Bells and Whistles of Time Management – Quite Literally!
November 20th is my youngest brother’s birthday. Over the last few years, sparked surprisingly by our mom, wishing each other exactly at midnight has become an unspoken tradition in our family. And it’s not just a simple text; it’s about the thrill of getting it right—no matter the time zone.
This year was no different. Living in Mumbai while my brother resides in California, I had to do some quick time zone math. Habitually, I set an alarm a couple of days in advance to ensure I didn’t miss the moment.
Fast forward to last Saturday afternoon—I found myself in a shopping mall (my first visit since the lockdown in March 2020!). The alarm went off, right on cue. A couple of snoozes later, I timed it perfectly and sent him a “Happy Birthday” message on WhatsApp. Mission accomplished!
Here’s what struck me:
When I set that alarm, I had no idea where I’d be that afternoon. A shopping mall? That wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. Yet, thanks to the alarm, I got to enjoy the fun of surprising him at his midnight—an otherwise impossible task.
The Power of an Alarm: Why We Forget and Miss Tasks
We often trust our memory to remind us of critical tasks, but here’s the reality:
- We forget.
- We miss deadlines.
That’s just how our minds work. No matter how good our intentions are, tasks slip through the cracks without reminders. Our entire time management system, in fact, revolves around overcoming this single limitation of the human brain.
The Modern Alarm: A Tool for Guaranteed Execution
Alarm clocks have been waking us up for centuries, evolving from mechanical clocks to digital ones, and now to apps on our smartphones. The beauty of a smartphone alarm is its portability and flexibility, allowing us to use it for far more than just waking up.
Here’s a simple recipe to leverage alarms for time management:
- Set an alarm immediately when you plan something for a specific date and time. Most alarm apps allow you to choose a future date.
- Use recurrence patterns for tasks that repeat on certain days of the week.
- Name your alarm. A quick label prevents you from wondering, “Why is this ringing?”
- Factor in prep time. Set the alarm a few minutes early to give yourself a buffer.
- Snooze, don’t dismiss. Keep snoozing until the task is done. If you shut it off thinking you’ll remember, trust me—you won’t.
(Subscribe to my newsletter, to get tips like this and more, directly in your inbox!)
A Quick Guide for Remote Work Productivity
Call it pandemic or endemic, remote work is not going to go away in hurry! Remote work may look like an interesting proposition as no one is breathing fire on your neck and you get flexibility at work. But it is not that it does not have its own problems as you are not physically present in the office environment. For example, you may not get friendly reminders about your work or you may not get a chance to substantiate your contribution.
Here are some key ideas that should help you to stay productive and shine in the remote work environment:
- Go Agile: Follow Scrum or Agile method where you work on 15 days sprints. A sprint plan is made and approved by the manager at the beginning of a sprint. The sprint plan could be just for you or a team. The priorities are also set in the sprint plan. A sprint plan ensures that one has enough work at hand and will never be short of work even when your manager is not physically around. You also could use your time wisely when you have a bunch of different kinds of tasks.
- Adopt a robust Personal work management system: GTD is an excellent methodology to manage productivity at the personal level. A sprint plan would have set the goals, but each goal involves doing several tasks at the personal level and those tasks must be managed and tracked well. GTD ensures that the tasks are written down in a system and there is no reliance on memory or occasional nudges from superiors. This is very critical as there is no one who can oversee you when working remotely.
- Communicate deliberately: You will have regular video calls and email communication for work tracking, anyway. Additionally, you should share daily written updates about progress made in a day. This ensures that you and your manager are on the same page. It also keeps you on your toes to meet the daily targets and eventually the sprint plan. Additionally, one should provide weekly and monthly reports which should ensure that management has very clear visibility on progress and your time utilization.
This approach guarantees you stress-free productivity and builds the confidence of stakeholders in you.
Subscribe to my newsletter, to get tips like this and more, directly in your inbox!
(Featured image: Photo by Ivan Samkov from Pexels)
Scan Your Way to Nostalgia
Our fond memories now get captured digitally in photo or video form. But it wasn’t so till ten to fifteen years back. So most of us still have loads of shoeboxes full of photo prints – invaluable memories but locked up somewhere and unavailable to share with others.
There are professional services that help you to get them scanned, but like many other services, even this service has got folded into our smartphones. You could scan your photo prints, at the comforts of your home and save money. Google brings you this power through a mobile App called Photoscan which is available on Android and iOS.
Photoscan is easy to use – almost a child’s play. Try to do this in good daylight, if possible. It senses the edges of the photo, as long as you keep it on a contrasting surface. If at all, it misses the edges, in a rare case, it provides a nice interface to adjust the corners. Photos get saved on the mobile device, in the Gallery App.
Now that the holiday season is ahead of us, it is a great time to take up such an interesting project. Here are additional tips:
- Create a good amount of disk space on your computer or cloud so that you could move scanned photos in small batches right away out of your phone.
- Rename the photos suitably, keeping retrieval in mind. Name them after the place, event, people, etc. in them.
- You don’t have to use your productive time for this. In fact, you should do this project in small time pockets when you are having a break from your important work.
- Now that you are doing this project in batches, use prioritization, so that your most precious photos get covered first. Don’t forget to mark photos that you have scanned on the back with a light color marker or soft pencil so that they don’t get mixed with the unscanned ones.
- Put this task in your to-do list so that you are reminded about it when you get those disposable time slots.
That’s all and you are ready to pull out photos right for the occasion. Recently I could make a quick mosaic of my photos when there was an appeal in our company to share childhood photos. Check out the feature image. Sorry, that’s the cutest possible, I looked, I guess 🙂
Subscribe to my newsletter, to get tips like this and more, directly in your inbox!
How to Turbocharge Your To-Do List
People who have their act together don’t get easily distracted by trivial things. Yet, even they sometimes struggle to focus. The primary reason they lose focus is the overwhelming thought of all the work they’re not doing.
The world around us is constantly changing in both predictable and unpredictable ways, often making you feel like you’re losing control of your work. Instinctively, you decide to make a to-do list. Aha! You feel better and get a few things done. Fast forward a few days, and you notice your to-do list crumbling under the onslaught of new tasks.
Don’t blame your to-do list if this is happening to you. Instead, turbocharge your to-do list. Here’s how:
- Centralize Your Master To-Do List: Use one place to make your master to-do list—whether it’s a notebook, a spreadsheet, or an app, stick to just one. You can temporarily collect tasks elsewhere, but as soon as possible, transfer them to your master list. Don’t worry if it grows into a monster; just ensure it’s always up to date.
- Weekly Review and Focus: Scan your master to-do list every weekend. Pull out what’s relevant for the coming week and create a weekly to-do list. Focus only on that weekly list during the week.
- Daily Review and Execution: Each day, review your weekly to-do list and create a day-specific to-do list. Focus on completing just that small list each day.
- Incorporate New Tasks: Any new tasks that come up should go into your master to-do list. Add them to your current week’s list if they are relevant for that week.
By following this system, when you work on a task, you know it’s the best use of your time at that moment. The other tasks are safely listed and won’t be missed or fall through the cracks. This confidence keeps your mind calm, allowing you to focus on the work at hand.
Subscribe to my newsletter, to get tips like this and more, directly in your inbox!
(featured image: Photo by vikram sundaramoorthy from Pexels)
How to Quickly Create Your Meetings Requests in Google Calendar
Most meetings end, agreeing unanimously at least on one point and that is when to meet next! Phew, we have another meeting! And then more meetings!!
Meetings are an essential part of our work and sending meeting requests an essential chore. Most often sending meeting requests is a thankless job but it has the potential of creating chaos and confusion if not done correctly. If sending meeting requests is one of your activities, you should organize yourself so well that drafting and sending a meeting request should not take more than two minutes.
Let’s see two ideas with which Google Calendar (if that is what you use) can help you to clock that super-speed on a computer.
- Side panel of Gmail App – If you haven’t noticed, on the bottom right of the Gmail page you have the option to show the side panel. The side panel gives quick access to many other Apps and one of them is Google Calendar. All the GUI is very efficiently packed in that sidebar to get your work done fast. It also makes a lot of sense to create a meeting request just by side of your emails as you could refer them for the required information.
One neat trick Google Calendar does is to use the subject of the open email as the subject of the meeting being scheduled and you would be surprised to see how often that choice is better than what you had in your mind!
- Meeting Request Template – You may create meeting requests with the same content but for different people and at different times. You may like to have a sort of meeting request template to do this quickly.
Google Calendar being a web app opens a nice opportunity to do it. Create the meeting request of repetitive nature with all the details. While the meeting request is open, click on the hamburger menu and select “publish event”. On the Publish event GUI, copy the “link to the event” and paste it in the browser address bar and test it out. Finally, bookmark the URL on the bookmarks bar or in a suitable folder, for future use. Name the bookmark suitably. (Learn more about browser bookmarks here and here).
Next time, when you require to create a meeting request of that kind simply click on that bookmark and you will have the draft of the meeting request ready with the most laborious part taken care of.
Happy (perpetual) meeting season to you!
Subscribe to my newsletter, to get tips like this and more, directly in your inbox!
My GTD Story
After completing my post-graduation in Remote Sensing – a space Technology, at IIT, I joined the dream job of Scientist in the Department of Space, Government of India. Besides doing the research activity, I wrote the required software code myself instead of looking for software developers. This idea of wearing two hats worked so well for our team – I mean, who doesn’t like all-rounders! It was a great brand to be known for.
So, eventually, when I moved to jobs at multinational corporations as a software developer, I went on adding more hats for myself, a manager, a software architect, a business executive, etc. More and more projects came my way. The top-rated year-end appraisals were proof of my success with my brand.
As my portfolio kept increasing, a period came in my career, when I was highly successful and highly stressed, at the same time. Why not, as I was doing the seemingly impossible task of folding, as per Paul Graham’s terms, Maker’s Schedule and Manager’s Schedule together into one. I could have not disappointed the stakeholders around me, as I had never let them down. I was also in no mood to dilute my brand. This struggle resulted in long working hours, stress, and work-life balance issues.
Added to this, I had a totally insensitive supervisor, who appeared waiting to see me fail. Despite the fact that I worked for him for the previous eight years did not matter anything to him. He deliberately chose to undermine my dedication to the work and focus on things that slipped through the cracks, which I agree had become common because of the massive workload and crazy schedules. He never missed an opportunity to show faults in my work. He called my directs to the meetings along with me and then humiliated me in front of them.
I could have simply left the job, but something inside me said that this would be running away from the problem than taking it head-on. On one hand, I reported the atrocities to the higher-ups but also decided to do something to eliminate my misses and inefficiencies.
One thing that was clear to me was that I had to work on was avoiding things falling through the cracks. I had noticed that my supervisor was good at remembering all the things that were under work. I could not do that so that well. I bought a bunch of books on personal productivity and also on how to remember things better. These books talked about some ideas but did not appear that they would solve my problem.
And then the life-turning moment came for me. I was chatting with my younger brother, who also is a software professional. When he knew that I was looking for a book on personal productivity, he suggested trying GTD (Getting Things Done) book by David Allen. I went through the book a couple of times and voila! I noticed that the GTD methodology hits at the root cause of the personal productivity problem. It is not that you have to increase your memory, but build a system that assists your naturally poor short-term memory.
The rest is history. I was always quite convinced about being organized and always experimented with it. This orientation helped me to not just quickly learn the GTD methodology, but bring innovations into it. In a year or so, I built the most promising personal productivity system for myself. It simply revolutionized my life. I felt fully in control of my responsibilities. Things stopped falling through the cracks. I planned my work more regularly and started working on them much in advance and completed them in time and with good quality. This helped not just me but my entire team working with me. As much as my supervisor shied away from appreciating this transition, but in the town hall meeting, he couldn’t avoid giving credit for several achievements of our department in that year to me.
As GTD got deeply wired into my way to work, it became my passion to continuously fine-tune my system and enjoy the compounding benefits. As a natural progression, I decided to share my success with my system with others, and since then wore just another hat – Personal Productivity Coach and Consultant!
Subscribe to my newsletter, to get stories like this and more, directly in your inbox!