Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book.

Cut to the Chase was recommended to me by a friend of a friend, who swore up and down that it was the best book on time management he’d ever read. As a long-time believer in Getting Things Done (and having read a lot of material on time management), I was skeptical.

Cut to the Chase, subtitled and 99 Other Rules to Liberate Yourself and Gain Back the Gift of Time, actually turns out to be a collection of short essays on specific aspects of time management rather than an overall philosophy. As with other books that use the same philosophy, I found that such bite-sized pieces made it very readable (I could read a bit or two before bed, for example) but the book doesn’t present a grand overall philosophy. Instead, it uses the idea that applying lots of little things will produce a big solution.

Does it work? Let’s dig in and find out.

Evaluating Cut to the Chase

Given that this is a collection of 100 short essays, each less than two short pages in length, I’m going to focus on several of the overall themes that the book presents.

Get started
The biggest theme in the entire book can be summed up in those two words. Any task that you need to do only gets done if you get started, and if you sit there not getting started, you’re not just delaying the start, you’re delaying the finish as well.

This concept permeates the whole book. Levine looks at a bunch of ways to apply this, from starting earlier each day (and thus going home early, too) to starting on real tasks immediately upon arriving in the workplace.

Brevity is key
In every aspect of what you do, minimize the time spent wasting time. Take charge of meetings and trim that agenda down. Keep your contacts short and clean, but also with all of the needed information so they don’t have to contact you again for more info.

Not only does brevity cut down on the time you have to invest, but it passes along time savings to others, too. When you run a meeting with a brief agenda and get everyone out the door in ten minutes, that saves everyone in the room some time. When you write a brief email with all of the needed information right up front, the person that receives it can get right to work. The whole workplace becomes more efficient when you’re brief and to the point.

Set goals
Working towards something without any idea of how to finish isn’t very useful because you never know if your task is misdirected or not. Know what your big goals are, your smaller goals, and how your immediate task fits into them. If you can’t answer those questions, take some time to define your goals. What are you really trying to accomplish?

I’ve found that time and time again, if I put forth the effort to really detail what I’m working towards and then define my tasks as being ones that work towards that goal, then I’m almost always more successful than just handling whatever comes along and not worrying about it otherwise.

Toss out the non-essentials
In hand with setting goals, once you define them, you should use those goals as a filter for the tasks that you do. If you have larger goals you’re working towards, focus on the tasks that meet those goals and minimize the tasks that don’t really help with them.

Not only does this help you prioritize things, it also gives you clear explanations for why you make your choices. You can start tossing aside the non-essential tasks and focus on the essentials.

Don’t let the details overrun your life
Of course, there are some non-essential tasks that you have to do. Unfortunately, with the intrusiveness of things like Blackberries and cell phones, it’s easy for these non-essentials to follow you all the time. Don’t let them, seriously. Turn off your cell phone and Blackberry when you’re not on duty and give yourself some time to recharge.

Similarly, try dealing with the other non-essentials in one session during the day. Do all of your emails in one batch, along with all of your paperwork, then close your email program and don’t check the mail again. I’ve been moving to this over time - having one email session a day really cuts down on the amount of busywork and allows me to get more “real” stuff done.

Find time for other things
If you’re going through all of this effort to save time, don’t use it to just work harder on your career. Step back and smell the roses. Work on your personal relationships, and work on improving yourself as well.

Buy or Don’t Buy

Cut to the Chase is one of those books that summarizes most of the “standard” knowlege quite well, but doesn’t provide anything new. If you’ve never read much about time management, this is a good introduction to the topic, especially for people who like their information already broken up into little digestible bits.

For me, though, I still think David Allen’s books are the best one can find when it comes to time management. Getting Things Done is still the standard, but if you prefer your reading broken up into little pieces, Allen’s Ready for Anything is excellent as well. Cut to the Chase is a solid complement to these if you’re not widely read on time management.

Perhaps the most frequent question I’m asked is how on earth do I find the time to do all of the stuff that I do in a given day? I thought the best way to illustrate this would be to give an outline of a typical day so you can see what I do during that time.

4:15 AM I wake up. This is usually followed by a bit of stretching, a cold glass of water, a multivitamin, and a splash of water on the face. I usually try to eat something healthy for breakfast here, and do a quick puzzle.
4:30 AM I settle in for a writing and research session. This usually lasts for two hours.
6:30 AM I take a quick shower if I didn’t take one the night before, and start getting the children ready for daycare.
7:15 AM I drop the kids off at daycare. I’m usually either listening to NPR or an audiobook on my commute, and I use a small voice recorder to record thoughts and ideas.
7:30 AM I arrive at work and begin my typical work day. This day usually contains a half-hour long interlude in the middle, where I either eat with coworkers or answer my personal email.
4:00 PM I leave work. If needed, I run personal errands right after work - a stop at the grocery store or the library, for example.
4:30 PM I arrive home and meditate/pray/stretch for fifteen minutes or so.
4:45 PM I settle in for another hour of writing and research and perhaps some email answering as well. I might also start supper during this, if something needs to bake in the oven for a while or something.
5:45 PM Family arrives home - my wife picks the children up from daycare. I’m devoted to them for a few hours.
8:00 PM I usually write some more starting about now as my children are in bed.
9:00 PM I engage in personal activities: spending time with my wife, cleaning, reading for pleasure.
10:15 PM Bedtime!

Weekends are usually more relaxed. I usually spend half of Saturday and half of Sunday locked in my office writing, with the rest of the time devoted to personal activities, like cleaning up the house, doing family things, etc.

In a few weeks, I hope to transition to something more like this:

4:30 AM I wake up. This is usually followed by a bit of stretching, a cold glass of water, a multivitamin, and a splash of water on the face. I usually try to eat something healthy for breakfast here, and do a quick puzzle, then a half an hour to an hour devoted to exercise.
5:30 AM I take a quick shower.
5:45 AM I do a morning email session to get any communication out of the way, and sketch out my writing for the day.
6:30 AM Children wake up. Depending on the day, I’ll either get them ready for daycare or start going through our normal day routine - we’re not sure how many days of which I’ll be doing quite yet. We’ll focus on the former.
7:15 AM The morning will consist of a research and writing session.
12:30 PM I break for lunch and do my prayer/meditation/stretching, then spend the afternoon hitting the grindstone again. At the end, say at 2:45 or so, I do a second email session.
3:30 PM I stop and do household chores until the family gets home - cleaning, cooking, etc.
5:30 PM Family arrives home - my wife picks the children up from daycare. I’m devoted to them for a few hours.
8:00 PM I engage in personal activities: spending time with my wife, cleaning, reading for pleasure.
10:00 PM Bedtime!

Ideally, this leaves weekends completely free.

The Principles

Obviously, my days for the last year or so have been really packed to the gills. There’s not much time at all for rest and relaxation in that schedule, and there have been many times where I’ve chosen to work or to write over other things. Here are the guiding principles that really made all of this work.

This doesn’t work without passion. If I wasn’t passionate about my main job, my writing, and my family, this would have never worked. I would have found reasons to let something down. If you’re going to try to effectively juggle so many activities at once, make sure they all fill you with passion.

Some sacrifices are needed to bring success. Because I was engaged with so much, I had to often abandon things that I wanted to do, like spend weekends with family or engage in leisure activities. This meant that I had to be willing to make some very hard choices, and I had to keep personally motivated at all times to keep it up.

Free time is valuable. Of course, giving myself very little free time meant that it was quite valuable to me. I always wanted to maximize the value of it - but, surprisingly, that didn’t mean going out and doing expensive things. It meant simply seeking out the things that made me feel the most fulfilled over the long haul. Instead of golfing, for example, I’d take the kids to the park.

“Winding down” time isn’t as necessary as you think it is. I used to think that a “winding down” period after work, where I’d do something completely mindless for an hour, was essential to my life. What I found was that I felt substantially better if I didn’t do that. Instead, now I just stretch and meditate for a few minutes after my work is done and I find I feel substantially better than I ever did “winding down” by watching television or something.

Try different things until you find what fits you. Not every schedule works well for everyone. For a while, I experimented with writing sessions in the middle of the night, which worked well over the short term but left me zombie-like after a while. Eventually, I came to find my current schedule made everything reasonably manageable for me, but I didn’t just get there on the first shot - I tried all sorts of things before I found that sweet spot.

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or personal development book.

Over and over again, I’ve come to realize that most of the stress and money management problems that people have come down to one thing: a lack of time. It’s because of that realization that I’ve come to write somewhat regularly about time management and figuring out the cash value of your time.

Take Back Your Time is a collection of essays on the topic of battling overwork and time poverty in America. I picked it up mostly on the strength of some of the writers that have written things I’ve loved in the past: Vicki Robin contributes an essay (she co-wrote Your Money or Your Life, which I utterly loved) and Juliet Schor (who wrote two books I’ve loved and reviewed here on The Simple Dollar, Born to Buy and The Overspent American), and those two alone were enough to convince me to pick up the book and give it a read-through.

I’m glad I did. This was a really thought-provoking collection of writings on time poverty, from various angles on how strong of a force it is to ways to battle it in our own lives - and in society in general. Often, I’m annoyed by a collection of essays on the same topic when people just parrot the same material, but the writers here tackle the topic from enough different angles that the varying perspectives made it quite enjoyable. Let’s dig in and see what’s inside.

Browsing Through Take Back Your Time

This book contains thirty essays, broken up into ten separate groups.

Part One: Overwork in America
The book opens by making the case that overwork actually exists, starting off with a scathing fact-based piece from Juliet Schor, the author of The Overworked American. Statistically, it’s pretty obvious that on average, Americans work more today than they did thirty years ago, and it’s continually growing. The other essays in this section tackle specific aspects of this: Barbara Brandt argues that opportunities are reduced for the underemployed and unemployed and also examines the places where this time comes from (families and sleep); Joe Robinson looks at the lack of paid vacation time, especially compared to the rest of the world; and Lonnie Golden addresses forced overtime in its various forms, from requiring hourly workers to work extra hours or piling requirements on salaried workers and forcing them to expand their hours. The end conclusion? The workplace is eating up more and more of our time.

Part Two: Time is a Family Value
Time poverty affects children and pets, too. When parents and pet owners have more and more of their time drawn away to work, less and less time is spent at home caring for children and caring for pets - this time has to come from somewhere. Less time spent means a less healthy relationship with children and with pets. Even more, children themselves often feel the pinch of needing time management: overscheduled children, with school and a ton of after-school activities, often lack the time to explore new things for themselves, develop a sense of self, have relaxing free time, and simply be children. In a nutshell, time poverty is detrimental to children and pets as well as adults.

Part Three: The Cost to Civil Society
Civil society loses out as well. One of the things most of us cut out of our lives when we start to feel the pinch is volunteer work. If we’re working more hours and we still want to maintain some semblance of a normal life, it’s easy to toss out volunteering for charities. This trend has shown up in contributed volunteer hours to charity over the last few decades, which has gone down. Similarly, we don’t do as many civil things for others that we used to do, like helping out a neighbor in need. Even worse, our elevated stress levels have caused us to be less civil to others, evidenced through trends like road rage. Basically, time poverty has made us less civil to each other.

Part Four: Health Hazards
Time pressure also causes health concerns. We minimize or compress exercise, don’t eat well (fast food is quick, after all), don’t visit the doctor, and are often subjected to stress-related illnesses. The end result is that we wear down after living a time-compressed lifestyle, with negative personal health consequences.

Part Five: Environmental Consequences
There are also negative environmental consequences to time poverty. Quite often, it requires many of us to increase our environmental footprint. We buy more prepackaged items, increasing our waste output. We have to commute alone because of our intense hours, thus burning more fossil fuels. We speed, burning even more fossil fuels. Most of these actions add more stress to our lives, compounding the other problems discussed earlier. In the end, overwork damages the environment.

Part Six: Historical and Cultural Perspectives
Why do other societies outside of the United States - and even in the United States in the past - have fewer challenges with time poverty? There’s a lot of interesting discussion here, from differences in culture and religion to a desire to continually improve production in the United States. Most interesting: in the 1930s, Congress nearly passed the Black-Perkins bill, which would have mandated a thirty hour workweek. Can you even concieve of Congress passing such a bill today? The point is that the current standard of time poverty in the United States is the exception rather than the rule from a historical and global perspective.

Part Seven: Taking Back Your Time
Here, the book turns direction and begins to look at solutions, starting with your individual life. Vicki Robin starts it off, reiterating the concept of calculating the value of your time and the fulfillment curve as expressed in Your Money or Your Life - basically, a five page nutshell of the whole book. What’s the first step you can begin to take, though? Cecile Andrews offers it - cancel something. Find something in your life and just cancel it. Free up some time to breathe.

Part Eight: Workplace Solutions
Obviously, the biggest place to find solutions is in the workplace, and this section offers a bunch of different perspectives on it. Individually, one can simply put aside material needs and begin to look for lower paying and less time-demanding jobs, or perhaps investigate the idea of a sabbatical. Alternately, one can work to begin to facilitate greater changes in the workplace by demonstrating that jobs with less time pressure get done better, with higher quality for the time invested - in many cases, this would actually be better for business than trying to squeeze more and more hours out of a person.

Part Nine: Rethinking Patterns of Culture
My favorite essay in the entire book came in this section, where Anna Lappe argues quite well that our changing relationship with food is directly connected to time poverty. The rise of fast food is the result of people needing more time - they can get edible foods prepared for them very quickly at a relatively cheap price, and that’s good enough. But what’s lost in the process is the nutritional diversity and spiritual effects of food - a truly great meal offers nutritional value and spiritual value that can’t be recaptured at Mickey D’s, and time pressure is the cause. The solution? Try taking the time to make a quality homemade meal - a message that hits home with me. Another interesting argument appears here, one that argues that “super sizing” is the real opponent - large houses, large televisions, and large meals are large wastes of money when they leave us without the time to enjoy them.

Part Ten: Changing Public Policies
The book ends with discussion on how to change public policies in relation to time poverty and what individuals can do. There are a lot of potential options, but most of them require broad awareness and support, something which doesn’t exist right now. Thus, the book proposes that we engage in a “Take Back Your Time” Day each October 24, where we spend the day making others aware of the problem in any way we can, just to increase awareness of the problem itself and the potential solutions.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

I found Take Back Your Time, as a whole, to be very interesting. It offered a lot of food for thought, different perspectives, and some solutions. It occasionally veered into the area of “we need big societal changes to fix this,” which is a rather dangerous road to follow, but when it sticks to identifying the problems themselves and providing individual solutions to the problem, Take Back Your Time really shines.

This is a great book to share with others, but it’s not one that I plan on returning to as a reference source. That’s true with most books of essays - you read them once and, if the essays are good, you share it - otherwise, why bother?

Thus, if you are interested in the topics presented here and know of some people you’d like to share it with, buy this book and pass it around. Otherwise, I recommend checking it out from your local library, but either way, it’s well worth reading for almost anyone engaged in Western society, particularly in the United States.

My wife’s extended family is of Norwegian heritage, and the entire family loves eating lefse at large family meals. The only problem is that preparing an extended family sized batch of lefse takes several hours, so they all chip $10 or so together and buy three or four pounds worth of the potato pastry from a local small businessperson who makes it from scratch.

Another friend of mine is of Eastern European descent and his family eats babka some family events, and the babka is made on a rotating basis (meaning one person makes all the babka for one family event). When it came to be her turn, she didn’t have the time to make the babka but she wanted it to be as good as the babka as her other family members made, so she ordered four loaves from Dean and DeLuca, setting her back $50.

Yet another friend of mine was making handmade wooden blocks in his woodshop for his son, sanding them down carefully and painting them. He ran out of time so he enlisted the help of several of his woodworking friends, paying them several dollars for each block they could make before Christmas arrived.

In each of these cases, the person was substituting their money for their time. Their busy lives prevented them from having the time to do something well inside their skill set, so they paid someone else to do it.

This brings to mind an argument from another friend of mine, who pays a housekeeper to come to his home for a couple hours a day. This is a local connection, paid in cash only - he pays the woman $10 an hour in cash to come to his home and do some basic cleaning - vacuuming, scrubbing toilets, etc. He argues that without this service, he wouldn’t be able to do many of the things he has the free time to enjoy, and to him it’s worth $10 an hour to get that extra time.

On a lot of levels, this approach makes sense to me. What value do you place on your time during your waking hours? One honest way to do this is to calculate your hourly wage and see how much you actually do value an hour of your time, and then use that data to figure out how valuable your free time is to you.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that I make $12 an hour as my real wage for the time invested working on The Simple Dollar, and I worked on it two hours a day. If I hired someone to clean my home at $10 an hour during those two hours, I would only make $2 an hour, but I would have two hours of free time where I didn’t have to participate in the drudgery of house cleaning. Those two hours could be used to make the lefse or the babka, saving some significant money, or else spent enjoying my life.

Alternately, let’s say I had a great idea for a side business and the capital to get it rolling, but I didn’t have the time to get started. I could channel some of that capital into hiring someone to do menial personal tasks, then channel my own time into the side business, seeing if there’s enough meat there to get things to really take off.

This is much the same idea as the “virtual assistant” concept in The 4 Hour Workweek, or the precise reason why upper middle class and upper class families hire a maid or personal assistant to take care of menial tasks for a relatively low wage. They’ve discovered that their time is quite valuable and that an assistant like this creates more free time in their lives that they can spend with their families, doing things they deeply enjoy, or perhaps following their dreams as well.

For many people, this isn’t even a consideration. I know many people who make a real wage (their hourly wage after including benefits, extra hours spent devoted to the job by commuting and so on, and extra money spent commuting and on clothing and on taxes and so on) below minimum wage and thus this isn’t really an option, or perhaps they’ve reached a point in their life where their income from other sources covers their living expenses and they have all the free time in the world.

This concept really speaks to people like me whose most valuable resource is time. Time, more than anything, is what I wish I had more of. Is it appropriate to buy more time? It depends entirely on how you value it, but as time goes on and my writing career begins to bloom, it begins to look like a compelling option.

Over time, many, many readers have asked me how I keep myself organized and find the time to maintain The Simple Dollar, work a full time job, handle a family life that involves two kids in diapers, and have any free time at all for other pursuits including some degree of intellectual curiosity. It’s not easy, and the only way it’s worked at all is by putting together some basic organization techniques that keep things in focus.

So, without further ado, here are the basic tenets of how I manage all of this stuff and keep things moving forward, with a lot of visual help along the way. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments, because if you’re thinking of a question, chances are someone else is too and it makes sense to ask there and have my responses there, too.

The Most Important Thing

The absolute most important thing in my life in terms of keeping my thoughts organized and not losing valuable ideas is this:

I keep a very simple Mead pocket notebook and a pen in my pocket at all times (hence the beat up look). Wherever I’m at, if an idea pops into my head, I jot it down in this notebook. I’ve even pulled off the road to do this and I’ve also been known to pull this out during conversations with others if they cause me to think about something.

What goes in the notebook? Anything and everything: tasks I need to do, words I want to look up, ideas I want to research or follow up on; all of these things are fair game. I usually write one distinct idea per page so that I can make “sub-notes” underneath it. Let’s look at a couple of examples from the notebook to see what I mean.

When I open the notebook, the first item I find is a note reminding me to “get lime remover for hot water heater,” and under that I jotted “ebay? plumbing supply?” This was the result of a conversation with a person who installs hot water heaters for a living. I described to this person that my hot water heater was making a “percolating” sound, much like a coffee pot, and he immediately suggested that I try running lime remover through it. I pulled out my notebook, jotted that down, and asked him where to get it - obviously, he said to try eBay or a plumbing supply store.

This is a note reminding me to follow up on a pont of intellectual curiosity. Here, I read an article from the September 2007 issue of The Atlantic about Karl Rove and I found that he was politically inspired by the presidency of William McKinley and that of McKinley’s advisor, Mark Hanna. I wanted to follow up on this to learn more about McKinley and Hanna, a pair I had only brushed upon once a long time ago.

On an average day, I’ll make ten or so notes like these. They’ll vary as much as these two do, from areas of intellectual curiosity to tasks that need to be completed. However, just making notes doesn’t mean that I do anything about them. I follow up on these notes once a day by putting them all in my inbox, then processing it.

The “Inbox”

Here’s a look at my inbox at the moment:

It consists of a folder (which contains several things I need to review that you can just see peeking out), two envelopes, a black pamphlet between the envelopes, and two pieces of paper torn out from the notebook. This is actually rather thin for my inbox - often, it has as many as thirty things in it. Note that I don’t actually have a plastic or metal inbox - it struck me as an unnecessary expense, which I suppose reveals my frugal nature a bit.

My goal at the end of each day is to have that inbox empty. I usually do this by doing an inbox “processing” after work each night. I go through everything in it and do one of three things with it:

If it takes less than five minutes, I do it immediately. If something afterwards needs to be filed, I just put it in my filing box at the front of the box, then every once in a while I file this stuff away. This actually winds up being the majority of the stuff in my inbox.

If it’s a longer task, I try to break it down into smaller pieces and try to do the first piece of it. I usually wind up sketching out at least the first few steps of a longer task in another notebook (that you’ll see in a minute) and then each day I’ll check each of these longer tasks and make sure I’m moving forward with them in some fashion. This keeps a lot of moderately complex tasks urgent for me.

If it’s food for thought (like a book or a magazine or a note to research something), I put it off to the side in a “thinking” pile to deal with later on. This “thinking” pile can get quite large, but I really enjoy going through it when I have an hour or two to burn, as it provides almost all of my creative ideas.

If I get into a routine of trusting my inbox, then I don’t really have to remember much at all and can instead focus on just getting through the stuff I need to do, and that’s a giant relief.

Organizing Documents

As I mentioned above, I file stuff somewhat regularly. I do this with a big pile of file folders and a pair of simple cardboard filing boxes like this:

One of these boxes is bill statements, receipts, and tax documents for the last seven years; the other one is instruction manuals and other materials. I plan on moving to an electronic filing system in the future when I get a true workstation set up, but for now the paper filing works fine. For the most part, I just stack stuff that needs to be filed inside the box, then file it into the folders about once every month or two. This takes care of all of the paperwork miscellany that would otherwise be floating around.

The Portable Office, or “Go Bag”

Naturally, I like the ability to take the stuff that I need and just go wherever I need to be, whether it’s my actual office at home, the dining room table, a coffee shop, the kitchen counter at my parents’ house late in the evening, or wherever else. To do that, here’s my “go bag.”

Yet again, I reveal my frugal tendencies: this is a backpack I’ve had for twelve years, and it was originally picked up used at a garage sale. There’s an ink stain on the bottom that I picked up from an exploded pen circa 1999. It’s also been sewn back together at least twice. It does the job I need and I’m not desiring to impress anyone, so I’ll likely be using it until it falls apart.

Here’s what I keep inside of it:

From left to right (roughly): a baggie containing several essential cables, a small number of books (with the recently reviewed The Paradox of Choice, a copy of What Color is Your Parachute? 2008 under that), a Dell Inspiron 1505 laptop, a Nintendo DS (a few games are also in that baggie with the cables), an iPod Nano, a power supply, a card reader that can read about any small memory card under the sun, a memory stick, and a Moleskine reporter’s notebook. Not pictured but always present in the bag are a file folder (seen in my inbox picture and which usually contains a few documents plus at least some of the contents of my inbox), a few pens (I was actually out of them at the time I took the picture), and the digital camera with which the picture was taken.

The reporter’s notebook, though, is much more interesting - it’s my “project” book. Each page in that notebook equates to a project that I’m working on. That page is a list of the specific steps that need to be done to get the project done. Whenever I finish one, I cross off that step in the notebook, and I usually try to keep at least a couple steps into the future written down for each project so I can see where I’m headed. For example, if I write a series for The Simple Dollar, a project would likely consist of a list of the basic concept for each post in the series, and I’d cross them off as they were fleshed out or else discarded for some reason. This keeps me on the ball for every long term project I’m working on, breaking them down neatly for me into nice, discrete steps.

Keeping a Schedule and Reminders of Important Events

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I use Mozilla Sunbird as my primary schedule keeper. Within it, I basically keep track of every possible timed event in my life, from the usual appointments and birthdays and anniversaries to things like infrequent home maintenance tasks. The tasks listed here are basically an extension of my inbox - I use the automatically generated “to do” lists that Sunbird can spit out for you to see the things that I need to be doing on any given day.

Let me walk you through an example of how it works. Let’s say I’m out and about and I hear about a blogger meetup in Des Moines on a Friday that I happen to be available. I jot this info down in my pocket notebook and, when I get home, I toss it in my paper inbox and start processing. When I get to that item, I go ahead and fire up Sunbird and enter that event so I can then crumple up the sheet. After I fire up Sunbird, I notice that it’s been three months since I changed my air handling filter in the house, so I enter the event, then run downstairs and change the filter.

If there’s more than one scheduled event in a day, I usually print off a copy of the day’s schedule so that I have it with me and don’t have to fire up my laptop to check on things or to make any last minute changes - I just edit with a pen and keep going.

Idea Organization on my Computer

Obviously, when I’m busy at my computer, the last thing I want to do when I have an idea or a task is stop, pull out my pocket notebook, and jot something down. Even when it’s sitting on the desk next to me, I still don’t usually want to stop and jot down that idea. Yet I want to also be able to easily retrieve any ideas and notes and tasks I have on my computer from any computer, and for that exact purpose, I use Google Notebook.

Google Notebook is an online application that basically lets you jot down notes to save for later. These notes can be your thoughts, pieces of web pages, images, or whatever you wish, which is nice, but it’s not really the reason I use it. This is why I use it:

This is what my default web browsing window looks like in Mozilla Firefox, my browser of choice. Notice that little spot at the bottom that I’ve highlighted that says “Open Notebook”? No matter what website I’m at, all I have to do is click on that (or press Alt-N on my keyboard) and the following opens up:

This little window pops up. Within it, I can just jot down any idea I have in a very free-form fashion. I can also separate them into different “notebooks” to keep them somewhat organized. I just click where I want to write and just jot down the thought, and if I want to, I can drag in pieces of web pages that I’m on as well. I basically treat this as an extension of my inbox, processing it each night.

What’s most useful about this is that I have this plugin installed on every computer I use regularly, plus I can access the notebook from any web-accessible computer.

Another absolutely vital piece of organization for me is Remember the Milk, a website I’ve written fondly about in the past. Remember the Milk is basically a very convenient list maker; for example, you can use it to make grocery shopping lists or Christmas gift lists.

Why would one bother to use this for a grocery list, you might ask? Let me paint you a picture. Throughout the week, we do jot down our grocery list using a piece of paper on the fridge and I sometimes also note ingredients in Google Notebook for things I’d like to try making. My wife and I will go over this, just to make sure we haven’t forgotten anything, and I’ll make the “master list” with Remember the Milk, which seems pretty mundane, right?

Well, check this out:

If you visit m.rememberthemilk.com, you can access your shopping list from any web-accessible cell phone, like mine is. So, when I get to the store, I just log onto the site on my way into the store and there’s my list. What’s special about that? Let’s say my wife thinks of a recipe she wants to try after I’ve left. She just logs on, adds the items to the list, and I have the complete, correct list when I get to the store. A similar logic applies for Christmas gifts, or a list of errands to run, or pretty much anything else you can imagine from a checklist.

Dealing With Email

One last important aspect of my personal organization is email. For this, I follow three simple rules.

First, don’t close the email program without emptying the email inbox. This means deleting the junk, reading each message, and either dealing with it now or adding it to Google Notebook. I empty the inbox, then close the email program and don’t open it again all day. I usually only do email twice a day at most unless I have five or ten minutes of idle time that I can use to shorten my email session later in the day or tomorrow morning. One quick thing I do that helps with this is that I use the Quicktext extension for Mozilla Thunderbird (my preferred email program; again, both are free). This plugin lets me respond to most of the common messages I get very quickly - I have nine of my most common responses pre-written with fields that automatically fill in names, and so I just hit Ctrl-R to reply, then Alt-0 (or any other number) to insert a message automatically. This does most of the email response work for me.

Second, don’t save it unless you need it for reference. If you’ll need the message for reference in the future, save it. Otherwise, delete it. Some people insist on saving every email, then they can’t actually find the useful items amid the thousands of saved messages that really don’t mean a thing. Unless you’ll need it again in the future, delete it now.

Third, if the amount of mail is too overwhelming, delete it all. If the message is actually important, the person will contact you again. If it’s not, well, why bother reading it to begin with? I usually use this approach when I return from a vacation from email - I just wipe all of it out if I open up my email program and feel utterly overwhelmed.

Do You Want To Know More?

In the end, there’s really only two principles behind everything: don’t lose an idea, but don’t get overwhelmed, either. Everything else is just a specific implementation of one of those two ideas or a way to resolve them when they conflict with each other. If you want to track down some of the ideas that contribute to this philosophy, here goes.

First (and most obvious) is the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s been written about over and over again online, but that’s because it’s really useful. However, for most people it’s like trying to shoot an elephant gun to kill a gnat. Just read the book and pull out only the pieces that you need for your own life. If you’re looking for more, I compiled a list of great personal productivity books a while back - and they’re roughly ordered in their level of usefulness.

If you read those and still want more, here are three excellent online resources:
Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann at 43 folders, explaining in detail the value of emptying your email inbox.
Zen to Done by Leo Babauta at zen habits, which focuses mostly on mental strategies to get things done.
The Hipster PDA, again by Merlin Mann at 43 folders, which explains in a somewhat humorous tone the value of keeping something in your pocket to jot stuff down on.

Following a recent post describing twenty three weekend personal finance projects, a discussion emerged about whether some of the projects were cost-effective given the time investment. 1mil made the following comment:

Wouldn’t it be more worth your time to do something that had the potential to get you more money than you are saving by doing it yourself?

In general, I agree with 1mil: if you have a surefire way to make, say, $50 in an hour, why would you spend that hour saving $20? Obviously, the activity that earns you $50 is more efficient than the activity that earns you $20.

Where the situation becomes more tricky is when you do things that have the potential to make you more money, because at that point it becomes risk assessment. Let’s take a look at an example:

Joey has an hour to burn, but after that his schedule is packed. There’s a Lowe’s down the street and he has heard that you can save about $7 a year per bulb by installing CFLs in your home. He’s decided to buy a couple jumbo packs of CFLs to replace all of the bulbs in his home, which he estimates will save him $150 a year.

On the other hand, Joey runs a small business in his spare time, and he could instead spend that hour doing some business promotional activities, such as placing an ad in the local newspaper or spending forty five minutes handing out flyers on Main Street. It’s impossible to judge how much this activity is worth, but the potential is there to gain a few new customers, which may make Joey more money than the CFLs would.

Which do you choose? It’s not an obvious choice either way. There is a general solution to the problem, however: maximizing the moment.

If it is the middle of the day, there’s likely to be a lot of potential customers wandering along Main Street, so Joey has a much greater likelihood of meeting a potential customer. However, if it is in the late evening, there are going to be a lot fewer people on Main Street, so his time is better used buying and installing the CFLs.

So, to answer 1mil’s question, the answer is sometimes. Most activities that save money can be done whenever it fits into your schedule, so you should find places in your schedule for money-saving activities when your potential money-making activities have a very low potential (like in the evening, in Joey’s case). By maximizing the potential money-making of your activity, you’re minimizing the risk of the time investment you put into it, making it a stronger use of your time.