Managing Time

February 8th, 2010 § Comments Off on Managing Time § permalink

My superb time-management skills were being challenged last month by a great new amount of responsibilities, so I decided to finally start working on articulating my time management framework.

When you think of time management, it’s really mainly about two things:

  1. figuring out what’s important and what not
  2. sticking to it

Now, the first point is very dependent on your field of work / focus, but the latter is all about discipline, which in my case is mainly about memory. My usual thought cycle has three stages: acknowledge something is important, forget it immediately, suddenly remember after two days and do it. And every 10 minutes I remember the next thing, and work on that… I got used to this and hasn’t failed me to often. 🙂

However, some things simply have to happen regularly and predictably – like weekly sales review, monthly roadmap review, or calling the parents. If you fail to do it regularly, nobody will really notice until the whole process stops working.

I’ve tried using regular calendaring solutions for this, but it’s just to rigid – there is no way the sales review will happen at the same day of the week and the same hour. So why even bother with rescheduling process? And the post-it notes are great, as long as there is less than 50 things on them, and as long as the tasks on them are one-time tasks.

So I decided to try a different approach – a meta-calendar, that will outline everything that should be done every day, every week, every month, every year. So every morning I simply glance at this timetable and check what should I have done this day of the week and this day of the month. Here’s how it looks (I’ve left some entries in for better idea):

… and you can also download OpenOffice.org source file

Now, I just wish I knew enough Javascript to be able to convert this to web-based app, where I’d have simple point-and-click editing of the cells, auto-sync with my Google Calendar and Remember the Milk and maybe a morning coffee report 😉

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Art of leadership

November 14th, 2007 § Comments Off on Art of leadership § permalink

imageBeing the head of a social group simply happens to some people. They are silently voted into the function, because of a number of ‘right’ moves in the everyday operations.
These right moves are simply about keeping their head clear at any time, even when the others freak out. Everyone wants someone to comfort them, except the leader, who doesn’t need it, since she simply doesn’t feel threatened by the world. So the art of leadership is mainly about staying rational no matter what.
Collateral damage of being the only one to act sober is to be the only one to make decisions. Even when you don’t really know the right path, others will force you with their big puppy eyes. It is thus imperative to have incredibly good hunch for advice, to know who to trust and when to change course, even if it isn’t obvious. Knowing when to be irrational and stick to some weird gut feeling means more than half of the successful leadership.
I guess it’s about following the intuition when setting the course and obeying the reason when walking up that road, is actually how the human was meant to behave in the wild. Call it fear, hope, wishfull thinking or anything else, the sense of every action remains emotinal, even when the reasons are obvious.

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