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GTD and Inbox Zero never felt like "time management" strategies to me, they're more like methodologies for very specific use cases like your email and to-do list. While they do help you manage the email flow coming in and what you have to do in your life that might slip by, they don't really teach you how to manage the rest of the time that it takes to actually do stuff in your life. My time management is basically a combination of Inbox Zero, GTD, and "extreme calendaring". Every (working) morning, I spend about a half hour processing my email and either replying to/reading messages or delegating replies/reads for the future. I delegate reading email by moving the messages into a folder called "Deferred", which I will go through at the end of the day to read anything that I might not have wanted to get into in the morning due to lack of time. To delegate writing replies, I will typically archive the message and start a reply to it in Drafts. I might also remind myself to reply to the email at a specific time or when I get home. My "inbox" for GTD is the Reminders list on my iPhone. Using Siri, I typically tell my phone to remind me to do things at various times or when I arrive at home/work/the grocery store/etc. Every Sunday, I block out about two hours to go through this list and do any tasks that aren't scheduled for a certain time. Reminders that have a schedule are expected to be done at that time, and reminders set for me to do when I arrive somewhere should be done pretty much immediately upon arrival. But the real trick to time management is using the Calendar. I block off time during the day to do certain things, and by default, I get notified when I have to do them. I've conditioned myself to just start working on whatever my calendar tells me to do when I get an event notification, and I attempt to put in things like travel times and longer/multiple alerts to remind me to get ready for longer events or for traveling to events. I'm a programmer in my day job and a musician at night, so I'm already used to being responsive to my calendar, but the music business doesn't really work like that. I have to put in all my appointments, like mixdowns, rehearsals, gigs, meetings, etc., in my own calendar if I want to make it to everything on time and not look like a space cadet. So while GTD and Inbox Zero help my calendaring be more efficient, the real secret sauce to me keeping my life together is my calendar. |