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my Time/Task/Goal/Habit (TTGH) management

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There was a post last night on oracle-l on the topic of task/project/time management, and I’m a big fan of productivity hacks and the whole GTD idea or method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done. The reason for adopting this method is I’ve been on consulting business my entire career and I always get swamped with a lot of work from multiple customers or research stuff and it’s really difficult to prioritize and focus without a system. The same thing I learned how to speed read (see tony buzan book) because there’s just not enough time and you want to learn as much as you can. The bottom line is you want to be efficient.

So I thought of sharing my way of dealing with this in general…

below is my post on oracle-l 

I would start with Tom Limoncelli’s Time Management for System Administrators, he’s got a video presentation here

http://youtu.be/XMc7jw38Bxs?t=2m48s  that became the foundation on how I manage my tasks

Personally I have Goal, Habit, Task, Time Trackers

And there are two parts to this: having a system that works for you and being able to instrument that

1) you have to have a system on setting your goals and prioritizing your tasks, and this one is a great response from quora http://www.quora.com/Productivity/As-a-startup-CEO-what-is-your-favorite-productivity-hack/answer/Paul-A-Klipp?srid=n2Fg&share=1
  • now I’m using mindmaps for goal setting and kanbanflow.com for task management which I really like because you can specify swimlanes+colors which makes it kind multidimensional than just a regular calendar
  • before I just use google calendar for tasks and “goals on track” for goal/habit tracker but I unsubscribed from that service and migrated the entire workflow to mindmaps (I use freemind)
2) you have to have a way of instrumenting your time
  • on my windows VM where I do all my work I have ManicTime installed and this enables me to track everything I’m doing.. automatically without any user input and it can auto tag applications let’s say if I open putty the time I spent on that app will be tagged as “Work”, and I can see where my time went just by graphing the data  https://www.evernote.com/l/ADBlN746vCxDXJykSPwZMT4TFUMQ6xT9oVw
  • on my mac host I have this free version of RescueTime, I like the weekly productivity percentage being emailed every week usually I’m about 68% per week.. If I go below, that means I’m pretty lazy that week. Above that means I was pretty busy
  • kanbanflow on the other hand forces you to input your tasks + the corresponding time you spent on it. So what I would do is at the end of the day I would export the data and graph it on my tableau dashboard. I just need to open the dashboard I created and it will automatically read the new file and it looks like this  https://www.evernote.com/l/ADD5nUeDwrZLpoc87uhpsqdKeHeNvvMPJcI on that link you’ll see the entire workflow I have for task management up to visualization
Some of these may not work for you, but at least you’ll get the high level idea. So a couple of years back early on my career I was learning and coming up with my own systems and using these tools, through the years I’m also improving and hacking it and up until now that helps me getting things done (GTD) and motivated.

 

:)



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