The Octopus of Optimisation - two levels of time management

The first job of time management is to reduce the unimportant stuff (you'll never get rid of it all) to maybe 20-30% of your time. Even though it's urgent and you are doing it straight away, or same day, you still want to reduce the amount of time you spend on it.

But then....

the question is how much time to spend on each of the important things! Maybe my Octopus of Optimisation can help?

O

Organise the unimportant (often urgent) stuff so you can reduce the time spent on it, and therefore get more time for the important things.

C

Choice – you can choose what’s important to you.  YOU decide.

T

Time spent should be related to importance

O

Objectives: anything that contributes to your goals is important

P

Playing and fun ARE important too

U

Understand what makes you happy – in the short and long term.  Those things are important.

S

Success is maximising the time you are spending on the things that are important to you

My octopus, above, is juggling between the things that I personally feel are important (you might well have a completely different list, for example where is football? (nearly got onto mine) where is religion, etc....

So I'm juggling wine/partying, sax playing and music generally, work (at least the parts that I enjoy, like writing this, my kids and grandchildren, foreign travel (shout out to Norway, India, Italy and the Greek Islands), reading (both self development and fun novels), playing tennis (and watching it and playing and watching other sports like cycling), dogs, and last but not least, my wife.

You'll have noticed that there are 9 things and only 8 tentacles, so I can't just hold it all, I have to juggle it. And really I need one of my tentacles, at least, to keep the urgent stuff at bay as well. I don't want to drop any of the above, so I need to think about how long to spend on each, so I can do all of them.

So that's the essence of time management - 1: making us much space as you can by minimising the unimportant stuff, and then 2: doing all the important stuff, in whatever ratio you choose. For part two, use the Octopus!