Effective Time Saver Series, Part 2

OK, this one is not going to be new to anyone, really, but I think it is still one that is overlooked.  If you want to save yourself 5-10 minutes every morning, lay out what you are going to wear the night before.  This works for a couple of reasons:

1. If you decide the night before what you are going to wear you save the time of making that decision first thing in the morning while you may not be in the best frame of mind to be making decisions.
2. By laying out what you want to wear ahead of time you save yourself from making the realization at noon that you are wearing one black sock and one blue sock.

I know this is a very small thing, but you can really get your life organized by tweaking just the small things.

Effective Time Saver Series, Part 1

In the two jobs I worked at before my current job I worked close enough to home that I could go home everyday for lunch. Besides being a great way to get away from work and relax, it was also a great time saver for me. The reason this is true is because I love television. I could sit and watch from sunrise to sunset if given the opportunity. However, with a job, a wife, and a young child I don’t really get that opportunity very often, so I need to maximize the time I do get. That’s where my beloved VCR (no, I don’t have TiVo, yet) comes into play.

Here’s what I did. Whenever something was coming on that I really wanted to watch without interuption, or was in the same time slot as something my wife wanted to watch, I simply taped it. Then, when I went home for lunch, I just watched the show I taped, fast-forwarding through the commercials. I could usually watch an hour show in about 35 to 40 minutes. Saving me time and arguments with my wife about what to watch if our shows were in competition.

You might be asking, how does this help me save time? Well, imagine you really like TV, but you are really busy. If you have a show that comes on at 7pm and 8pm but you are too busy to watch, simply tape them and take care of the other business you have. After that, you can watch your taped programs without the commercials in less time that if you had stopped what you were doing and watched the shows. Let’s face it, there’s no way to be productive during commercials.

Getting Things Done (GTD) and ADD

Although I probably would have never thought of this myself, it seems a natural match:  ADD and GTD.  Meg Edwards, a coach at The David Allen Company, her article makes a pretty good case that GTD would be a great way of helping the child/adult struggling with ADD to stay organized and on task.  Let’s face it; don’t we all suffer from this just a little?