Long term planning never worked for me. I can plan my next week relatively accurately but to be honest, it’s not going to be even 80% accurate by Friday.

This can be de-motivational. You start to think, “those plans that I had wanted to get through this week seem to get further and further away”. I’ve discovered this is because I’m not breaking my goals down enough. I’ve started to take what I would call a project, breaking it down into tasks. Then taking those tasks and breaking them down further. Continuing until I’m pretty much left with small goals such as “Write up a document for ” or “Check why this snippet of code isn’t working”.

The majority of these tasks are only about 30 minutes to an hour worth of work.

Don’t assign or pack your day with these tasks to the days over your working week. Instead, only assign the extremely urgent or necessary tasks to each day. Spread them out as much as possible. An average day should have no more than 3 hours or 3 of these tasks assigned to it in my opinion.

When you start your day, get cracking on those three tasks. Once completed, in some instances you’ll find yourself with hours to spare. In others, you’ll have noticed those tasks have taken you the entire day due to unforeseen circumstances. Where you do have free time left over, start getting through the tasks that are not assigned to a day.

You’ll notice that your getting more done. The fact that your ticking of tasks a lot faster and more frequently seems to motivate me a lot more than the thought of never getting to tick of that long term goal.

This has been the most productive method of getting through workloads and projects for me and there’s plenty of task or To Do list managers out there to help you with this.

Honesty is the best policy. I’ve always believed it. The company I work for, Blacknight Solutions, also believes it. We have a status blog that we post to if any service that is public facing has any issues.

Blacknight Internet Solutions

Sometimes they are related to a server being in difficulty and other times it’s just a way of communicating that we’re planning downtime to fix an issue. You see, we provide services to customers. If a customer is sitting at home and their service isn’t working, they should know why, what’s being done and an aprox ETA to it’s resolution.

I don’t want this post to just be related to where I work, it’s about honesty from businesses as a whole. I’ve seen so many different companies turn the other way when things start to go wrong. They close up the customer facing shop front. Nestle down, fix what needs to be fixed and then re-open and pretend nothing has happened.

It’s not rocket science. Your customers are the key to your businesses. If you mess up, and you will at some stage, tell them. The majority of your customers will understand and will be very thankful that you are honest enough to tell them the truth. They have messed up along the road too. They understand!

If you mess up and just go into hiding, customers don’t know where to look. It starts to radically pitfall into anger and then finally to sourcing a more reliable service. Being honest let’s everyone know who you are, what your doing and that your a company who cares. It builds your reputation positivity.

I have set hours in my job. I work 8AM to 5PM, Monday to Friday. I have breaks and I take lunch. Normally around the same time everyday. The majority of people in office life do the same. However I don’t believe it’s the most productive way to get the most out of me.

My day is cut into tasks which I assign myself. I keep tabs on what tasks need to be done using a task manager called Things. You can read more about it’s benefits here. If I’m working on one of my tasks, the time assigned to it is never totally accurate. Some run 15 minutes over what I had hoped, some might take an hour less due to unforeseen circumstances. In fact I hate assigning a time frame to the tasks and very rarely do.

If I’m plugging away getting what I need to do done, I don’t want to glance at the clock and realize, “Hey, this is my lunch time…” drop what I’m working on and head out to get some food. Same goes for companies that have designated breaks. If an employee is happily plugging away on a task, you don’t want them disrupted. At all. This can be worse for IT works but it applies to all.

When that employee comes back to that in-completed task, their concentration is lost. They need to spending an unneeded amount of time to just get back to where they were.

The same goes for when I arrive and leave the office, it’s not always optimal. If I’m running a little late and arrive to work at 07:50AM I don’t want to be frantically getting my ducks in a row with coffee’s, booting up my machine etc. If I do, I’m disjointed when I go to start my work. I’m trying to slow my breathing down rather than getting stuck in.

If I’m working on a task and notice it’s 5PM, I would prefer for my brain to not go “Time to yet…” but rather, “Lets get this done”.

The ideal scenario would be to arrive in work when you wake up fresh from a good 8 hour sleep. Setting tasks to be done before lunch, with a few coffee breaks in between the tasks, then some more work on the same basis after lunch. When all the tasks are complete, go home. Rinse and repeat.

I know this wouldn’t work in all walks of office life, but I know I would be more efficient. The company would reap more from me and I would go home a lot happier knowing my full list of jobs that I wanted to get done today, are done.

We all want to de-clutter our lives. They get bogged down with crap. I don’t know where it comes from but after a while you get into a routine of doing things the wrong way. It’s a slow process that gradually creeps up on you. Then you forget to take some time to evaluate how you can improve. Make things work better for you.

I’m not a big reader. I do follow a few blogs and twitter streams on a daily basis. One company I follow is 37Signals. I like what they have to say. They’re never afraid to just come out and say how they feel. The company is owned by two guys, David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried. David’s the programmer, Jason’s the designer. The work extremely well together.

Jason founded 37Signals back in 1999. David came on board sometime between 2003 and 2004. Together they created something that I haven’t really seen happen much. They created a work ethic that challenged everything. They grabbed every piece of their daily working life and tore it apart and made it work best for them. It first stemmed from doing it to their business, then to their working lives. From products to productivity.

37Signals: Rework

37 Signals created a book called “Rework”.

They wanted people to know. So the guys at 37Signals wrote a book outlining how these believed things should work.  Taking on the perspective of so many businesses today and pointing out, through their own experiences, where they were wrong. You can’t really disagree with that when it is obviously working for them.

I recommend anyone who would like to review their day to day work life and how they take on challenges to have a read of this. I mean it’s only 5.50GBP from Amazon!

Grab a copy of the book here

Listen to a podcast on how the book was created here

Your time is valuable. Probably the most valuable thing you possess. It should carry more weight than spending money. Yet we never seem to value it like that. We work for free time. We work smarter to create free time.

I, like many people have a memory like a sieve. This is down to interruptions. I won’t go into why interruptions are so bad in the workplace but we’ve all gone through this scenario. Your working on a project, your full attention is 100% focused on what you are doing. Then someone taps you on the shoulder with a “Hey Brian, ….”. These can be urgent taps on the shoulder, but more often that not they aren’t.

These interruptions can also be to ask for something to be done. The problem is the minute that person has left your desk, so too has that task. All you want to do is get 100% back focused on that problem you were solving or the project you were working on. You simply file it under “I’ll stick that in the calender later” in your memory. Gone for ever.

I’ve had this problem for years. People call it having a bad memory, I would say it’s that your just not ready to give your attention to that person as you weren’t exactly planning on their interruption.

So I decided to have a look around for a solution to this problem and I found a mac application call Things from Cultured Code.

Cultured Code: Things

Things for Mac by Cultured Code

Things is what I would describe as a simple task management app that works for my type of problem. When that someone knocks on my shoulder, I would like to deal with it as polietely as possible but also to remember what they needed me to do.

If you hit Ctrl + Enter, you get a dialogue, that sits on top of all your other applications where you can quickly type in what they wanted in about 5 to 10 works and just hit enter. Thats it, nothing more.

An hour later when you’ve got some free time, you fire up the Things application fully. Where your greeted with one of the cleanest UI’s I’ve ever played with. You select your “Inbox” and there lies all of your Tasks that you’ve been entering over the hours.

Now you can manage them as you’ve got your free time. You can set when you have time to get these Things done. Schedule them for a later date. Assign them to a project or if they are just on the back burner fire them in the “Someday” folder.

There’s plenty of more features to this product which you can check out on their site or even better take a trial of the software for 30 days. I wanted to highlight how a clean piece of software can declutter your day, allow you to be less interrupted and back on that problem you wanted to solve.