Tom left a great comment on the recent article about taking care of your things:

How can you fight off “I’ll do it tomorrow”-ness? My lack of motivation makes me lazy, even though I see the benefits of not being like this.

Procrastination is a big enemy of financial progress. It’s easy to say “I’ll do it tomorrow” about countless maintenance, frugality, and money management tasks. I do it all the time myself, and I’m one of the more proactive people I know.

How do you get around it? How can you make yourself do all of the “important but not urgent” things you need to get done in your life, when it’s so easy to put them off and just kick back?

Here are the tactics I personally use to make it happen.

I don’t overwhelm myself with a to-do list. If you sat down and made a list of all of the little “important but not urgent” things that you need to do in your life, you’d have a monstrous list.

Give it a try right now in your head for the next minute. Just go through your life and think of all of the stuff that you’d like to get done – that’s important to get done – but it’s not urgent. The books and articles you’d like to read. The home and auto maintenance you’d like to get done. The financial tasks you ought to take care of. The people you should get in touch with.

The list will be painfully huge, and it’ll probably seem overwhelming.

Instead, I make a short list each day. Instead of deciding that list is overwhelming, I break it down. I tackle two or three or four of the items on that list every day.

Which ones? If they’re all important and not urgent, it doesn’t matter – I just tackle whatever’s at the top of the list. Sometimes, though, one item or another does take precedence – it’s something that needs to be done regularly.

In that case…

I use Google Calendar to plan the daily list in advance. I just add an all day event for a task that needs to be done and drag it around to whatever day I want to do it. If I have a thing I’d like to do, I just scroll ahead several days and stick it in on the first day that doesn’t have much going on.

The big advantage here is that it allows me to set up recurring events, for things like regular auto or home maintenance or health tasks like setting up a dentist appointment. These automatically appear in place on the day I ought to do them, so I can easily just shuffle stuff around it.

When that daily list is finished, I can kick back without guilt. So, each day I have three or four “important but not urgent” tasks that I should get done – an amount that isn’t overwhelming. I can get through them in a half an hour or an hour or so.

Once they’re done, I’m done. Sure, I have other “important but not urgent” tasks I should get to, but that’s what future days are for. I’ve taken care of what I’ve assigned myself today (which isn’t overwhelming), so I can kick back and play with my kids without feeling I’m letting something down. I know it’s all in place.

If it’s a big task, I break it down into little pieces. Big tasks are easy to postpone, so I break them down. I don’t have a task like “clean the house” or even “clean the office.” It’ll be something simple like “go through the bookshelf in my office.” I don’t do things like “fix my relationship with person X,” I instead do something like “write person X an email” or “give person X a phone call.”

Usually, at the end of such a task that’s just one part of a bigger puzzle, I immediately record the next step that needs to be done as another task. I fire up Google Calendar and jot it down immediately, putting it in place.

I keep a notepad and pen with me so I don’t forget those “important but not urgent” tasks when they come to me. “Important but not urgent” tasks pop into my head all the time. I just keep a notepad with me to jot them down as they come to mind. Once a day or so, I go through the things in my notepad and make sure they’re handled.

Sometimes, I’ll just do those things immediately. Other times, I’ll just toss it up on my calendar, adding another thing that needs to get done.

Always remember that procrastination is the mortal enemy of all of the “important but not urgent” things in your life, and often it’s those things that separate the people who get things done and succeed from those who fall behind.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

I cover time management quite a lot on The Simple Dollar. I write about Getting Things Done and other time management books. I talk about how I manage my own time and some of the techniques I use in my own life.

Almost always, I’ll receive an email or a comment or two about how this has nothing to do with money. On the surface, that might be true – I’m not mentioning the almighty dollar anywhere. If you dig even a little, though, it becomes clear: time management is the same thing as money management, because time is money.

Step back for a minute and think about it.

Each person is blessed with the same allotment of time – 168 hours per week. Bill Gates has 168 hours per week. I have 168 hours per week. You have 168 hours per week. Each of us sleep during some of those hours, leaving us with perhaps 120 waking hours during a given week.

Out of those 120 waking hours, many of us sell the majority of those hours to someone else in exchange for money. We go to work, we work for a while, we go home, and often, some work comes home with us. Add in the hours we burn thinking about work and our time for ourselves grows ever smaller.

Household chores eat up more of that time, as does personal hygiene. Soon, we find that we’re left with just a small pile of hours in a given week to do with what we please.

Those hours are precious. They’re the ones in which we relax. They’re the ones where we interact with friends and family. They’re the ones where we catch up on personally fulfilling hobbies.

But we pay a hefty price for those hours. We invest so much time in work, hygiene, and household chores so that those remaining hours bring us some semblance of joy. Most of our financial choices are intended to either make those free hours more enjoyable or to make them safer.

Whenever we find ourselves wasting time, we take directly away from those precious hours. We get behind at work, reducing our ability to earn more and thus taking away from the enjoyment of that time or the safety of it. We waste idle time at home and then when something truly worthwhile comes along, we can’t participate – we have too many other things we’re behind on.

To put it simply, wasting time takes away from those valuable hours that we work so hard for. It strips away their quality and it strips away their safety. Time management simply seeks to give us more of those hours – or to make the other hours produce more money.

Here’s an example. Some days, when I sit down to work, I make the decision to dive right in. I’ve got some big idea on my mind and I can’t wait to research it or plan out how I might use it. So I’ll rip through most of an article in thirty minutes or so – and then find myself at a dead end. Where am I going with this? I idle for a bit, then eventually delete the article. I’ve wasted forty minutes.

On another day, I’ll start off by making a list of all of the things I need to accomplish for the day. I’ll decide what posts I’m going to write and list the main idea of each one. Then I’ll take each of those ideas and spend a bit of time fleshing them out – is this even worth a post? Is it perhaps more than one post? What research do I need to do to make it work?

That process might take twenty minutes, but I’ve usually discarded three or four ideas along the way and fleshed out three or four more to the point that I know what I’m going to write. From there, I never find myself “lost” at work – I know what tasks I need to do, I execute them, and I keep on rolling to the next one.

I might have spent the first twenty minutes of my day not moving forward at all on any projects, which seems bad. But the time invested in time management pays off – I don’t have to worry about such details as the day goes on, allowing myself to focus on just getting things done. Thus, by the six hour mark, I’m usually far ahead in terms of my work if I’ve done that planning. The big part? I’ve drastically reduced my wasted time.

The end result? If I’m a couple hours ahead, I now have hours I can add to my personal life. Or, perhaps I can use them to work ahead, giving those personal hours more of a cushion in case something happens. Maybe I can spend an hour getting in touch with others, building relationships that will really pay off over time. Maybe I can work on another project that might lead to more earnings or more readers, both of which shore up the valuable parts of my life.

Time is money, and when you manage your time well, you manage your money well, too.

How do you do that? Here are the four most valuable little techniques I’ve found for managing my time.

1. Start your day off with some planning. Make a list of what you need to get done today – usually four or so things. Don’t just make a 1, 2, 3, 4 list, though – investigate each one for a few minutes and make sure you have the information, ideas, and materials you need to actually execute each item. That might mean spending five or ten minutes on the basic framework of a task, but doing that now means you won’t burn an hour chasing snipe later on. Also, that list of things to do will keep you from burning time in the middle of the day wondering what’s best to do next.

2. Alternate between multi-tasking and single-tasking sessions. Multi-tasking works well for some tasks – phone calls, emails, filing, and so forth. Those are tasks that usually aren’t mentally taxing at all, and thus can be done two or more at a time. However, the meat and potatoes of your work usually does require your focus – and doing that with interruptions makes it take longer and reduces the quality of your work. Take a few periods during your day, turn off your communication routes (turn off your phone, close your email program, etc.) for an hour or so and bear down on a task that needs to be done. When it’s finished, go back into multitasking mode and get caught up on your messages and information.

3. Meditate. This sounds counterintuitive, but it really works. It’s easy, later in the day, to “zone out” – you’re mentally (and perhaps physically) worn out. Many people keep pushing, but they find themselves losing three minutes here and three minutes there because they space off – and this will often spread into the evening’s personal time. Instead, try meditating for fifteen or twenty minutes near the end of your work day. Just sit in a chair and relax – here are several great basic techniques to try. I almost always find myself refreshed and alert after doing this.

4. Write down the things on your mind. Keep a notebook and pen near you at all times. Whenever something pops into your head that you need to do later or think about later, jot it down immediately. Then, a few times a day, leaf through the notebook and take care of the things jotted down there. Throw down anything and everything – a word you want to look up, a personal task you need to take care of, a person you want to get in touch with. Getting these things out of your head and onto paper means you can spend far less mental energy trying to remember it – and use that energy instead focusing on your current task and getting that done as well as you can.

Another important tactic is to find ways to spend your free time that simultaneously help you grow as a person and bring you enjoyment. Reading literature that really pushes your mind is one example. Going for a jog is another example. Almost any social activity falls into this group, too – learning how to interact with more people is invaluable. Such activities bleed back into the rest of your day – they increase your energy at work, improve your mental acuity, and raise the bar on your ability to interact with others and network. Putting forth a little effort to find enjoyable ways to spend your spare time that also help you to grow pays off over and over again.

Remember, time is money – so stop wasting it.

One common question I’m asked a lot is how we actually balance our work lives and our family lives. Barb sums it up best:

How do you do it? You write tons and tons of stuff for The Simple Dollar, your wife works a full time job, you seem to have tons of time available for your kids, you read quite a bit, and you also seem to have a somewhat active social life. How do you do it? Do you not sleep?

There are a handful of tricks to making this all work. I’ll outline several, but I’ll start with the big one.

The line between work and family is pretty blurry at our house.
As I’ve mentioned before, I set aside a block of time each day to spend with the kids – and my wife does the same. This block usually goes from about 5:30 in the evening until 8:30 in the evening, with the last half-hour or so involving one of us putting the kids to bed while the other one does something else.

Outside of that, the lines between work and family are really blurry at our home. We’ll engage in family activities and in the middle, I’ll yank out my pocket notebook and jot down some notes. I’ll read books for review for The Simple Dollar in the late evenings when my wife is enjoying a piece of meaty fiction. My wife (who is a teacher) will grade papers on the way to an activity while I’m driving, or I’ll gather notes while she’s driving. Sometimes she even helps out with background tasks for The Simple Dollar, brainstorming ideas, correcting posts, and even helping with writing tasks here and there.

It’s not uncommon for us to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon watching a movie in the family room. The kids will choose a Pixar movie we’ve seen a dozen times and my wife and I will fire up our laptops, hers to record some grades and mine to answer some emails.

It doesn’t feel intrusive – at least not to me – because I enjoy the work so much. I love to write. I love to communicate with readers (in fact, I love it so much that I often get behind simply because I want to respond to as many emails as I can). It just feels – most of the time – like just another enjoyable thing to do in my life.

During the school year, the kids do go to daycare, a decision we put a lot of thought into before we chose it. The biggest reason, actually, was for the kids themselves – there are cognitive benefits and health benefits to such attendance. That doesn’t mean that we dump them at the door and run – I often spend days with them, taking them to the Science Center of Iowa or to the library or to the park – but I do try to maximize the time they’re at daycare, doing tasks that they can’t participate in (my work) or would greatly hinder.

The end result of all of this is that my children get my undivided attention vastly more than they did when I was working a full time job. When I had work intruding on my life then, I was either out of the house or mentally distracted when I should have been spending time with them. Now, when they need me and something work-related is on my mind, I have the freedom to slam the door on work whenever I choose. Plus, because I enjoy my work, I also have the freedom to pick it up whenever time allows without hating how it’s interfering with what I want to do – it is what I want to do.

We own one television – and it’s rarely on.
In the last month, the television’s primary use has been twofold. It’s kept us up to date with local storm coverage (since we’ve had some awful weather as of late) and it’s provided the source of our “family movie night,” where all four of us (once a week or so) watch a movie together. Other than that, I think it’s been on roughly two hours (to watch True Blood).

That’s it. The only television we own is down in the basement, and we simply don’t go down there that often. We’re too busy doing other things that we enjoy – activities that often involve active interaction with our children (like drawing pictures or building a giant model railroad).

We do lots of household chores together as a family.
We cook meals together. We clean together. We work on art projects together. We wrap presents together. We do dishes together.

Virtually any task that the children can possibly participate in is done in a social fashion. Everyone gets more out of it if we work together. Sure, there might be minor setbacks when the children get involved, but they offer a lot of help, too. Even our twenty one month old daughter can scrape plates and put them in the dishwasher (seriously) and our three year old loves stirring cookie batter.

The more things like this that we do together as a family, the tighter we bond and the more real world skills our kids have. Doing things this way turns household chores into opportunities for family bonding – and often gets things done just as fast, if not faster.

Many of our friends are also parents.
If you’re friends with parents that have children of a similar age, they’re much more understanding about things like taking kids to the bathroom or washing their hands. They’re also much more likely to be helpful when you need a hand, and you have a lot of experiences and advice worth sharing.

Here’s a perfect example. My wife had four bridesmaids at our wedding – two of them were her sisters and the other two were long-time friends. Today, one of those friends has a son that’s literally one day younger than our own, while the other has a daughter in between the ages of our kids and an infant son. The children have become part of the social bonds tying them all together.

Thus, our roles as parents and as social creatures overlap.

We choose enriching things for our relaxation time.
So when do we relax? Almost every evening, my wife and I spend some time unwinding. That time, though, is often spent reading or playing a game that requires some thinking. Last night, we both read for an hour and a half, side by side, before bed. The night before that, we played Dominion over a bottle of wine.

In short, we make an effort to keep our minds “on” as much as possible during the day.

Turning my mind “off” is done in a very focused way.
Obviously, though, being “on” all the time isn’t the best thing, so I have what I think of as an extremely focused “off” time each day. I meditate/pray for about twenty minutes – I clear my mind and do a few very basic relaxation techniques. Often, if I do this later in the day, I find myself hugely mentally refreshed for the evening instead of burnt out after a lot of work.

I used to try to do something like this during my commute, but it never really worked well, so eventually I settled on meditating/praying right when I got home. It’s a late afternoon tradition for me that I’ve used ever since – and it makes a huge difference in my energy and alertness in the evenings.

Doing these things – blending work and parenting and play, meditating, socializing with other parents, and engaging in activities that are usually mentally enriching – has been invaluable for juggling all the roles we have without needing to shell out the cash to bring in extra help (like a housecleaner, for example).

As I’ve mentioned many times before, I start off every day with a pretty full to-do list – usually numbering twenty items or so. On a good day, I’ll accomplish most of them – write a few posts for The Simple Dollar, answer email, check the comments, handle some correspondence, work on another writing project, read a few chapters in a book, do some household tasks, and so on.

Inevitably, though, my list at the end of the day has a few things left on it – the things left undone. Quite often, these things are the low priority tasks that I’d like to accomplish during a given day.

The obvious question is why are there things on my to-do list that I regularly don’t accomplish? Obviously, I’m overstocking my to-do list each day – something that a lot of people do. When I put things on that list, I genuinely want to accomplish all of the things on the list, but I simply run out of time to get all of those things done.

Those things left behind eventually dig at me. I want to accomplish them, but I sometimes seem to never get around to them. What kind of things? I want to make another batch of homemade beer, followed by a batch of homemade wine. I want to write more short stories. I want to devote more time to reading for my own enjoyment. I want to rearrange the furniture in my office. I want to add a bunch of shelving to the garage. The list goes on and on.

This probably sounds familiar to you. I know it sounds familiar to a lot of the people I spent Christmas vacation with. I brought up this situation in various forms to different people, and almost to a tee, they all identified with it. Even my nine year old nephew did to a degree – he mentioned a book that he’s wanted to read for a while, but never opened.

Here’s the catch, though. In a few months, I will have done most of these things.

Sure, on a day to day basis, I do leave things undone, and those things do bother me. However, instead of just leaving those little things undone, I use several tactics to actually make sure that I do get around to them.

Here’s the game plan for getting around to those little things you’d like to find time to do.

Make one of them a priority today. The biggest reason that things on your list get left there is because you view other things as having a higher priority.

On my to-do list, there are usually a few things that are of the highest priority for the day. For me, that’s usually keeping up with my required writing – I need to stay ahead with my written words, after all. I usually build my day around those tasks and fill in the gaps with other tasks of less importance, but still need to get done – like reading email.

My solution? I take one of those tasks I’ve been neglecting and make it a top priority for the day. So, for example, today my “suddenly high priority” task is cleaning up my office – along with my writing, I’ll consider today a successful day if I get my office arranged the way I want it.

Do one of the tasks first thing in the morning. Another approach that works well for me is to do this low-priority task first thing in the morning, just as I start my day. This works well because of the flexibility of my schedule, since I can take on personal tasks at the start of my “work day,” but it also works in many office environments particularly if the task is related to your job.

Put off those big “essential” tasks that you start your day with (for me, I usually start off with writing whatever I think will be the most difficult article of the day) and start your day with that simple task. Don’t check your email. Don’t get started on the task of the moment. Instead, get that little thing that you’ve wanted to do out of the way. Write that little bit of code that needs to be written. Read a chapter of that book you’ve been intending to read. Get that office clean. Get that sticky correspondence out of the way.

Re-evaluate your use of time. If you’re consistently bothered by the things left undone, it might indicate that some of your life priorities are out of order at the moment.

Start by taking a serious look at the things you spend your time on during the day, from the minute you wake up until the minute you go to sleep. What things are you doing during that time that you would describe as very low priority? What things are you doing that seem redundant, pointless, or a waste of your time? What things are you doing that could easily be bridged with other things?

For example, let’s say the thing you’ve always wanted to do is start reading some classic literature, but you can’t find time for it. You don’t watch television, your job is jam packed, and so on. But, when you look at your daily schedule, you notice that you’re burning twenty minutes or so during your daily commute, and you’re usually just listening to talk radio. Why not turn off Glenn Beck and turn on an audiobook of For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Typical places to look for extra time include time devoted to entertainment (like that evening television block), time devoted to commuting, time devoted to gaming, time devoted to … avoiding work by surfing the ‘net, and so on. Just replace these things with some of the things you wish you had time for and suddenly you may find yourself getting things done.

Eliminate a few of your responsibilities. For some, though, the above tactics won’t help – they really are jammed to the brim and they’re leaving things on the table that they should be addressing.

If you’re in this situation, your schedule is overstuffed. You’re walking a tightrope and eventually you’re going to trip, fall, and drop something important.

This means that it’s time to start looking at eliminating a few of your responsibilities. It may be time to step back from some of your volunteer responsibilities – perhaps you can resign from a board you serve on or can step down at the end of a sports season when you coach. It might even be time to have a discussion with your work supervisor about the things on your plate in the workplace.

Every schedule needs some breathing room – without it, you’re begging for disaster. Now’s the time to start making some space in your own schedule.

Ask for help. One effective strategy for clearing out an overburdened schedule is to simply ask for help. Are there not items on your daily to-do list that couldn’t be easily handled with the aid of others? Here are three options for getting some assistance with your to-dos – so you have time to take care of all the things you want to do.

Delegate. If you’re in a position where you have the ability to move some of your most mundane tasks to another worker, take advantage of that. Delegate some of your busywork to an administrative assistant or to a lower-ranking employee. In some situations (I found myself in this situation, once upon a time), if your work load is full of mundane tasks that are keeping you from excelling in the “big” tasks of your job, you can ask for an assistant to help you with these mundane things – freeing you to achieve the things you’ve been aching to accomplish.

Ask. If you need help with the activities in your life, just ask for help from those around you. Ask your spouse to help out more with household tasks. Ask your friends for a break from some of your engagements with them so you have time to recharge your batteries. Ask your family members to help out with some of the personal responsibilities you’ve taken on helping with a sick family member. Just ask – if you’re a giving person, those around you will often step up to help you.

Trade. If there are tasks in your life that you struggle with, perhaps you might be able to clear up some time by trading skills with someone. For example, if you’re struggling with a computer that doesn’t work well – the crashes keep you from getting work done – offer to trade the skills you do have to a person who can tune up your computer. If you have kids, offer to swap babysitting nights with the parents of a couple of your child’s friends – that way, you’ll have a couple free evenings a month that won’t cost you anything in exchange for one night of focused babysitting.

Often, the little things in life are the ones we are most proud to accomplish. Don’t let some of the difficulties of life get in your way.

If you’re anything like I am on this historic day in the United States, you’re probably sitting frenetically on the edge of your seat, looking for exit polls and waiting impatiently for the first election results to roll in. I know I’m certainly there – I’m such a big politics hound that the presidential race is just one of many, many things I’m following today. Today’s events are a big distraction right now for me, for you, and for millions and millions of other people on both sides of political discourse.

While it’s great that so many people are engaged in the future of this country, it’s also a gigantic distraction. A good chunk of America isn’t really working today – and that means many millions of hours of lost productivity – and lost opportunity.

Take me, for example. Even though I have a deep, passionate interest in this election, I also know I have several projects I need to be working on right now and, even though I’d rather be following the news, I know I need to keep my nose to the grindstone.

Today is a great day to get ahead of the “competition” because so many people are focused on other things.

Here are seven great tactics for focusing on the task at hand, useful today and any other day when distractions abound.

Clear a workspace. If you’re in an environment where things are chaotic and you have no real clear place to focus on your work, it’ll be very hard to focus. Your mind will find ways to distract itself using whatever is at hand.

The best way to combat this kind of distraction is to clear your work area of distractions. Move all of the things that aren’t related to the task at hand far away from the space where you intend to work.

Cut off external communications. Communications devices are another form of distraction. That includes cell phones, the internet, your landline phone – even your office door. Close your web browser. Shut down your email program. Turn off that cell phone. Unplug your landline phone. Close your office door and stick up a “do not disturb” sign.

Even better – put a little blank piece of paper on your desk, along with a pen. If you’re in the middle of a task and something important pops into your mind, jot it down on that piece of paper and keep on going. You can deal with the contents of that note later.

Set a clear goal. Come up with something realistic that you can actually accomplish in the time you have. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. In fact, you’re often better off picking two or three smaller pieces instead, then working through those one at a time.

What if you’re just facing one singular gigantic project that you won’t get done today no matter what? Identify some smaller elements within that big project that you can complete today. Writing a book? Make it your goal to add 1,500 words today. Find that little piece you can do and set it as a clear goal.

Visualize what you need to get done. Once you know your goal, visualize the steps you’ll need to work through in order to get it done. What will you do first? What follows that? Jot it down – it helps you to make your plan clear. Just a bit of visualization up front can help you quite a bit when executing your task.

Plan for breaks every ninety minutes to two hours – but don’t interrupt “flow.” Regular breaks to re-fuel with food, drink, and a bathroom break are essential – without them, you can quickly lose mental acuity. Plus, these breaks allow you to catch up on any important news you might be following.

Of course, if you’ve managed to slip into a “flow” state – when you get deeply engrossed in a project and lose all track of time – don’t interrupt that flow state just to take a break. Instead, ride that wave for as long as it lasts and then break when you’ve lost that focus. The time you spend in a “flow” state is invaluable – don’t break it because of something arbitrary.

Use a timer. I find it quite useful to use an online timer to help me with scheduling regular breaks and managing my time throughout the day. I often use the “countdown” mode and set it at two hours. Sometimes it can go off and I barely notice it – I just quickly turn it off and keep going. But if I’m not really focused, this alarm tells me just when to go take a break, reload with a nutritious snack, catch up on the news, and so on.

Have a small (reasonable) reward at the end of the day. My reward is usually pretty straightforward. If I meet my work goals for the day, I allow myself fifteen minutes or so to meditate, followed by thirty minutes in a quiet room where I either read or play a strategy game on my Nintendo DS. It’s a very simple reward that doesn’t cost me anything, but the thought of that peaceful time really helps me keep focus throughout the day.

Without such a reward, I find it very easy to let down my guard during the day – and when I do that, I find myself browsing political news and wondering where all the time has gone, lamenting the things that I should have done.

Good luck!

As longtime readers certainly know by now, I like to post articles rather regularly on the subject of time management. I’ve reviewed a small mountain of books on the subject (Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything, Do It Tomorrow, Leave the Office Earlier, and Find More Time were the best among these) and written dozens of pieces about how I manage my own time and tasks.

But why? Why do I find it so important to talk about time management on a personal finance site? We’ve all heard the trite “time is money” catchphrase, but what relevance does it have in day to day life in terms of improving your financial situation? Let me lay it out for you.

Time management at work Most time management material focuses on workplace concerns, because the workplace is where the most obvious connections between the time you spend and the money you earn appear. In the office, time management provides room for:

Extra polish If you can free up some extra time during the day because of effective management, you can afford to invest more time polishing your projects, taking something that’s average and making it good, or taking something good and making it great.

Extra projects Good time management also enables you to be involved with extra projects, enabling you to add many more positive contributions to the production of the organization.

Extra opportunities Extra time also lets you follow up on other opportunities: building relationships with other workers, finding a mentor and building a bond, or connecting with peers in your field outside of your office.

Increased likelihood of promotion and raises The end result of these extra steps is an increased chance at promotion and greater pay, plus more opportunities to spread your wings and fly elsewhere if the opportunity provides itself, all of which put cash directly into your pocket.

Time management at home The more subtle effects of time management show up in the home.

Enhanced frugality If you’re effective with your time, you’ll find time to be involved in frugal activities that save you money over and over again. Can you come up with fifteen minutes every few months? Then make some homemade laundry detergent that saves you twenty cents a load. Use cloth diapers instead of paper ones to save a quarter with each change. Cook at home and save a few bucks per meal. Many people claim not to have time for frugality – in truth, the time is there, it’s just not being managed well.

Extra time for self-improvement Finding an extra half-hour a day gives you ample time to learn about a new topic or to get some exercise. This can easily be done if you apply some clever time management principles to your home life, and such activities can directly lead to better earnings in the workplace.

Extra time for a “side hustle” Similarly, freeing up some extra time can give you space for a small side business – writing a blog, repairing computers, or so on. Again, just a half hour or an hour of free time – which you can easily build up with good time management – provides all the space you need to get started.

Extra time for personally important matters You may also find that you spend money to help ease the pain of a difficult situation in your life. Better time management can enable you to give that personal situation the attention it deserves, which can help you get over the figurative hump.

Five tiny steps for getting started Here are a few basic tactics for freeing up time in your life.

Set a reasonable extra goal beyond what you’re doing right now You might want to simply make a particular project at work gleam. Perhaps you want to get into better shape by jogging three times a week. Whatever it is, define a single goal that you’d like to accomplish beyond what you’re doing right now. Make it a reasonable goal, however – not one that requires time far beyond what you have right now.

Carry a pad and a pen with you Wherever you’re at, have a pad of paper and a writing utensil on you. Then, whenever an idea or something else comes up, jot it down and forget about it – go back to concentrating on whatever you were focusing on before. This allows you to stay focused on the task at hand, getting it done more quickly and with higher quality than you would if you were busy dealing with interruptions and remembering little tasks.

Do something different with thirty minutes of your evening Almost everyone has a period of relaxation in their evenings. Some of us have much more than others. Instead of vegetating for an hour or two, take half an hour of that time and devote it to something else. Maybe it’s jogging. Maybe it’s reading a challenging book. Whatever it is, pencil it in every night. Make it as important as any other appointment on your schedule.

If something takes less than two minutes to do, do it now instead of later If you need to pay a bill online, write a note to someone, make a quick phone call, add an item to the grocery list, or some other very simple task, do it immediately. Don’t put it off. Putting it off means you have to waste focus, time, and energy remembering the task. You’re far better off just doing it right now.

Learn more about time management One final tip: pick up some strong reading material on time management and look at ways you can apply those ideas to your professional and personal life. For professional life, I’d recommend Getting Things Done, Do It Tomorrow, or Leave the Office Earlier; for personal time management, Find More Time is the best book I’ve found. Spend your half hour of “doing something different” reading one of these books and figuring out more time management techniques to free up even more time.

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.