On time management

I have long heard of Timothy Ferries' book 'The 4-Hour Workweek'. It was only until recently that I laid my hands on a copy (from the library). I'm not done with the book yet but the first few chapters already challenged my thinking. I particularly like the chapter on time management, or in this case, the chapter title is 'The end of time management'.

Most of the time management books that I've come across talks about prioritizing your tasks, doing the most difficult task first (to get it out of the way), keeping your work area organized to increase efficiency etc. The very first advice that this author gave was to 'forget all about it'. Most of us tend to fall into the trap of trying to do more each day, filling every second with work or some sort of activity. As the author put it, being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. For instance, organizing your contact list in outlook, mobile phone, PDA and so on, or calling meetings when you can settle it by email or phone call.

Here's another 2 golden nuggets from this book:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you do is more important than how you do it. If we attempt to do everything perfect, we'll probably never ever get started. But if we'll just do it, we can always tweak as we go along. This is a good reminder for myself too ;) Effectiveness is doing the things that get us closer to our goals, whereas efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. While efficiency is still important, it is useless unless applied to the right things.