time management - the pickle jar approach

Time Management - The Pickle Jar Theoryis interesting. I've spent quite a lot of time lately thinking about "planning".

By "planning", I don't really mean project planning, gantt charts, etc. - more "how to get the right things done today". Well, and some thoughts about determining what the right things are.

In my last jobthere was a lady who spent the first thirty minutes of every day organising her plan for that day. She did this on paper, copying incomplete items from the previous day and prioritising as she went. Once the prioritised list was completed, she allocated time against each of the items. Then, she started working down the list.

This always seemed very attractive to me, in a similar fashion to how I admire people who find significant comfort in religion. In both cases, you might not want to live your life that way, but it's clear that the people who do get some comfort from it (and in the case of the lady with whom I worked, she was widely admired for her professionalism and approach).

Anyway, I've always been verygood at making lists of things to do. Similarly, I'm good at making entries in diaries (paper or electronic) about things that need to be done on a certain date. The problem has been doingthings on the list or remembering to look at the diary to see what should be done today.

It often seems that there should be some type of technological answer to my problems, but it never turns out that way. I've tried many PDA's, various email, todo and calendaring programs. In the end, if you aren't disciplined, these things will just help you to build up a vast bulk of data that you never actually use.

These days I manage with the emacs diary/calendar for my meetings and appointments. Whilst the package is simple, that's okay, as most of the meetings I have are regular and straightforward. For a list of things todo I have a slightly customised version of emacs outline mode. With a few default first level headings, code to move entries around, add timestamps and some gnusintegration I'm all set.

But I still get tempted. I readabout how Morbus Iff uses Omni Outlinerto manage his todo list. Before you know it I've started the browser and I'm reading the specs...