Because of my ridiculous schedule and the number of projects I juggle, I get a lot of emails asking for tips and resources for managing time. It seems people are overwhelmed at how much they have to do in their regular workdays, and are floundering a bit trying to get it all done. Not surprising, particularly in this day and age of doing more with less. Whether you are juggling work and school, work and family, or work and more work (honestly, how many of us have just one job anymore?), here are some recent favorites:
- Find Time for Your Personal Life…: Maintaining a personal life in the midst of a busy professional life.
- A Checklist for Checklists: Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto, is fascinating. The subsequent project’s website provides many medical checklists (although not any that are specific to forensics, so maybe we should get on that). Here’s one, though, that just gets to the heart of the matter.
- The Mess Manifesto: Considering a life NOT consumed by our electronic devices, or at least one that’s consumed just a bit less.
- Building a Smarter To-Do List: Atul Gawande’s checklists (#2) are procedural lists, meant to be repeated. This is about just getting your own shit done. A classic piece, broken down into 2 parts. Read both.
- A 90 Minute Plan for Personal Effectiveness: Some thoughts on how to begin your day in the most productive way possible.
- The Best Way to Use the Last 5 Minutes of Your Day: …And how to end it.
- Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up: Because if we can learn from failure rather than be consumed by it, we’ll probably all save ourselves a lot of time.
- All Abstract Strategy Discussions Are Useless: No comment necessary. I may put this on a bumper sticker and tape it to my forehead. We could save so much time if we stuck to this premise when meeting with others.
- Productivity Apps: It’s impossible to predict what will work for you, but if you’re an iPhone or iPad user, here’s the page where you can find all the apps in the productivity category.
- Broken Meetings: One of the greatest time sucks is the meeting, especially the badly executed meeting. Do your part–run yours better. And also: the slides in this presentation are brilliant.