Project Management Tips - Value Your Time

Tip: start be aware of where you spend your and your team time. Spend it wisely.


Steps to get there:

1. Once you reach the office, sit and don't start your machine for 10 minutes. Just sit there. Be careful with that - you may panic first few days. It's important you do nothing these 10 minutes. During this time you can think on what you would like to accomplish this day. Now for the scary part - before you get your emails.

2. Imagine time as a physical resource (imagine unit representative). Every time you are planning to spend some of it imagine how much of units you need to take from the heap of all units you have to complete the project and ask yourself: is it worth it? If it is then go for it. If it's not forget about it.

If you want to call the whole team (8 people) 2 hours meeting to discuss which variant of user interface workflow for some scenario would be better think again. Be creative in finding ways to make this decision at lower cost than two man days. Toss a coin for example.

3. Don't write elaborate emails. They look nice, but you have to pay a lot of time to write them, and then your recipients pay time to read them. Straight to the point is a good approach. People know you are smart anyway.

4. Don't answer your emails. Or less extreme version don't answer your emails right away. If you don't - problems magically tend to resolve themselves even without your attention. Don't worry if they don't you will be reminded about them. Extra benefit here: you minimize the risk of becoming your company's google search replacement.

5. Make sure that you open your mail program only once, twice a day - every 4 hours or so. Spend time with it, caress it for an hour or so, and then close it and start doing a real work. Limit your time spent with it to an hour, two hours a day. With that in mind your mails will be much more efficient.