Track The Time Blog

Check out this simple gear clock. Made from bicycle parts. Too bad it is so expensive.

1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks.
2. Stop multi-tasking.
3. Be militant about eliminating distractions.
4. Schedule your email.
5. Use the phone.
6. Work on your own agenda.
7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals.

From Inc Magazine.

Related blog post about over-committing.

How to graduate college faster

Instead of using some elaborate organizing system, I stuck with a very basic pen and paper to-do list. My only organizing tool was a notepad where I wrote down all my assignments and their deadlines. I didn’t worry about doing any advance scheduling or prioritizing. I would simply scan the list to select the most pressing item which fit the time I had available. Then I’d complete it, and cross it off the list.

If I had a 10-hour term paper to write, I would do the whole thing at once instead of breaking it into smaller tasks. I’d usually do large projects on weekends. I’d go to the library in the morning, do the necessary research, and then go back to my dorm room and continue working until the final text was rolling off my printer. If I needed to take a break, I would take a break. It didn’t matter how big the project was supposed to be or how many weeks the professor allowed for it. Once I began an assignment, I would stay with it until it was 100% complete and ready to be turned in.

Lots of good discussion here.

Check out this awesome math quiz clock, I just love the design and idea. They have several designs, and they’re only $28. MATH pop QUIZ Clock

“We live and we die by time. And we must not commit the sin of losing our track on time.” — Chuck Noland

“Customers don’t measure you on how hard you tried, they measure you on what you deliver.” — Steve Jobs

A nice interface for Google Tasks: Gtasker.com

Help for teachers to balance their work and private lives. How to organize to-do lists, paperwork and time to best help teachers get more done.

http://youtu.be/SuhGwaZiNIk

A sweet poster proclaiming that freelancing isn’t free. That’s so true.

Mike Rowe on jobs and working.

…[P]ie charts are really only useful when a small number of categories of data are far, far greater than others.

The above example is useful. From John Graham-Cumming’s post about pie charts.

How do people spend their time?

MARGARET THATCHER, a former British prime minister, reportedly got by on just four hours’ sleep a night. Such deprivation would trouble many people, and certainly the French, who sleep for nearly nine hours on average, according to a report by the OECD. True to stereotype, the French also spend the most time eating and drinking of OECD members—indeed, they eat for almost twice as long as the Americans. The Japanese appear to have a tough time of it, working by far the longest hours. However, they also devote less time to unpaid work such as household chores and childcare, activities that account for around one third of the OECD’s GDP.

From The Economist.

I tell myself that I will merely write down the steps needed to complete the task. Just a rough draft, at first, and that’s it. Maybe just 3 steps. I then add more steps, breaking the 3 steps into smaller sub-tasks. I then add some details, and thoughts, notes of things that I shouldn’t forget when doing this task. I just think the task through and write everything down. After a little while, I will be a proud author of “The Complete Guide To Finishing Task X for Dummies”.

From 10 best tricks of fooling myself to work.

Watch Ricardo Semler give a talk about “Leading by Omission.”

“Every one of us can send emails on Sunday night, but how many of us know how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon? If you don’t know how to go to the movies from 2 to 4, you’re in trouble because you’ve just taken on something that unbalances life, but you haven’t rebalanced it with something else.” — Ricardo Semler

A few years ago I read the book Maverick by this man, and it was really good and got me thinking about a lot of topics.

About the Lecture — If successful business depends on innovation, wonders Ricardo Semler, why are automobiles made essentially the same way today as they were in Ford’s first assembly line 100 years ago? Parallel parking is one of “ the stupidest things we do,” says Semler, “If we had a day, could we not by tomorrow afternoon figure out a way to make a car” that handles better in this common situation — or, on a grander scale, escape from the “silly concept” of oil dependent transportation altogether? The problem, Semler figures, is that there’s “something fundamental about organizations and … leadership that makes it almost impossible for people inside a business to change their own industry.” Industries are based on “formats that are basically legacies of military hierarchies,” says Semler, which neglect or deny the power of human intuition and democratic participation. In Semler’s own firm, there are no five-year business plans (which he views as wishful thinking), but rather “a rolling rationale about numbers.” A project takes off only if a critical mass of employees decides to get involved. Staff determine when they need a leader, and then choose their own bosses in a process akin to courtship, says Semler, resulting in a corporate turnover rate of 2% over 25 years. “We’ll send our sons anywhere in the world to die for democracy,” says Semler, but don’t seem to apply the concept to the workplace. This is a tragic error, because “people on their own developing their own solutions will develop something different.

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

From Entrepreneur Corner on VentureBeat.

Interesting TEDxBoulder video with Grant Blakeman. He advocates minimalism for a better, full, life.

How much do freelancers actually make an hour? (It’s a lot less than you think.)

A nice printable timesheet PDF.