Too Many Things But Too Little Time

By Sandy Naidu | October 8, 2008

Its 5:45 in the morning and I just finished my cup of coffee. I just wrote down all the things that I need to do today. Writing a blog post here was not my task list. But then I had second thoughts. It has almost been 20 days since my last blog post. And that is a long time in the blogging world. Scary…I have definitely not lost my passion for this blog. I love this blog and get all excited when thinking about this blog and the future I have in mind for it. So I guess that is good news. There are a couple of websites which needed my immediate attention and hence I had put this blog on the back burner for a little while. I am definitely annoyed that I had to do this. I should have been able to manage those two websites plus this blog - all at the same time. But I failed. I am not talking about becoming a super woman here.

I am talking about better organization. I am organized on many levels but on some levels I have heaps to improve. I have a goals list for one year and then every month I sit down and make a list for that month. Every day I pick things I need to do from this monthly list. This system has been working for me for quite some time now and I plan to continue with it - why change something thats working?

Having said that, I am still not happy about how much I am achieving. Over the last couple of weeks I realised that I do have a lot of ‘time wasters’ in my day.

As a mum of two young kids, I already have very little work time. And so I really can’t afford too many ‘time wasters’. Some ‘time wasters’ are okay and unavoidable but I can’t afford ‘many’. So I have been clocking every hour of my work day for the past two weeks. This has been a great experience…It has revealed quite a few areas I can improve on…Most of them I already knew but never really did anything much about it - Bad Sandy !!

Here are the things I will be doing from today to achieve more:

1. My monthly list has to be broken down further - What I mean here is I need to break down a particular task into further smaller tasks. This way I will know more accurately the time required to finish a task and so I will be mindful of how many tasks I put on my monthly list. At the moment I quite often underestimate the time involved for a task and hence end up adding a lot of tasks on my monthly list. In the process I don’t have a finished monthly list and I find this a bit discouraging. The months that I have a finished task list, I am more motivated and encouraged. I want more of that feeling.

2. Brain Dumps: Sometimes my mind is buzzing with new ideas plus things I can do to improve my existing projects. Quite often this leaves me in a bit of overwhelmed state. So for the past two weeks, I have been dumping all my ideas into a notebook. This has been working very well for me. Its all in the notebook and so I know I can go back and refer to it when I am ready to take action. Dumping it this way immediately empties space in my brain..

3. Develop a laser sharp focus and get all things on the daily list done without allowing my mind to wander (the mind can wander sometimes but not as often as it has been happening to me lately). And also no browsing while working. I will be setting aside separate time for my browsing (reading blogs, forums etc).

4. Proper Systems: I don’t really have proper systems..I thought I did but I was wrong. Sometimes I might spend around 10 to 15 minutes looking for something on my laptop. I think I can cut down on these time wasters if I have a better system. This is not something I can achieve by the end of today. It will take slightly longer than one day. But I am going to start working on creating a better system from today.

5. Weekly Menus: Draw a weekly menu before I go grocery shopping.

For now just implementing the above five things will help me achieve more in business. I am going to start working on them from today.