Organize IT

This is a guest post by Emma Newman of Post Apocalyptic Publishing.

I once heard that former British Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher said “Happiness is a ticked off list”. I have no idea if that’s true, but regardless of how one might have felt about her politics, I can certainly relate to that statement. I always write a to-do list for every project, and having recently completed a major one, I realised something about the process that causes it all to break down.

View original image

This is a guest post by Francis Wade of Time Management 2.0.

Most professionals can name a handful of time management systems that they have come across in their professional careers. They can probably also list a few people here and there who have embraced these systems and are quite happy using them. If they were to think of improving their productivity they would probably look to adopt one of the systems they have heard about, and take a course, read a book or visit a few websites in order to learn what to do.

On Monday I said goodbye to the new year’s resolution. They are certainly a waste of time but what else can you do? As I said previously, though the new year is bad for resolutions, it’s great for that sense of having a fresh start and a clean slate. We humans seem to love it for some reason, so it’s silly not take advantage of it. In this post I want to start addressing that and look at an alternative way of how to make the most of the new year.

It’s January. That can mean only one thing. New year’s resolutions are back in force, not only because it’s a new year but a new decade also. But it doesn’t seem to really matter what year, decade or century it is (or any other milestone you can think of for that matter). Statistically, the vast majority of new year’s resolutions get broken within a month of making them. Hardly surprising perhaps; it’s easy to make a resolution, so it’s bound to be easy to break them too.

I don’t really like priorities. I think prioritizing causes more trouble than it’s worth. It’s one more layer of complexity between you and simply doing it. Don’t get me wrong, prioritizing does have its uses and we all (need to) do it on a very basic level every day. The customer that comes through the door has to take priority over the paperwork you’re filling in. But when it comes to the whole prioritizing tips and tricks that self-help and business books go on about (even I came up with my own), all it’s doing is covering up the fundamental problems – you’ve got too much to do and/or you’ve not got enough time to do it all.