Managing your Time

By Mark Kirby - Web Developer and contributor to freelanceadvisor.co.uk

If your office is often in a mess, you forget to do laundry, you have heaps of tasks pilled up with no easy way of organising them, I’ll have lots suggestions to help you out.

To begin with I’m going to list three resources which I have found very useful for improving the way I work.

1. The book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen

Getting Things Done is the so-called productivity bible that lots of people, especially in the web industry, have been raving about. It can be quite hard to follow, and I don’t agree with everything in it, but there are certainly some excellent concepts have been really good starting points for organising myself. I recommend a skim read, and then a more in depth one if you think its for you.

2 - The book “4-hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris

The 4-hour Work Week is a very entertaining read, and proposes some big and highly questionable lifestyle changes. At its core however are some truly superb methods of reducing the time it takes to do dull repetitive tasks, and freeing up time to work on projects that mean more to you. Like Getting Things Done, there are concepts in this book that formed the basis of some of my most useful time saving techniques.

3 - The web application “Remember The Milk”

“Remember The Milk” is a fantastic free application which lets you record things you need to do over the coming weeks and has many ways of reminding you to do them, including email alerts and texts. If you have an iPhone there is an iPhone app you can use for $25 a year, and if not, its easy to print stuff out and carry it with you. I urge you to sign up and give it a go.

This page will be updated with more thoughts on Time Management from Mark soon.