| Sam Altman says "make a lot of lists" [1]. That's basically it. There's many types of lists. Many books are written on lists. A lot of it is BS but the solution is really just lists. I set aside 30 mins/day for cleaning up my schedule. You need to set aside time to buy food and take out the trash. And you need to set aside time to clean your email. First 15 minutes: I go through all my emails, flag everything to take action on, archive/delete the ones I don't need to. Then I move it all to the Big List. Go through wallet, any loose papers, Slack, WhatsApp, whatever you're communicating on. Dump it all into Big List. If I have extra time, do the browser bookmarks too. Prerequisite: I have 10 goals I want to achieve this year, each of them their own list. Workflowy is good for tracking these. These are large goals. Something like "get promoted" might be a subgoal of "buy a house". Picking goals is worth whole books in itself, so I won't cover that. But things like "be healthy" and "spend time with family" are goals too. Now I take everything out of Big List and assign it to those 10 goals. If it's not on the goal list, I consider just ditching it. Do you really need to get your car tinted this year? Do you need that book? Do you need a blog? Next 5 minutes: I plan my schedule for the following day. You should commit hard to it. Plan as best you can, then remove one thing. I have an excel sheet with four colors: meetings, focused time, break time, and processing time. Processing time is often first, and frequent. Times to check messages, distribute tasks to other people, do stuff like this, and all blockers. Last 10 minutes: Pick out stuff from that list of goals and fill in the slots as needed. You often want to sort it so that things from different goals that can be batched together (e.g. calls) are done together. Sort out the goal list so that the thing that needs to come first comes first. The schedule is purposely tight, so I stay focused. If you run out of time, just do it the next day or assign some time to do it if it's important enough. [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity |