Sometimes, no matter how hard you work, your in-tray just keeps growing faster than your out-tray. For many business leaders this feeling of being ‘up against it’ might follow the peaks and troughs of new business activity, for others it could be a daily battle with no light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, it’s not uncommon for business leaders to have a high workload and the level of responsibility that comes with running a company will always necessitate periods of intense activity. But a lot of the problems associated with a mounting workload over a long period of time can be put down to bad time management.

In this guide, I want to look at the five pillars of effective time management. Whilst I can’t promise they will change the nature of your job or the volume of work you are responsible for, they should help you manage that workload in a way that is more productive and less stressful.

The To-Do List

A to-do list needn’t be anything more complicated than a handwritten list or Word document but ideally you want to be able to be able to rank tasks by importance and set deadlines and alarms to remind you. There are a variety of cloud based time management solutions out there that will allow you to create tasks, assign them to yourself and other people, share calendars, etc.

Prioritization

A good way to approach prioritization of work is to use a system like Stephen R Covey’s time management matrix. Covey proposes that all work fall into one of four quadrants on a matrix, which will in turn determine how you should deal with it (see image below).

The general idea to keep in mind is that you can’t change the size or composition of the overall matrix (that’s your total available time) but you can alter the size of each quadrant in relation to the others. Ideally you want to be increasing quadrant two, whilst shrinking the rest.

The Covey Matrix is a powerful tool and can really help business leaders change the way they think about the importance of what they are doing. Start by listing all of the regular work activities and projects that take up your time and then put each into the corresponding quadrant. Some tasks you may be better off avoiding entirely, whilst others you could be delegating down the chain of command.

Learn to Delegate

Teamwork is at the heart of any organisation so it’s very important not to try and shoulder all of the burden. Building strong relationships with your team is the secret to effective delegation. A good business leader will get to know where each of their team member’s strengths and skills lie and use this to help improve their team’s overall performance levels and delegate work down the management chain in a way that is sustainable and agreeable to everyone involved.

Another skill to delegation requires identifying work that isn’t a priority to you and learning when to say no. Much of this can fall into quadrant 3 on Covey’s matrix and can include meetings and other unimportant interruptions.

Stay Focused

No matter how effectively you manage your time on paper, a loss of focus can scupper all your good intentions. Multitasking has a lot to answer for in this respect. Studies have shown that very few people can pull off multitasking effectively and that overall it can have a negative effect on efficiency.

Distractions are also responsible for a loss of focus and more often than not they can be managed. Email is without doubt responsible for the vast majority of our day to day distractions. It’s all too easy to spot that email reply you’ve been waiting for pop up at the bottom of your screen whilst you’re in the middle of something else. Before you know it you’ve stopped what you’re doing and have got sucked into an email conversation. Be strict with yourself and turn your email notifications or your entire email program off when you’re tackling something important. Even better, decide a time to check your emails 3 times a day and don’t look at it outside of those times.

Get a Life

It might seem unimportant, but going home on time and taking proper lunch breaks are very important conditions to effective time management. Study after study has shown that taking a break can improve efficiency and productivity at work and that long hours correlate to high stress levels.

Put simply, maintaining a healthy work / life balance will help you stay motivated, which is one of the prerequisites of any successful business leader. Accepting that tomorrow’s another day may not help you when you’re up to your neck in work and can feel like defeat, but having a life outside of work really can help you become an effective time manager in the long run.

If you’re familiar with the story of Novocaine, German chemist Alfred Einhorn discovered it and (thinking it had medical application) fought to keep it from being used in dental surgeries. It wasn’t until Einhorn died that Novocaine became widely used in dental applications, due in large part to his resistance to allow its use in the dental niche.

I think of this story in the context of tech tools. Some have potential for mass market application and haven’t achieved it (Google Plus and Twitter come immediately to mind). Some tech tools are upstart companies whose features may have very strong application for specific niches (Haiku Deck Zuru, which automatically populates slide decks, and Canva, a cloud-based graphic design tool come immediately to mind). Like Google Plus and Twitter have found niche audiences with much higher adoption than the general public, I suspect there are professional niches that will find unique utility from Haiku Deck Zuru and Canva.

Which leads me to IQTell. I’ve written promotional pieces for IQTell after being drawn to the app for its unique utility as a universal inbox, Evernote manager, calendar manager and Getting Things Done (GTD) database. When I had the opportunity to talk with one of the creators of IQTell, Sahaf Flam, I shared that I thought many more people would find his app helpful beyond GTD disciples who use Evernote (there are literally dozens of us). Sahaf said I sounded a bit like Jason Vichinsky.

Jason is a lawyer, and has become a champion for IQTell in the law profession. I got in touch with him, and asked if I could ask him some questions about the utility of IQTell with him and he agreed.

Back to the Novocaine example, I feel unease using independent tech tools without understanding their funding and their prospects for the future. I love IQTell but don’t want to get a note one day in my inbox saying that the product is discontinued. If you remember the untimely passing of Behance’s Action Method project management tool, you understand it’s a real concern. I love that IQTell embraces niches where it is extraordinarily useful and that folks like Jason find great professional utility in it. I find IQTell indispensable and hope it becomes the biggest thing since Novocaine.

If you’re not familiar with IQTell – this is the app what we’re discussing:

Q: What aspects of IQTell are useful for you as a lawyer?

IQTell  is the best project management software I have ever used.  If you are an attorney with a small firm or a solo and want to have a completely paperless office IQTell and Evernote are the only tools you will ever need.

The way the product allows me to handle email is absolutely phenomenal. The ability to immediately link that email to an action or project is indispensable.  I am now able to deal with all of my email and get my inbox empty in a fraction of the time it used to take.

That I am able to use the product on my Mac, my iPad, and my smart phone is fantastic. This means that I  literally carry my entire practice with me wherever I go. Moreover, because the data is stored both locally and in the cloud I have four backups of my data. I never worry about losing anything.

Q: What tools were you using to manage your information before using IQTell?

I have test driven Rocket Matter, MyCase, Cleo, Remember the Milk, Toodledo.  I also experimented with trying to use Google products together. Nothing I have used comes close to IQTell.

Q: From your perspective what are the strongest aspects of the IQTell app?

The strongest aspect of IQTell is simply this: the user truly has everything she needs in one place in a clean robust interface that works on any computer or mobile device with an Internet connection. It is the holy grail of the paperless mobile law practice.

Q: Can you talk about the utility of Evernote in your profession?

I use Evernote to store all of my documents, Web clippings, audio recordings, photographs, and notes. I also use it with penultimate to store handwritten notes for those occasions when I cannot use voice typing.  That I am able to access all of these from any computer with an Internet connection is phenomenal. Evernote truly is the best at what it does. Combined with IQTell an attorney needs nothing else to run a completely paperless and highly organized practice.

Q: What aspects of time management are critical for lawyers and how does IQTell address these?

Because it allows me to carry my entire practice with me wherever I go, I am able to make use of time that might otherwise be lost. There are often occasions when I am sitting in court waiting to be called. Before I had your product that time Was lost. Now I can use that time to work on almost anything. Moreover, it is not uncommon to encounter another attorney who is in court for a separate matter. If that attorney and I have a case together we can go sit in the conference room and discuss that case while we are waiting.

IQTell is free for a 60 day trial and then is $5.95 – $9.95 per month depending upon the number of email accounts that you need to sync. I should probably mention that neither Jason or I was compensated for mentioning IQTell or any other product in this piece.

I am the kind of person who throws themselves enthusiastically into new ventures.

When I started running, I immediately subscribed to Runner’s World, found a group to run with, planned my racing calendar, and talked shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and I.T. band stretches with anyone who’d listen. When I decided to write a book, I found a writer’s group, took exhaustive online writing courses, bought Scrivener and spent two days watching tutorials, and started blogging, Tweeting, and Facebooking furiously.

Sometimes all my enthusiasm makes me feel like an Amway salesperson.

My new passion is balance

If you are one of the poor souls who has suffered from my zeal—please forgive me. My new passion is balance. I’m striving to become more laid back. To do less of certain things.

In order to do this, I’m making several changes in my life and I thought I’d share them just in case you need to become more laid back too. Because, of course, I have to form a “laid back” pal group, study about the benefits of balance, read “how-to’s” and write about it.

It’s the Greta way.

Change #1: I’m only sending one email a month to my list.

For years “Fun Friday has gone out every Friday.” That’s the minimum pro-bloggers suggest. (I know because I’ve read them all.) But, I’m not a pro-blogger. I’m an author and a freelance writer. From here on my list will receive one email a month with a list of links to things I’ve written during that month you can check out if you’re so inclined.

If you want more of me (not sure why you would), follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

Change #2: I’m working out less, but smarter.

I’ve just gone through a complete revision of The Wine and Chocolate Workout. Re-writing it has made me realize I need to take my own advice. I am finding balance in exercise. I can’t workout as much as I did when people paid me to do it.

I’m being more strategic, doing the things that give me the most bang for my allotted hour.

Change #3: I’m eating better food, drinking better wine and having less of it.

I’ve found when I rush through life, I tend to gobble without discernment. I stand at the kitchen counter and grab whatever’s handy. I’m slowing down, planning meals, researching my wine and enjoying it all.

Change #4: I’m watching less T.V. and reading more books.

During my dark ages between careers, I was in mourning. I mourned my old, busy life and all the people that populated it. I mourned the emptiness of my nest. So I found new friends—on Netflix.

My life is busy and full again. I have a Kindle bursting at the seams with unread books and a stack on the floor by my bedside table. I don’t think my T.V. buddies will miss me if I only check in now and again. My brain will be better for it.

Change #5: I’m forgiving myself more and punishing myself less.

I want to do and learn many things. I’m gregarious and, at times, verbose. This means I make mistakes. Lots of them. In this world of social media, those mistakes are often very public. I’m learning to get over myself.

I want to be as kind to myself as I am to you.

Here’s a bonus round:

• Whine less; sing more
• Worry less; pray more
• Throw it against the wall less; strategize more
• Follow recipes less; create more
• Feel less insecure; practice more

Your turn. What should you being doing less of?

The original post, “5 Things to do less of” by Great Boris was originally published on her blog.
To read all the posts in Greta’s “7 Deadly Sins series” Click Here.

The first generation Kindle was ugly and slow. It wasn’t comfortable to hold, it was an unsightly, off-white color, had no internal light source, and the right button on my Kindle was broken, turning multiple pages every time my thumb would mistakenly click down too hard. But still I loved it.

I primarily loved my Kindle for two features: its on-board dictionary and its text to speech function. Even with its retrospective uncoolness, there was a trendy aspect of our Kindles that my wife and I felt when out reading on Saturday mornings at our local coffee shop. The bitter coffee aroma in the air, the sweetness of a pretentious Northwest coffee drink, and a host of hipsters asking about our plastic, abstract-art book-repositories. Times were good for me and my Kindle.

Text to speech rocks my world

My Kindle didn’t have a bluetooth. It had a long, gray cord that would stretch from the auxiliary outlet of my car to the passenger seat. I would listen to the robotic text to speech voice for five hour commutes up and down I-5 from Portland to Seattle. It would reliably mispronounce almost all proper names which I accepted as a crazy quirk of my otherwise lovable e-reader.

Our love affair didn’t last. My wife gifted me a Kindle DX for my birthday, which was huge (bigger than an iPad) and had the equivalent computing power of an late 1980s computer. My preference for the big model was the beginning of the end.

Soon, I was listening to books on CD rather than firing up my behemoth Kindle, then I graduated to an iPad (which allowed me to read Kindle books), and later Audible audiobooks that I could download and listen to in the car or when I was out on runs. The Kindle was an afterthought anymore, and I resisted the urge to buy later versions. I would still try and read the Kindle occasionally, but the experience was always lacking relative to its alternatives.

My wife did upgrade her Kindle and to our shock, Kindle discontinued the text to speech feature. The dictionary was the only reason to use a Kindle anymore, but the loss of text to speech psychologically diminished my drive to re-establish a relationship with my Kindle device. We were through and I was crushed.

As time went on and I continued to support Amazon through Audible, I was missing the opportunity to read and listen to the same books. I could be sucker a buy the book and the audiobook, but I opted for the next best option: increase my running until suffering from debilitating shin splints. I missed reading like I missed the feeling of normalcy in my inner right shin. A lot.

When Amazon recently released the Kindle Voyage, I considered a reconciliation. It got rave reviews, is thin, attractive, has a great user interface. For $250 I imagined they must have reincorporated text to speech into the device. They didn’t.

Devastated again by Amazon, I wondered will I ever love again? Is it too much to ask to be able to read and listen to a book without spending thirty or forty bucks a pop? That’s when my iPhone, my Kindle app, Siri and I entered into a polyamorous, literary relationship.

How to enable text to speech reading on your iOS device

You can set up your Apple device so that Siri’s text to speech feature will read your Kindle books to you. Here’s how you set it up:

Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Accessibility Shortcut -> VoiceOver

• You’ll want to enable “lock orientation” and “do not disturb” (if anything pops up or changes while Siri is reading, it will read those instead).
• You then go into the Kindle app to the page you want to start from and press the home button three times. You’ll get the auditory response “VoiceOver On.”
• Then run two fingers down the screen and Siri will start reading to you, mispronouncing most (if not all) of the proper nouns.

You can also have Siri read articles in a browser, Office documents, et cetera using this feature.

Important tidbit: you will want to turn this off when Siri isn’t reading books and documents to you, and you do this by pressing the home button three times.

As a postscript, I don’t love reading on a iPad but I don’t mind it too much either. And although I miss those whimsical days pretentiously reading on my first-generation Kindle (and having her read back to me), Siri’s text to speech feature provides me with the same function and is a lot more portable. MapMyRun works concurrently with it, talking over Siri to tell me that my split times are pretty bad, which I blame on the shin splints that are indirectly attributable to Amazon.

You should also know that in addition to mispronouncing proper names, Siri mispronounces expletives. I personally wish that Apple would remedy this curious problem, but I guess it keeps all books suitable for work. Whatever.

In any event, I hope this feature is as useful to you as it is to me, expletives and proper nouns notwithstanding.

Public domain photo courtesy of Pixabay

Time management tools make you feel productive.

When I have all of my open projects organized in my GTD system (primarily using the IQTell app), I feel in control. When I use the Pomodoro app on my phone and power through a bunch of work, I perceive that I’m getting a lot done.

When I say that I’m being “productive,” what does that really mean? Does it means that I feel more productive, or can “time management” be quantified?

What I want to attempt in this post is to tangibly quantify the time gains that (lucky) thirteen of the most popular time management methods provide. I’ll try to list assumptions when I can, but will concede that any of these estimates are very rough. All of these are completely debatable in the comments if you care to share your thoughts.

Whether you agree or disagree with the assumptions, I think you’ll find that these little productivity gains snowball quite quickly into big time gains.

Each minute is a little thing, and yet, with respect to our personal productivity, to manage the minute is the secret of success. – Joseph B. Wirthlin

How much time do you save by aggregating your calendars with a calendar app?

There are lots of calendar apps for your smartphone that consolidate all of your calendars into one. I personally use Sunrise, but have gone through all of the most popular calendar apps before deciding that Sunrise does the job for me.

How does this save time? Consolidated calendars let you see your day at a glance without having to vacillate between calendars.

Assumption: 15 seconds saved per calendar entry because you don’t have to switch between calendars.

This survey suggests that users add 1.36 calendar entries into their smartphone each day (on average). I’m going to make the pretty outrageously conservative assumption that everyone has at least one item on their work calendar every day (on average). So, 2.36*15 =

• Daily time savings: 35.4 seconds
• Weekly time savings: 4.1 minutes
• Annual time savings: 3.6 hours per year

How much time do you save by aggregating your email accounts with a unified inbox?

Most email accounts allow you to consolidate them into one platform. You can sync your Gmail to Exchange and POP3 accounts to Gmail. However you configure it and prefer to work in email, there are ways to consolidate your email in one place.

How does this save time? Unified inboxes allow you to process all of your email without switching between email accounts.

The general consensus here is that most people have AT LEAST two email addresses (I have six). The average smartphone user unlocks their phone 130 times per day (!!!?) and the average smartphone user checks Facebook 14 times per day. Since about 40% of all adults have smartphones, we’ll assume 15 seconds time saved, six times per day.

• Daily time savings: 1.5 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 10.5 minutes
• Annual time savings: 9.1 hours per year

How much time do you save by aggregating your social media accounts with Hootsuite (or other SoMe Aggregator)?

How does this save time? A social media aggregator  allows you to manage many of your social interactions in one place.

Since only 25% of people have Twitter accounts, less than 20% use LinkedIn and most people only have one Facebook account we’re going to have to take liberties. But for the sake of this piece we’ll assume everyone has one Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profile. Since people (on average) check Facebook far more than Twitter or LI, I’m going to conservatively assume that an aggregator saves 15 seconds multiplied times two visits to Twitter and one to LinkedIn (and of course if you are more social the time savings would be greater).

• Daily time savings: 45 seconds
• Weekly time savings: 5.25 minutes
• Annual time savings: 4.6 hours per year

Incidentally, a disclaimer that Hootsuite isn’t the only social aggregation tool out there, but for the price (free) it is far more robust than anything comparable.

How much time do you save using IFTTT / Zapier to connect disparate apps?

How does this save time? Trigger-action apps can consolidate disparate (GTD defined) inboxes.

Because this is so arbitrary already (and I can’t find a lot of information on how many tasks people do every day), I’m going to make some really inaccurate (but conservative) assumptions about how much time an “action-trigger” augmented primary inbox would save when used for time management purposes. I’ll assume that you can save three coordinating trips back and forth between platforms to get your tasks in order (15 seconds per trip):

• Daily time savings: 45 seconds
• Weekly time savings: 5.25 minutes
• Annual time savings: 4.6 hours per year

Bonus: If you read one website a lot, using recipes with the IFTTT email digest is an awesome time management tool. For example, I love the lifehacker site, but I only read it once a week when IFTTT sends me a digest of all of the published content from the previous week. I do the same with Mashable on a daily basis.

How much time do you save using Evernote / OneNote to consolidate your notes?

I had a hard time initially getting into Evernote until I read a couple of books about the cool things you could do with these apps (although it has always been my go-to app to document my parking place at the airport). Frankly, I can’t imagine life without it now. The capability to immediately capture notes by typing, camera or voice recorder into the cloud and then contextually tag them feels pretty awesome… but can that feeling be measured? (Note that although I like Evernote, the differences between it and OneNote are rather slight)

How does this save time? Capturing immediate, accessible notes prevents redundant planning.

Evernote doesn’t publish statistics about how many notes people take per day, but let’s break it down at a very human level: your short-term memory. Wikipedia tells me (and I have no reason ever to doubt them) that human short term memory can hold 7 +/- 2 items in short term memory. Let’s conservatively assume that Evernote serves to clear 5 items from your short-term memory once every day. How do we quantify the time impact of this? If you forget something, you will eventually have to rethink of it and capture it. For the sake of consistency let’s say that each captured thought nets you a net positive of 15 seconds of time:

• Daily time savings: 1.3 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 8.2 minutes
• Annual time savings: 7.1 hours per year

How much time do you save by using Trackr / Tile to keep track of your stuff?

How does this save time? When something is misplaced, the trackr app helps me to immediately find it.

I’m going to assume that you misplace one thing per week. This is conservative for me, may be too much for you, let’s meet in the middle. Here’s the kicker, if you’ve ever lost your keys you know that it can take a long time to find. For the sake of this piece I’ll say ten minutes BUT will also cop to spending up to 30 minutes or even an hour doing some searches. I’m just saying that depending upon your search area and other impediments it could be much more.

• Weekly time savings: 10 minutes
• Annual time savings: 8.7 hours per year

This means that if you spend a half hour each week looking for things you lose an entire day each year (vociferous expletive). What an embarrassing situation to need a time management tool.

How much time do you save by using list apps (or just list written on paper)?

Even though David Allen is not a fan of lists, it is an important intermediary step between no organization at all (short-term memory) and a more advanced time management method. Post-college I went through the whole grief process for the fallibility of my short-term memory, followed by maniacal (sometimes disparate) lists that made me more effective relative to relying on my memory. There are a ton of listing apps: Wunderlist, Any.do, and IQTell come immediately to mind (IQTell is a list app I use, but it also does much more as described below)…. and there is always pen and paper.

How does this save time? A list serves as a short-term memory dump and allows for sorting and prioritization.

I’m going to make the same assumptions about a list that I do about Evernote / OneNote, although they have the benefit of committing information to the cloud, and you are more apt to have your smartphone with you than a dedicated tablet throughout the day. Five items per day, fifteen second savings:

• Daily time savings: 1.3 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 8.2 minutes
• Annual time savings: 7.1 hours per year

How much time do you save by using the Pomodoro Technique?

How does this save time? The Pomodoro Technique keeps you focused during your work time and less prone to multitask.

There aren’t great statistics on the time savings of Pomorodo, but I’m going to conservatively say that it makes you 5% more effective per hour (You could do the equivalent of 63 minutes of work for every 60 minutes of time). I’ll also assume that a normal person would probably do four pomodoros every work day (due to the difficulty in managing distraction for an entire day).

• Daily time savings: 12 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 1 hour (only five days in a work week)
• Annual time savings: 52 hours per year (TWO DAYS+!!!!!)

How much time do you save by using the Seinfeld Method?

Don’t break the chain. This is the “Seinfeld” time management method in its entirety.

As I understand it, a new comedian asked Jerry Seinfeld what he would recommend that he do to “make it,” and Seinfeld told him not to break the chain: to consistently write and perform every day.

How does this save time? The Seinfeld method forces you to do repetitive tasks everyday rather than procrastinate.

I’m going to assume that there is one thing that everyone needs to do everyday and hates doing, possibly to the point of procrastination. It’s hard to quantify this in terms of time saved, but maybe David Allen’s assertion that open loops cause stress and impede you from doing other stuff. We’ll assume that you have to spend an equal net amount of time to do your procrastinated task and that your mental snooze button costs you two minutes everyday.

• Daily time savings: 1 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 7 minutes
• Annual time savings: 6 hours

How much time do you save by using a Franklin Planner?

When I graduated college and went into the Army and in every job that I had for the few years subsequent, the Franklin Planner (or DayRunner, Day Planner, et cetera) was an item of envy. A huge book filled with a calendar, address book. notepad, and a bunch of other goodies, it was (and I guess still is) a paper-based smartphone minus some angry birds. The problem is that these don’t automatically sync with anything and require a lot of upkeep.

How does this save time? The net effect of this is similar to a unified inbox (explained below)

In a post about time management hacks, this is an oddity because it’s not super productive comparable to some cloud solutions. However, some people just like paper AND there is some efficiency to be gained. Because the calendar is synced (presumably) from computers – no time savings there. Ditto contacts. But because the consolidated calendar serves to connect disparate inboxes (you can set an appointment or make a note without changing screens), so we’ll say that the Franklin Planner has the same net productivity gain as a unified inbox:

• Daily time savings: 1.5 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 10.5 minutes
• Annual time savings: 9.1 hours per year

How much time do you save by using the 7 habits methodology?

If you’ve read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you know that much of the discussion in the book isn’t directly actionable as a productivity method. But in the “Principles of Personal Management” chapter (fist bump for the Cliff’s Notes), there are some specific prioritization tools (such as their four-box model) that helps you make decisions about the priority of your different tasks relative to each other.

How does this save time? Deliberate prioritization and time scheduling allows you to accomplish your most important tasks in a predictable timeframe.

We’re going to have to reach into the hypothetical to determine the benefit of deliberate prioritization, so let me propose this as a thought-experiment: Imagine you don’t prioritize your work and at the end of the week every week you have an extra hour of priority work that needs to be completed. In my experience, that’s almost obnoxiously conservative. Let’s say that with prioritization, you are able to meet deadlines with your priority work and delegate and ditch some of the other stuff – sounds reasonable, right? Here’s what that would look like:

• Weekly time savings: 1 hour
• Annual time savings: 2.2 days per year (nice!)

How much time do you save by using GTD?

If you’re unfamiliar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) time management method where do we begin? We begin with a thing. That thing goes into our inbox. We decide whether to trash, file, do or prioritize that thing. If we opt for the latter it becomes an action for a project. It is prioritized and periodically reviewed until it becomes our “next action,” it is completed and we move on to the next “next action.” I’m being a little loose with the specifics, but the big productivity gains from GTD are that it serves to eliminate redundant planning and prioritize work appropriately.

How does this save time? GTD saves time by eliminating redundant planning and prioritizes work.

We’ll start off giving GTD the same weekly hour that we credited the seven habits to save us for prioritization. Although it eliminates redundant planning similar to how we described using Evernote, we allotted time for Evernote based upon one daily purge of short-term memory. For GTD, you need no short-term memory because everything should immediately go into your inbox. So I’m going to stay super-conservative and estimate that you only have fifteen actionable thoughts every day. Let’s see what THAT looks like:

• Daily time savings: 3.9 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 24.6 minutes + 1 hour
• Annual time savings: 3 days per year

How much time do you save by using IQTell?

How does this save time? IQTell gives you access to all of your productivity tools on any platform your want / have to use.

The genesis of this post was that I was managing my projects in IQTell and wondered how much time I saved by managing everything in one place. So let’s take a look at it adding together what we’ve already calculated:

IQTell without GTD: unified inbox + consolidated calendar + Evernote

• Daily time savings: 3.3 minutes + 3.9 minutes = 7.2 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 23.1 minutes
• Annual time savings: 20.2 hours per year

IQTell with GTD: unified inbox + consolidated calendar + Evernote + GTD

• Daily time savings: 1.5 minutes + .5 minutes + 1.3 minutes = 3.3 minutes
• Weekly time savings: 50.4 minutes + 1 hour = 110.4 minutes
• Annual time savings: 4 days per year

There is also huge time saving by consolidating & integrating email & task management that I don’t take into account.  For example, when I read email in IQTell, I can swipe the app to create a task.  But the big time saver is when I do the the task, I can just click the email and  update the corresponding party.  If this is in one app, you are saving the need to complete the task (e.g., in Wunderlist), open your email, find the email request, and then respond to requester that it is done. The problem I have to quantify the time savings for IQTell is that it is such a versatile productivity app.

How time management tools can earn you a two (or three) week vacation.

Hopefully I made the point that you can gain a lot of time with time management tools and methods. Consider the most congruent ones:

162 hours = 6.75 days or 13.5 12-hour work days. And while you probably can’t spend that time in a contiguous block enjoying a well-deserved vacation, you can spend that time doing something other than work (or more work). Recall that most of these time estimates were extraordinarily conservative: if you use Zapier or Hootsuite (or something else) more than the average bear maybe you could save three or four weeks. 🙂

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before. – Franz Kafka

Appreciation to Thomas E. Hanna for his input about the title and meta description on this piece.

Disclosure

I am a paid brand advocate and unabashed enthusiast for IQTell. I would like to think that these two facts are mutually exclusive but I invite you to make you own conclusion about this tool.

Public domain image courtesy of Pixabay