When work is physical you need time & motion studies. Frederick Taylor pioneered this around 1900. He found out, for example, that a guy (it was always a guy then) could shovel more stuff in a day if he didn’t overload the shovel.

When work is a process you need process design and proper automated tools. Check out The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones.

Your work is probably neither. It’s probably knowledge work and often interrupted. That needs a time management system. Not every system works for every person. Some people need piles and have to see all their stuff or they loose track. Some need a clean desk and properly labled files. Some use cards or paper, some electronics, and some all of the above. I can’t even recommend one system from experience because I work best after I’ve just started a new one. A few months later it all goes to hell and I wait a while – then find another and restart the cycle. At my age (or actually once you’re past 30) it’s time to stop trying to improve your weaknesses and learn how to prevent them from causing catastrophies. Then play to your strengths. That saves a lot of time.

I can tell you that time management is a misnomer. You can’t manage time – you can’t save it or allocate it or spend it the way you can with anything else we “manage”. You can only manage yourself within the time we all have. But it has a nice ring to it so we’ll keep using that term.

I can also tell you the single best read on the subject is Getting Things Done by David Allen. His system, called GTD for short, has inspired countless web sites. Google it when you have some time.

But here’s what all the systems I’ve looked at have in common:

• Review – They all require a periodic review of EVERYTHING, Daily, hourly, whatever works for you but no less than weekly.
• Transitions – No one really multi-tasks. We just switch back and forth between many things so quickly that we don’t loose our grip. The best systems force you to slow down this process and deal with your transitions in a way that makes it easy and quick to pick up where you left off. I’m using clear plastic folders now – a new one for every task. All the papers have to be in that folder expect for the one (only one) thing I’m working on now.
• Priority – With a good system in place you’ll actually do less. You’ll know what has to be done now, what can be put off and what can be eliminated. You’ll have better ways of delegating and following up. You’ll get the distinction between urgent and important.

Some things I’ve not seen any system recommend:

Empower your employees to manage your time. Regular meetings on certain subjects are one way to do this. It clumps all the work on that topic to just before and during the meeting. Another is to empower an assistant to demand certain things of you at certain times. One client, an attorney, stopped working with me after a couple sessions. I told him to have his secretary come in at the end of the day and insist on getting his time sheets, before she went home. She then gave them to the person who did the invoices and he started getting paid a lot quicker, and a lot more. (It’s hard to bill someone for all the work you’ve really done after weeks have gone by). It made such a difference in his life that he didn’t need me anymore.

Stop managing your employee’s time. That means when you give them more stuff to do, they can not assume you know what’s on their plate and that you know if they have the time to do it all. Instead they are required to assess if they can fit it in by the deadline you give them (you do give deadlines don’t you?) and if not, they are to immediately tell you this and discuss your priorities for what they should postpone.

Takeaways:

• Stay on top of transitions and you’ve got half the battle won.
• Review more often than you think you need to. The reason you feel so good before you go on vacation is you’ve reviewed everything and know there’s nothing lurking that you’ve let slip.
• Google David Allen’s GTD. I learned that bit about vacations from him.