So much to do, so little time!!

(or maybe not)

We regularly hear people talk about “not enough time” — adults, kids, pros, amateurs. And then we run across someone who is doing so much more — using the same 24 hour day.

How can these things both be true?

Can you keep a secret?

Because after a decade of industrial espionage, NSA level information compiling, and a bunch of awkward conversations — I found the key to time.

That key appeared 5 years ago — but I was feeling greedy and not inclined to share…. OK — actually I wanted to test it a lot before I admitted to having found the key.

For context, 5 years ago, I was working at Google, launching a social media startup, single parenting 2 sons, and exercising 5–6 days/week. I was committed 🙂

Feeling time crunched and stressed was every day — traffic to work, kids swim team, startup leadership tasks, and “I really need a bike ride”. Overwhelm was a daily occurrence.

But I found a solution that I still use today — leveraging techniques from Agile software development.

What I find funny about this is that I’d been using agile processes for software development since before the Agile Manifesto was created — it’s a common project management strategy for early stage startups.

And Agile was the key to me slashing my stress about time management. Those few critical pieces of agile made my life much easier.

Here’s the simple process I started using 5 years ago:

1. prioritization — every day I had to force rank what was important for me to do that day. I wrote it down in a notebook so I could check off items as they were done.

2. do the things (and check them off in the notebook)

3. evaluate — the next day I’d see what had been missed, what needed doing, and then I prioritized again. If things stuck around longer than 3 weeks I deleted them.

I still do this every day.

I’ve moved off the notebook to my digital calendar — but it’s the same principals. Items that were deleted can always be re-added in the future.

Surprisingly I have more free time because I’m not wasting time worrying about what to do or wasting time on low priority tasks.

I have a running backlog of items that I think need doing (agile works so well!!) and I pull those into my daily task list.

That old time pressure just isn’t here anymore.

It’s almost time to go for a bike ride with my kids — pardon me while I get ready.