Randy Pausch's time management tips

Who should you most listen to when looking for tips on time management. You could look at one of the ninja lifehackers such as Merlin Mann, Tim Ferris, or Gina Trapani; but really… wouldn’t you want to understand the focus that you get from someone with 6-months left to live?  Randy Pausch gave a lecture at CMU in early 2008 knowing that his doctors had indeed given him 3-6 months left to live.

An old video… I know - but I just rediscovered it . Watch the video below, and follow along with the slides here.

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Getting your inbox to zero

A presentation by Merlin Mann of 43folders fame, in the style of Beyond Bullet Points, on the basics of how to process your email. Well worth watching. Slides available from here

Getting things Done

I forget how I happened across the Getting Things Done by David Allen. It might have been a Google on task lists in Outlook, or an Amazon referral. Not sure. Either way - I'm currently working hard to try to make the methodology work for me. I'm already feeling more relaxed about the huge amounts of stuff I have to do in my job, although it isn't quite second nature yet.

I'd recommend that anyone who finds themselves continuously worrying about stuff that they need to be doing (open-loops) take a look at the book.

This isn't going to become a GTD blog - as there are already plenty of those out there. Suffice it to say that I'm working with multiple Categories on Outlook tasks as my primary method for capturing the ToDo lists, and OneNote + email folders as my general reference filing system. It is working reasonably well (however ActiveSync for multiple categories to my iPaq isn't reliable).

References

• Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity
• David's Web site
• A Guardian article

And 3 blogs

• Office Zealot GTD
• What's the next action
• 43 Folder