微时间管理术

Even after you''ve established your personal focus, life gets busy. Days will get filled with all kinds of obligations which sidetrack you from what''s most important. The solution to this lays in what you do each day-because a year is lived one day at a time. Spend 8-minutes every day in a daily ritual focused around getting the right things done.

Deciding on the five areas you want to focus on in the coming year is a huge step forward. Most people never get around to doing that as they run on the treadmill of their lives.

The immediate challenge is now to translate your good intentions into day-to-day decisions. The only way this will happen is if you use a simple yet robust system day-in and day-out。

Key Thoughts"Over time, I developed my own system to keep myself centered on my areas of focus and to help me ignore the things that were distracting me. A daily plan helped me tremendously. That meant making explicit decisions, ahead of time, about where I would spend my time and where I wouldn''t. It meant lists and to-dos-but not too many-and a calendar that truly reelected who I was and what I was trying to accomplish. And it meant gentle, but consistent, reminders to stay on track."

—Peter Bregman

If you plan ahead on a daily basis, you stand a better chance of keeping moving towards your intended destination. A good planning system needs be simple enough to be used every day and yet it also needs to create manageable chunks of time where you can get things done. It also needs to help you solve the real critical issue today which is how do you decide between competing demands on your time. You need a system which stops you from feeling overwhelmed.

The way forward is to spend 18 minutes a day keeping organized. That 18 minute block of time is broken up into a 5minutes planning session first thing each day, quick 1 minute updates on the hour every hour throughout your workday and then a 5 minute review session where you evaluate how things went and make plans for the next day.

Keep in mind deciding what not to do is an essential component of this system. Today''s world is moving faster than ever before. A flood of information is flowing into your life through the Internet, your cell phone and over the airwaves. It''s easy today to get distracted because there are so many other things to think about and spend time on.

To succeed in using your time wisely today, there are also a few unusual questions you should ask:

What am I willing to forego today in order to do something better in the future?

What doesn''t make me happy or generate long-term value for me?

What''s not really all that important in the bigger scheme of things?

What distractions and time wasters do I know get in the way of me achieving more with my life?

Lots of people have to-do lists but a smart way to approach productivity enhancement is to also have an "Ignore List" as well.

That ignore list could contain a description of all the things you don''t want to get caught up in today. If you plan where to apply your time and what to ignore each day, then it stands to reason you will be more productive.

When you get right down to it, the key to getting more of the right things done each day is simple to visualize:

You''re trying to get as many items as feasible every day from your to-do list into your calendar and at the same time move as many of the time-wasters as possible from your calendar into your ignore list. In a nutshell, that''s what you want to make happen.

A calendar is the right tool to make the centre piece of your personal productivity efforts because:

A calendar is finite-there are only a set number of hours each day. Therefore, you''re forced to make some trade-offs because there won''t be time for everything you would like to do.

If you''re trying to cram too many activities into too little time, it will become immediately obvious.

You can schedule your hardest yet most important items for first thing in the morning before you do anything else. That will help you feel good and build momentum for success.

You can calendar time for "Other 5%" items into your calendar. This will help you focus on your other priorities because you''ll know you''ve got time allocated for responding to other people''s needs.

You can be strategic about what items you schedule time for from your to-do list and which items you move to your ignore list.

Once you''ve gone to the length of developing these various lists, you can then get into a daily ritual which uses them. This ritual involves spending 18-minutes a day managing your day so you work consistently, systematically and purposefully towards achieving your goals. This ritual is simple enough to be used each day and yet powerful enough and sufficiently comprehensive to keep you focused on your priorities.

The template for this 18-minute a day ritual is:

Set your phone, watch or computer to ring every hour throughout your work day. Whenever you hear the beep, take a deep breath and run through a quick evaluation of how you''re going to use the next hour.

Throughout the day, try and move as many items from your to-do list into your calendar as feasible. Keep working at that and make this your goal all during the day.

Key Thoughts"The power of this ritual is in its predictability. If you do the same thing over and over again, the outcome is predictable. In the case of 8 minutes, you''ll get the right things done. Just 8 minutes a day can save you hours of inefficiency. The trick is to choose your focus deliberately and wisely, and then consistently remind yourself of that focus throughout the day."

—Peter Bregman

One other point. Most people find when they use this system, they still have lots of items left on their to-do lists which don''t fit into their calendars. To address this, you need to apply the"Three-Day Rule" which goes like this: