Time management when retired

I had a vision of what it would be like when I retired - I would basically just potter around all day doing the things I enjoyed doing. I would take lots of long walks and visit lots of interesting places. I would at last have time to learn a musical instrument, would perfect my French, Spanish and German, and read loads of books.

Some of that’s happened, but the sense of unlimited time available for what I want to do has so far eluded me. In fact I am so busy most of the time I don’t know how I ever fitted full-time, or even part-time, work into my day. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing - just not what I’d envisaged.

One of the problems is that I don’t seem to be able to switch my mind off inventing time management systems. I’m always getting brilliant ideas, and when I get a brilliant idea I want to try it out. And if I’m trying it out then I want to tell other people about it, and discuss it with them and get them to try it out too. So before I know it, I’m doing almost as much work for nothing as I was previously doing for money.

The above is just a preamble to saying that I have now come up with yet another new time management system. It is however very different in the way it works from the Autofocus and DWM systems which I have introduced over the last sixteen months or so. About all it has in common with them is that it uses one long list.

What it does do however is what the Autofocus systems aimed to do, but never quite achieved, which is to autofocus - to zoom in on the things which really matter while not neglecting the mundane but essential tasks which are part of everyone’s lives. So I’ve actually started to get moving with the walks, the music, the languages, the trips and the books. And I may even be able to find time without too much difficultly for that fund raising project which my church seems keen to get me involved in.

How does it work? It’s too early to go into detail, but it is basically a new way of combining some of the time management principles which I have worked on over the years, plus some new ideas.

More soon.

P.S. I almost forgot to say that I think it will work just as well for those who are not retired!

Repetitive nature of work

The new DWM system is throwing up some interesting new perspectives. One that has struck me quite forcibly is the repetitive nature of most of my work. Previous time management systems have tended to disguise the number of times that one re-enters the same task on the list.

But DWM separates out re-entered tasks from new tasks, and rather to my surprise I discovered that the number of new tasks that I’m putting on the list is decidedly in the minority. For example, yesterday I re-entered 43 tasks and only added 11 new tasks.

This reinforces a point I have often made, which is that good systems are all important in being well-organised. If the majority of tasks are repetitious, then making sure that those tasks are being carried out as efficiently as possible will bring about huge time savings.

Simplicity

I think that one of the tendencies that most of us have to fight against is the tendency to overcomplicate things. I’ve tried with all my time management systems to design them so that they are as simple as possible and need the minimum of “props”. Yet I’ve noticed that one of the first thing that happens when I issue a new system is that an army of people descend on it and think up ways to make it more complicated.

What are the advantages of simplicity versus complexity?

To answer that, just think of a few things which people by and large really hate:

• Software manufacturers who instead of ironing out the bugs in the basic functionality of their products keep on adding more and more functions which most people never use.
• Politicians who keep producing more and more laws in an effort to solve problems which they created in the first place.
• Being asked to provide the same information over and over again.

Then think of a few simple solutions which suddenly cut through all the complexity:

• The Amazon “One-Click” ordering system
• The “point and shoot” digital camera
• The Clickfree back up system in which you just plug in an external hard disk to start the back-up and unplug it when it’s finished.

Now please note that a simple system for the user may be the result of a very complex process. To produce any of these three examples of simplicity required a lot of thought and a lot of very sophisticated technology. But because the manufacturers were thinking “How simple can we make this?” the end result was something that revolutionises its field.

So a good question to keep asking yourself is “How simple can I make my life/my business/this particular project”? This is not “simple” as in living in a cave eating vegetables, but “simple” as in “makes it easier to do it than not to do it” or “makes it easier to do it right than to do it wrong”.