Time Management

Email is a necessary evil and a wonderful tool for communication. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. I wanted email to waste less of my time and be more effective. I’ve created a system that I wanted to share to help you filter your email to save time, see the important stuff and still not miss out on good but less urgent things (like sales from your favorite brands). Here’s what I do. This process is for anyone using Gmail or a Google Apps account, but I’d imagine (or hope) similar ideas could be applied to other email services. I’ll share the general guidelines first and then get into the nitty gritty. Regaining Control of Your Inbox Through Filters and Labels ...

Naturally, my life is as organized as an elementary school recess: lots of frantic running around, falling down, and then calling it quits once the bell rings for the day. Since I have a tendency to forget and lose things, I’ve had to train myself to spend my time more wisely. I have by no means mastered it. Time is a wild beast that can’t ever be perfectly tamed. I’ve come up with a system to hack myself a bit and make sure I’m accomplishing the most important things, which is ultimately the goal of time management. 1. Do the most important thing first, every day. Each morning I commit to reading the Bible before anything else. I’m trying to kick the habit of catching up on 100+ tweets when I wake up since I’m 6 hours ahead of most of the people I follow. I get distracted, start reading articles, and start thinking and reading and favoriting and linking and then my morning is blown. So, I’ve started jumping out of bed, throwing a pot of coffee on and cracking open the Word. ...