Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week

From Where I Sit: How to Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week

It takes a ton of time to do the routine things if you don’t keep close tabs on what you’re doing. In light of Tim Ferriss’ brilliant “Four Hour Work Week,” here’s some suggestions from Michael Hyatt to bring big time savings into your day without jumping off the grid or hiring a company in india to do your taxes. My favorites:

1. Limit the time you spend online. In my experience, the Web is most people’s #1 time suck. Yes, I know it is a wonderful tool for research, blah, blah, blah. But I often catch myself and my family members mindlessly surfing from one page to another with no clear objective in mind. Before you know it, you can eat up several hours a day. The key is to put a fence around this activity and limit your time online. Set a timer for yourself if you have to.

I’ve taken to timing my web surfing into 15 minute slots, often as “reset points” between big projects. It’s way too easy to burn an hour or more if you don’t stay mindful of what you’re doing.

2. Touch email messages once and only once. Okay, let’s be honest. How many times do you read the same email message over and over again? Guess what? The information hasn’t changed. That’s right. You are procrastinating.

One of my biggest challenges — I still tend to keep things in my inbox as long as they’re “undone” — leads to way too much rework. GTD and do/delegate/defer, along with the 2-minute rule of handling (“just do it if you can complete the next action in 2 minutes or less) would save me hours a week. My big challenge for ‘08.

4. Stop attending low-impact meetings. If there’s one thing we can probably all agree on, it’s that we go to too many meetings. Either the meeting organizer isn’t prepared, the meeting objective isn’t defined, or you can’t really affect the outcome one way or the other.

I still have a lot of these on my calendar — and am actually getting rid of three of them as a result of this thought.

5. Schedule time to get your work done. This is crucial. As the saying goes, “nature abhors a vacuum.” If you don’t take control of your calendar, someone else will. You can’t spend all your time in meetings and still get your work done.

Instead, you need to make appointments with yourself. Yes, go ahead and actually put them on your calendar. Then, when someone asks for a meeting, you can legitimately say, “No, I’m sorry, that won’t work. I already have a commitment.” And you do—to yourself!

Biggie. I have some dedicated slots — mainly at the beginning of the week, mid-week and then at the end of the week to check in with myself and then hammer out next actions.

7. Engage in a weekly review and preview. Part of the reason our lives get out of control is because we don’t plan. Once a week, you have to come up for air. Or—to change the metaphor—you have to take the plane up to 30,000 feet, so you can see the big picture.

Keeping control and planning can seem like a lot more work, and if you’re already strapped for time and stuggling to keep up it can seem insurmountable to take on “one more thing” in your calendar. But if you don’t plan for completion and add some structure to how you handle your tasks, it’s only going to get worse.