Focus on the next most necessary thing
The accurate measure of any time management technique is whether it helps you neglect the right things.[¹]
We find more charm in hope than in possessions, dreams, or reality. Reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control of time and can’t hope to meet our perfectionist standards.
The “next and most necessary thing” is all we can aspire to do at any moment. Resist the allure of middling priorities. All you can do. It’s also all you have to do.
Focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.
Limit your work in progress
The acronym WIP stands for Work In Progress. WIP is the number of tasks a team is currently working on.
It frames the capacity of your team’s workflow at any moment. Work-in-progress (WIP) limits restrict the most significant number of work items in the workflow’s different stages.
They can be defined per person, work stage/type, or the entire work system.
Having too high WIP limits means your team is working on many tasks, switching contexts all the time, and failing to meet deadlines.
Low limits, on the other side, mean that when a given item is pending on a 3rd party, your members have to wait, i.e., they are idle.
WIP limits are essential for delivering customer value as fast as possible. Implementing WIP limits allows an Agile team to complete single work items by enforcing focus on finishing current tasks before starting new ones.
By applying WIP limits, your team can locate bottlenecks in their working processes before they become blockers.
Take control of your schedule
Step one in your search for happiness is to work toward having control of your schedule.
Every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people.
Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work to be more effective within the confines of time.
[¹]: Oliver Burkeman(2021): Four Thousand Weeks (Amazon.com: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals eBook : Burkeman, Oliver: Kindle Store)
