Hi,
I usually do my weekly planning on Monday. There was a time when it took me hours just to get ready for the week. Now I get it done in less than 15 minutes.
Over the past 20 years I've basically studied every time management system under the sun. And they all have the same issue.
It takes too damn long to run the system.
I remember trying out a system that had me do a weekly review on sunday. Nothing wrong with that. But I followed every step, did the review exactly their way... and it took me 4,5 hours!
That's a ridiculous amount of time.
So I went to their online forums to ask if this was normal. One of their trainers got back to me and after some back and forth he basically said: 'well, no one ACTUALLY follows all those steps. That would take way too long'.
That's like having a training schedule and the trainer that made the schedule tells you: "Well, no one really does all these exercises".
Makes no sense.
So here's how I handle time management these days.
You only need two things:
1) A calendar
2) A list
I use Google Calendar. You can obviously use anything similar. For the list I switch between using regular paper, using Kanbanflow and using a normal .txt file that functions as a list. Depends on my travel schedule and the amount of work at any given point.
Planning the week and the day is easy.
1) All time sensitive stuff goes into the calendar. So if I have to show up somewhere at 11? That doesn't go on my list. It goes in my calendar.
2) All my todo items go on my todolist.
3) I go over the todo items and give them an A, B, or C.
A = HAS TO BE DONE TODAY
B = WOULD BE NICE TODAY
C = SOME TIME IN THE NEXT 7 DAYS
Then I pick an A1, an A2, and an A3. I leave the rest alone.
Then I get to work on A1.
It's that easy.
And because it's that simple people tend to IMMEDIATELY want to complicate it.
"Let me order all the A items"
"Let me add an extra category"
"Let me automate it using AI"
My advice would be: just don't. Just run the system as it's laid out above. It's easy. It works. I've been using it for years. I get a lot of stuff done. Would highly recommend.
Talk soon,
Arno
