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Highlights from Get Everything Done
- Efficient time managers are decisive whereas poor time managers tend to be impulsive. What does that mean? Efficient time managers come up with a plan to deal with almost every regular event in their lives and stick decisively to that plan for processing, whereas poor time managers react to all events on impulse, often handling the events irregularly.
- Say no to some things and simply reduce the quantity of little demands on your day.
- Forster argues that the real key to success for time management is sufficient regular focused attention. In other words, the best way to actually get stuff done is to focus directly on a specific task until it’s complete and move on to the next one.
- The worst kind of task (in terms of interrupting your work flow and causing you to get less done) is a task that has a specific time attached to it - a meeting or an appointment. Such events force you to interrupt whatever task you are working on to give this time-specific task your attention. You should strive to minimize the number of time-specific tasks and appointments on your schedule.
- Forster recommends working in bursts on virtually every free-flowing task you have. These bursts should be relatively short - forty minutes at most - and should alternate between tasks, meaning you should switch to a burst of time on something completely different. When you have a large task on your plate, use a five minute burst simply to brainstorm on the task, coming up with something of a work plan for future bursts.
- There are a lot of little tasks that we do over and over again during the day - answering the phone (and taking down messages), dealing with paperwork, and so on. For each of those, you should come up with a system for dealing with all of those things that come in.
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