Today I want to do my first core idea video deep dive, I should say my first core idea deep dive and the topic I want to do it on is time management. So my goal here is to give a brief summary of my thinking about time management. And what that's going to consist of is let me define for you what I mean by time management.

Let me give you the three principles in my writing. And on this podcast, we always talk about that any good time management system should probably satisfy. And then I will briefly talk through my particular system, which we can think of as one example of a time management system that satisfies these principles.

So you can do something else. So you see what a real, fully fledged time management system that satisfies these principles look like. And then I'm going to have a bonus fourth principle I want to talk about, that debatably is not really about time management, it lives right outside time management, but it's related.

So I'm going to talk about that briefly at the end. So that is my agenda for this core idea discussion on time management. So let's start what do I mean by time management for me, at least in the context of this discussion, I'm thinking about work. So time management in work, the way you deal with your time outside of work is a little bit different.

So I'm going to put that aside. And in the context of work, I'm going to define time management to be whatever philosophy process systems or rules that you deploy to make decisions about what you're going to do right now with your time. How do you figure out it's 1226 on a Friday?

What do I do next? In the end, that's what a time management system is a way to help you answer that question in as useful a manner as possible. Now everyone who works has some sort of time management system they're using. If you don't know what it's called, if you can't tell me the details of it, if you've never thought about that, it's just a really bad one, probably, but you still have one one way or the other, you're making these decisions.

The question is just how do we want to make these decisions? What is going to work better? So I'm going to give you the three properties I think any good time management system should have. I love alliteration. Longtime listeners of the podcast know this. I love C's in my alliteration, as longtime listeners of this podcast know.

So I named the three key properties here with three C's capture, configure, control. Talk about these each briefly in the abstract and I'll tell you about my system that satisfies these. Number one capture. I believe a good professional time management system needs to have some place in which you store all the information that's important to making decisions about what you need to be doing and what you should be doing.

That is trusted. It's a place that you are going to look at things that go in there will not be forgotten. These ideas get out of your head and into a system so you're not wasting brain cycles on trying to remember or keep fresh stuff that you need to do.

Now in the context of tasks, we can give credit to this idea to David Allen. So David Allen and his seminal post computer time management book and I mean that very specifically because as I've written about before, time management goes through big evolution. So post computers, computer networks and email time management went through a big revolution.

And David Allen was there at the beginning. He had this idea of full capture, where he said all of your tasks should be in a trusted system that you review regularly, not in your head. He actually adapted that idea from a previous business thinker named Dean Atchison, unrelated to President Truman, Secretary of State, same name, different person, who had first developed, I believe in the 1970s, this notion of full capture and David Allen expanded it.

So that's really the core of this. David Allen's articulation of full capture said, don't waste mental energy remembering things, have it in a system so your brain can be clear to actually focus on working. This also reduces a lot of stress because your brain gets stressed when it's worried about forgetting things you need to do.

I generalize capture though, beyond what Allen talks about. In addition to each of your commitments, being somewhere you trust, I want your plans to also be somewhere you trust. So any thinking you've done about what you're working on, on all sorts of different timescales, that should be written down somewhere you trust and review regularly as well.

I think that's often overlooked, but the planning process of what's going on, how do I want to get my work done? What needs to be done this semester? What do I have to get done this week to hit this goal? That's a really important part of time management. I don't want that all in your head.

That also gets captured. All right, second property, configure. This is a twist that I've become increasingly a loud advocate for, which is care more about how you actually organize this information that you're capturing. I think you really need to think through, once I have this information written down somewhere, where do I put it?

How do I organize it? Is it in categories? Is it broken up by role? Equally important, getting the relevant information consolidated. I'm really big on this. So not only do you have a really smart organization for all the stuff on your plate, you're also gathering in one place all the relevant information.

You're not searching through your email inbox to try to remember what does this mean? And where are we? And what do I owe this person? I'm supposed to get back to Derek about the program codes. What does that mean? Let me go through my inbox. Now all that should be in one place.

So these are our two goals with with organize a that the information is organized well, where what you want to happen here, what you want to have happen here is that you can very quickly get the gestalt of what's on your plate, what's do what's not who you're waiting to hear back from the information is put aside in such a way that it's not just a list with 100 things and to all the relevant information is there.

Not scrambling around to figure out what I need to know to do this thing. All the information is there. All right, control. The third property of a good prime at the time management system. Control says instead of being reactive in your decisions about what you want to do with your time and by reactive, I mean just saying, okay, it's 1223 on Friday.

What do I want to do next? I don't know. Let me see what seems relevant. Let me look at my let me look at my inbox. We look at Slack. Maybe I'll look at a to do list and try to choose something off of it. Control says don't be reactive.

Don't wait till you get to the moment to say what should I do next? Instead be proactive. Make a plan for your time in advance that makes the most of the time that you actually have available. So you think ahead, you look at the time you have available and you say, what do I want to do with this?

I'm planning the whole picture at once. I'm not waiting till the moment to say what happens next. Now on the podcast, I talk often about doing this control at multiple timescales. You'll hear me talk about multi-scale planning. This is where that actually applies. And what I recommend is that you should be doing this type of planning on three timescales, quarterly, weekly, daily.

So quarterly, you have a plan for what you want to try to get done that quarter. What's important? What are the big projects you're working on? There could even be daily work that you want to really emphasize like, look, I got to get my cold calls up. So every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I spend the first hour doing cold calls, whatever it is, but you're making this plan for the quarter.

Looking ahead at the quarter, is this a busy quarter, not a big quarter? What are the big deadlines this quarter? Is there a huge trade fair halfway through it? That means the first half of the quarter has to be really focused on preparing for that trade trade fair. You're looking at the whole picture of the quarter and at this pretty big granularity coming up with a plan.

Every week, you then look at that quarterly plan and produce a plan for the week ahead of you. Now you're doing weekly planning. And when you're doing weekly planning, what you really want to do is get a sense of what's going to happen which day. And then finally, you get down to the daily scale, where you say, what am I actually doing during the hours of the day?

So we're in weekly planning, you're looking at what am I going to do the different days of this week at daily planning, you're saying, here's my day. I have a meeting here, I have a call here, I have two meetings here, here's a time that's free, what do I want to do during that time?

So multi scale planning, I think is the right way to think about control. You're giving your time a job as opposed to asking in the moment, what should I do next? So I think any good time management system should do capture, configure, control. Let me talk briefly about my specific instantiation of these properties, what my time management system looks like at the moment.

So for capture, there is where I actually store the things I need to do. And I use Trello, which is a task board software system. So it gives you a visual metaphor for cards on a board arranged vertically in columns, I use Trello, to keep track of tasks and commitments, and I use Google Docs, to keep track of plans, the plans I have about various things.

So Trello is where all my tasks are. Google Docs are where my my plans live. So that's where in multi scale planning, my quarterly plan lives. That's where other plans live. Jesse and I, for example, have a Google Doc where we we have our plans for the podcast, etc.

Trello for tasks, Google Docs for plans. In addition to the storage systems, you have to have the capture tool. So the tools you use to capture things during the day on the fly that will then get later moved into those storage systems. Now for me, I use two main ones.

I have my time block planner. I am in a lucky situation where I was able to design and publish my own planner. So you can obviously find out more about that at time block planner.com. But that planner has for every day a page in which you can capture stuff.

So I capture stuff right in that planner. On my computer, I also have a text file on my desktop. I call it working memory dot txt. Because I think of it as like an expansion of my actual working memory. And I use that when I'm on my computer to capture things, especially when I'm cleaning out my email.

I can just type much faster than I can write and I capture all sorts of notes in this document. I work through ideas on the document, it really is like an extension of my working memory. So a lock gets captured in there. If I'm in a meeting on zoom, things are popping up I have to do.

I'm writing it probably right there in that working memory dot txt. At the end of every day, I do a shutdown. My planner even has a box I checked. It says shutdown complete that indicates I've done my shutdown. As part of that shutdown process. I look through everything in that planner, everything in working memory dot txt.

And I get it into one of those more stable systems goes on the Trello or I update my Google Doc. So those things get pushed back down to zero, their temporary tools to capture and then they get moved into the more stable systems. The one addendum I should add there is the calendar.

Obviously, some of these things are appointments. So that goes right to the calendar. All right, configure. I mentioned I use Trello for my task. The way I actually use Trello is I have a separate board for each of my different professional roles. I keep a separate board as a writer, a separate board, for example, as a teacher, which I keep as a separate board as a researcher, etc.

Those are then split up into columns. There's a few standard columns that every one of these boards have. I typically have a column where I put tasks on there that's called to be processed. It's a pretty complicated thing I need to do. And I don't quite understand all the details of it.

But I don't want to keep track of it in my head. But also, you know, it's five o'clock and I'm shutting down, I don't have time to spend 20 minutes figuring out what does this mean? Like what are the actual actions here. So I'll just throw that in the to be processed column.

I usually have a column on each of these boards for waiting to hear back from. So if I've sent someone a note, and I need information from them, and that information is critical for me to keep making progress, I like to put a card on my Trello board under waiting to hear back that says, here's what I'm waiting to hear back from.

And here's what I'm going to do once I get that information. I don't want to remember that in my head. So I put it on there, I typically have a column for things I'm working on this week. And I'll typically have a column for if there's specifically persistent initiatives within that role.

I'll give it its own column. So I can really quickly see for this thing I'm working on. What are all the different things that need to be done? So as a researcher, there might be a column for a paper we're preparing for publication. In my administrative role at Georgetown, there might be a column for a search committee that I'm on, here's the relevant tasks.

The time that I really get into and clean this up and look at it and move things around and check in on it is when I do my weekly plan. So once a week as part of my commitment to configure, I really go through these systems and I update it once a week when I'm building my weekly plan is also when I'm reviewing the Google Docs that capture these other types of plans that are going on and update them and remind myself what's on them.

So the weekly scale is when I'm really getting my hands dirty throughout the week. I'm just throwing stuff into here at the end of each day. But each week I really go in and clean things up. All right, finally, is control. I already talked about multi scale planning, I think is the best way to do control, you could do it other ways.

But I do for me, it's semester instead of quarterly, but semester weekly, daily planning, semester plans in a Google Doc, weekly plan, I actually type it up in a text document and print it out. And I keep it with me in the back of my time block planner. So that's how and I'll update it and reprint it as I need to throughout the week.

And then for my daily plan, I'm time blocking, like I talked about, here's my day, let me block off everything on my calendar. Here's the time that remains, what I want to do during that time. Well, let me look at my weekly plan to remind myself of what my big picture plan is for this day.

And then I'm blocking off actual hours of time and saying, here's what I'm doing here, here's what I'm doing there. And I fill in all that information, I do that right in my time block planner. But you can do this in any type of notebook. There's a whole video at my site, timeblockplanner.com that walks through the details of how time blocking works.

So that is how I do the daily piece, you put those all together, there's my commitment to control. Alright, so stepping back, capture, configure, control, you do those three things, you're going to be making smart decisions about what you want to be doing with your time professionally. Now I know people get concerned, they say, well, I might be injecting too much structure into my life.

And this is going to make my work life more rigid, and I'll be less creative. I call nonsense and all of that. Just because you're in control of everything doesn't mean you need to schedule every seven minutes of your time like a crazy person. I mean, you can, when you're in control your time, you can now start to make decisions like Thursday afternoon, starting at 12, I want to do no work, I'm going to go to the woods and just think about this problem I'm working on.

When you're doing capture, configure control, you could do that with confidence, because you know what's on your plate, you've cleared out that time, you know, things aren't being forgotten. You made sure that you had time on Wednesday to catch up on things people need to hear about Thursday, because you're in control, you can aim that control at more breaks, more free time, more creativity, less stress.

You can significantly like a lot of my listeners do reduce the amount of time it takes for you to get your normal workload done. Because you're in complete control of things, move it into certain days and keep whole days free to basically do phantom part time jobs. There's a lot you can do that makes your life more interesting and creative, and less stressful.

Once you have an intentional way of making these decisions about what do I want to do next with my time? All right, now I promised you a bonus property that arguably has to do with time management, arguably it's something different. So I'll just mention it briefly. And that is constrain.

So circling this whole idea is how you figure out what gets on your plate to be managed in the first place, and how you actually manage that work. I'm just going to plant the seed here because this is a bigger conversation. But we need to be very careful about how we decide what we say yes to and what we say no to.

We would really like to avoid the situation where we have so much work on our plate that yeah, we can control it and be organized about it, but we still don't have enough time to get it done. We want to avoid that situation. So having clear rules in place about how do I decide what I let on my plate, that's really important.

Processes is the second thing that I think is really important when it comes to constraining, you know, figuring out how do I want to do this work? The stuff I let on my plate, can I put a process in place that will reduce the footprint this has on my schedule?

There's a lot of different things this can mean. And again, because we're just seed planting here, I'm just going to very briefly skim the surface, but there may be automation you're doing here. You know what, we have to produce this same client report every week. I don't want to just send emails back and forth and kind of figure it out at the last minute.

Here is our process for doing it. And you figure out a whole process. That's the same thing. The same things happen at the same times every week. You can rely on it. You've taken that burden off of your planning system to have to figure out from scratch for small questions and back and forth.

You might push that all towards office hours, three days a week for one hour. Well publicized. I'm in my office. Zoom is on. Come to that office hours. If you have a small question for me, come to that office hours. If there's a little bit of information you need, come to that office hours.

If there's something we can figure out in two minutes of back and forth. And when people bother you with an email or slack, like, Hey, what are we doing again about this? Or can explain to me again what this thing means? Just say, yeah, come to my office hours.

These type of processes are all about reducing what it is that you actually do have to manage with your capture configure control system. You want to simplify that simplify what's on your plate, simplify how the things around your plate are executed. The easier you can make the planning version of yourself job, the better you're going to do at your actual job.

All right. So let me summarize it there. That is my thinking on this core idea of time management.