Time management tricks, tools & tips [closed]

Question

Working with software day-to-day usually means you have to juggle project work, meetings, calls and other interrupts.

What single technique, trick, or tool do you find most useful in managing your time?

How do you stay focused?

What is your single biggest distraction from your work?

Answer 1

My single biggest distraction is myself - I tend to go all hare-brained, chasing emails and internet links much of the time. Therefore, I'm using a simple trick to discipline myself into staying focused and on-task for larger parts of the day. The principle is to stay accountable for the use of my time:

1) Have a scheduled job in your operating system, that pops up a small messagebox every 15 minutes (in Windows, it should run the command C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /C "start /B msg jpretori /W /V "15-minute check"")

2) Have IDailyDiary running in your system tray (a text file will work fine, too). Every time the box pops up, fill in what you've been up to the last 15 minutes.

I've caught myself with an ugly day filled with procrastination before... It's quite a good motivation to stay on-task.

Answer 2

You should see this:

Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management

It's a teacher from Carnegie Mellon who is near dying, giving his final lecture about time management. It's the best tips and tricks you can find.

Answer 3

I find email the most distracting, so I've really cracked down on receiving certain types of email. I've unsubscribed from many mailing lists, job alerts etc. Shutting down email for a period of the day is quite useful too.

Answer 4

Email, IM, Skype... all those can distract. But biggest distraction is when my fellow colleague ask me why I wrote some year old algorithm this way and not that way. It brings my work to halt even if I know the answer.

To stop this interruptions, we have a 5-minute break every hour outside the office where we can talk about such problems.

Answer 5

I read this rule somewhere, and I use it every day...

• If someone asks you to do something - if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it immediately. If it takes longer, put it on your list and come back to it.

This really works for me.

Answer 6

Single most useful? http://www.nowdothis.com is AWESOME for focusing on what currrently needs to get done, and has raised my productivity by tons. (Bonus tip: Use Google Chrome to make it its own application and then make the app always be on top of other windows)

Biggest distraction? Google Reader.