Getting Things Done

Is there a Silver Bullet to Time Management? This is a question I have been trying to answer for quite some. Now I have come to the conclusion that there is no such silver bullet but each person need to choose the best method that suits him or her.

We've come a long way since simple TODO lists. Infact there are quite a few modern ways of time management. Stephen Covey introduces a great method in his book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" and it's sequel "First Things First"

I liked the concept of focusing on the important things and not the urgent things that we tend to focus on. Just knowing these principles could improve one's time management a lot.

Tony Robbins also has his time management method called "Time of Your Life". Here he focusses on the importance chunking and grouping of related tasks together and being emotional about the achievement of the tasks. This method is more heavy weight than the Covey method and for someone who's learning it it could take about 1 hour a day just to do the planning. So to use this method one has to be really disciplined.

A recent time management method I stumbled across is called "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.


I got an eBook and yet to apply the whole book. At least I've been using his concepts for my email which, is in hundreds per day. So far this has been the most effective method I've used with my emails.

This is simple and light weight. Unlike the previous two methods, you don't have to spend too much extra time doing the planning.

I used to delegate a lot of tasks to lot of people and found it difficult to keep track of all tasks. This is expecially difficult as some people tend to forget. Using this method it's really easy to keep track of delegated (Waiting for Tasks) .

Well, in conclusion I would say there's no silver bullet but knowing all these techniques would really help as in this age of balancing 1000s of tasks we cannot only depend on todo lists anymore.