The Simplest Time Management System

From the Happiness PhD Project with Jackson Kerchis...

Here’s the world’s simplest time management system...

David Allen said “the mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

Einstein said “the mind is used to think, pen and paper is used to write things down that we need to remember.”

I’ve come to believe the biggest source of stress and burnout is not even always necessarily the amount of work tasks. But it’s the cognitive load of keeping all of it in your head.

Imagine you have 100 pounds of dirt that you need to move from one end of a field to another. You can try piling it all into your arms or in your pockets or carrying it on your back in a big sack. That’s gonna be a lot of work. Alternatively, you can take a small handful. Run it to one of the field would run it back and do that a million times. An ideal alternative would be to use a wheelbarrow to bring the loads of dirt to the under end of the field. Think about what you’re doing you’re moving the same amount the same distance, but you’re using an external tool to bear the load.

Now apply that thinking to the cognitive load of all your various tasks. You need to build a personal operating system (pOS) that gets things out of your head and into a usable rhythm that will help you shift from reactive to proactive work. If you feel yourself overwhelmed, and putting out fires all day, unable to focus on the long-term strategic things that really matter, this is for you.

Here it is as in the simplest form possible. You need a project / priorities list for bigger ongoing initiatives and goals. You need an actions list of single concrete steps. And you need a waiting for list which is where you capture things that you are waiting on from others.

At the end of each workday (or later in the evening) take 15 minutes blocked on your calendar. During that time you’re going to look at these lists. Then you’re going to pick the 3-5 most important things you need to do the next day. Then you’re going to estimate how long each one will take leaving at least a 15 minute cushion because we have a tendency to underestimate things. Then put those into your calendar as appointments with yourself. Caution here, do not give yourself seven hours worth of pre-planned tasks. That is unrealistic.

The idea here is maybe the first 3-5 hours of your day will be proactively planned leaving sufficient white space to react to unexpected and urgent things that come up later on. Now, here is the beauty of the system, when your workday starts instead of feeling scattered and overwhelmed with 1 million different things to choose from and incoming things to react to. You honor the commitment you made to yourself to work on the three most important things. Then if you get through them and still have white space, the beauty of it is, you can look back at your list of priorities and actions and identify what is most important for you to do.

This creates a personal operating system instead of keeping everything in your head.

You can of course extend a couple additional life or well-being related tasks such as “go for a walk after work” or “call my friend Josh”.

Try this out and let me know what you think!

Or… You can reply or go here to meet with me and talk through it because I’m turning this into my first signature coaching program: » Personal Operating System «

Your happiness nerd,

Jackson K.