1. Don’t leave email sitting in your in box.

2. Admit multitasking is bad.

3. Do the most important thing first.

4. Check your email on a schedule.

5. Keep web site addresses organized.

6. Know when you work best.

7. Think about keystrokes.

8. Make it easy to get started.

9. Organize your to-do list every day.

10. Dare to be slow.

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1. Set up your calendars (4-6 hours)

Put all of these events into your calendar:

• Gas bill due date
• Electric bill due date
• Mortgage/rent due date
• Phone bill due dates (landline and mobile)
• Cable/satellite bill due date
• Insurance premium due dates
• Backup computer (daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your usage and level of paranoia — automate this if you can)
• Trash pickup (set reminder for the night before)
• One day every three months for oil changes
• One day every year for auto tune-ups
• One day every three years for major auto tune-ups
• One day every 6 months for dentist appointments
• One day every year for doctor, eye doctor
• Any other recurring medical appointments
• One day very month for prescription refilling (two reminders — one to call in refill, one to pick up)
• Netflix/Tivo/XM/other service billing dates
• Write grocery list (one day before your regular shopping day)
• The day the exterminator comes
• The time and day of any TV show you watch regularly
• The last day of January (to check for tax paperwork)
• One or more days at the beginning of the year to do your taxes and.or contact your tax preparer
• April 15 (or whatever day taxes are due in your country)
• Start and end of the school year, start and end of school vacations
• Birthdays, Anniversaries, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, other important holidays (set two reminders — one on the day itself to remind you to call or take some other action and one two weeks earlier to buy a gift, if needed, or plan a party)
• Monthly, quarterly, and annual home maintenance (see checklists below)
• Any other date which requires a concrete action at specific times every week, month, or year

Also add these dates, without reminders:

• The end date for all of the above billing cycles
• The pay dates for any automatic payments (and it’s a good idea, while you’re at it, to set up automatic payments for as many bills as you can)
• Direct deposit dates
• Automatic bank transfer dates
• Stock dividend payment/reinvestment dates
• Any other date it’s important for you to know about but which does not require any immediate action on your part

In your main calendar, the one you use for keeping track of your schedule day to day, schedule blocks of time for the following:

• Grocery shopping (weekly)
• Laundry (weekly)
• Family meals
• Bill paying (bi-monthly — the first and third weekend of the month might be good. List in the note section all of the bills that come due in the half month after each bill-paying day)
• Any weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meeting
• Kids’ sports events (e.g. weekly football games every Saturday from September 15 through December 15)
• Other kids’ activities (art classes, piano lessons, every 3rd weekend at grandparents’, etc.)
• Weekend chores/cleaning
• Commute time
• Gym sessions
• Golf/bicycling/other sports
• Weekly review (schedule 2 hours whenever you’re least likely to be interrupted) — make sure you use your weekly review to add any new reminders you might need!
• Writing time (if you want to write an hour a day, schedule an hour a day — don’t assume you’ll just “find” a spare hour each day.)
• Other hobbies (same as with writing)
• Any classes you’re taking
• Goofing off time (I schedule at least an hour a day for whatever strikes my fancy)
• Any other regular blocks of time you know you need to be at a specific place or doing a specific thing. The only exception is your regular 9-to-5 job, if you have one — schedule the activities you’ll do at your job, not the job itself.

2. Set up password system (2-3 hours)

Make sure you get information for all of these:

• Bank accounts (including debit card PIN)
• Credit cards
• Stock accounts
• Email
• Internet service
• Online payment services
• Phone service
• Utilities
• Website memberships (Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, flickr, Wordpress.com, Digg, Reddit, Blogger, OpenID, etc.)
• Your site’s login, FTP, and admin panel info
• Any MySQL or other databases your site uses
• Work accounts
• Parking permit services
• DMV online/other government services
• Web applications
• Software registration keys (not technically passwords, but many password managers include sections for registration keys — useful if [when] you need to reinstall Windows)
• Any other account you have a password to

3. Create checklists (2-3 hours)

Some checklists to think about creating include:

• Grocery list (with everything you commonly buy and space for additions; my list is organized by aisle in the store we shop at, so I can move quickly from back to front with minimal interruptions)
• Monthly home maintenance (e.g. change air filters, test smoke detectors, etc.)
• Quarterly of semi-annual home maintenance (e.g. clean gutters, replace smoke detector batteries, check fire extinguishers, etc.)
• Winter/Summer car preparation (e.g. check coolant, flush radiator, add chains/snow tires, etc.)
• Trip/vacation packing
• Christmas decorating

4. Keep up to date with a weekly review

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Step One: Remove Big Chu

1. Television - This is a good starting point if you need more time. If you don’t completely eliminate it, cut it down to only the key shows you enjoy viewing or news you need to hear. Otherwise power-off this timewaster.
2. Internet - Quickly replacing television as a huge time consumer is the internet. Try going on an internet diet where you halve your net usage for two weeks. The first few days will be hard, but each time I’ve done this my results have been that almost no work was lost in the cutback.
3. Games - A friend once told me that World of Warcraft was electronic crack. I’ve seen 14-Day subscription CD’s for dirt cheap, so I can see they’re even using the drug dealer business model. In all seriousness though, cutting back on game playing can give you more time.
4. E-mail - It’s easy to get lured into checking your inbox, just one more time. Unfortunately, if you are checking it every hour or two, it can waste more time than it’s worth. In the past I’ve maintained a once per day inbox clearing routine and found it saved a lot of time. Now I’d like to aim for twice per day.
5. Work - Cutting time from work isn’t easy. But as Tim Ferriss demonstrated in the 4-Hour Workweek, if you can maintain productivity or increase it, then cutting low-value work is possible. Outsourcing menial tasks to virtual assistants or simply cutting work that isn’t useful can help you reclaim work hours.
6. Chores - Beyond just hiring a maid, there are ways you can reduce time from your chores. Cooking meals in advance, keeping things perpetually tidy, maintaining an organizing system to reduce the need for overhauls can all cut down your time usage.
7. Schoolwork - For students, the classroom offers a lot of opportunities to save time without ruining your GPA. Most of these involve changing how you try to learn things to reduce wasted time in cram sessions. Read this article for more on how to do that.

Step Two: Reclaim Gap Time

1. Books - Bring a book with you at all times and get a few minutes of reading in.
2. Listen - Put some audio books in your iPod and listen while you drive or walk.
3. Problems - Solve problems in advance during gap periods so you won’t waste as much time on them later.
4. Articles - Print off longer articles and read them while waiting for food to cook or in lines.
5. Creativity - I use gap time to come up with new article ideas. You can use it to come up with new ideas for work or life.
6. Rehearsal - Use gap minutes to visualize important parts of your day you want to perform well in.
7. Engage - Make your gap minutes more enjoyable by focusing on what you are doing. Focus completely on the drive to work or observe everything when waiting in line.

Step Three: Triage

1. E-mail - Consider an autoresponder for common messages. Use concise yes or no answers for questions that don’t need a length explanation.
2. Reading - If your purpose for reading is information, learn to change your pace from a knowledge absorbing crawl up to a fast skim over unimportant details. Ignore whole chapters and focus first on the ideas that are crucial to understand.
3. Television - If you still watch TV, tape in advance and cut the commercials. You can save fifteen minutes from an hour program by doing this.
4. Exercise - Plan workouts in advance so you can get the most exercising done without time spent flipping though fitness magazines or too much rest.
5. Meetings - A good management trick is to conduct all meetings standing to speed them up.
6. Relationships - I hesitate to say this, since relationships aren’t the normal domain of productivity time-cutting. But there are people in your life who use up much of your time without adding to the relationship. Not entirely caustic, these relationships drain your energy without providing much benefit. Navigate away from those people and focus on friends where the investment is worthwhile.

Final Tip: Prioritize Work

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10. Make a lunch or dinner date (to create a deadline).

9. Write down the first thing you have to do tomorrow morning and put it on your keyboard before you leave the office.

8. Don't check email for the first hour of the day.

7. Decide NOT to do one task on your to-do list and cross it off.

6. Edit that email you're writing down to less than five sentences.

4. Book a meeting with yourself.

3. Master the art of the qualified yes.

2. Block out distractions and set a timer.

1. Do a free jot brain dump.

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