So far the recession has spared me. In the contrary, the goals I have set myself for this year are likely to be dwarfend if the pace of the first two months of this year continues. About a week ago, Gordon from eWrite wrote a post about “Learning the time management thing“. Joining this, I want to tell you about my approach to the same problem.
Beginning the day
My day usualy begins before dawn, as I like the peace and quite for reading my mails and news. No phone, no skype or icq and even twitter is kinda quite. Just me and my mug of sweet and strong caffee latte.
First thing of course are my mail. I use googlemail with some labs and greasemonkey extensions. I addition to the not-to-bad gmail spam filters, i also have some tight server filters, which keep my spam load pretty low at roughly 150-200 per day. About three or four spam show up in my inbox, while I have about the same amount of false positives in my junk folder, which i check and sweep regularely two to tree times a day.
I organise my mail by using the “Superstars” and “Custom Label Colours” from GMail Labs, every client has its own star/color. Importantly I only keep current mails i have to look after in my inbox, everything else is moved to the archive. To consequently do so, I use GMail Labs “Send & Archive”. I addition to that I use the Greasemonkey “Folders4Gmail” plugin and some Gmail Filters to label my mail corresponding to my customers, so I have easy access, even when archived. I also use the Gmail search function a lot.
Next, I read my rss-feed. I follow a lot of SEO related blog and even if the subjects seem to be similar or comming up again and again in regular intervalls, i still find some interesting posts in between. I have also set up some google alerts, to monitor my presence on the web. When I find a post I like and want to read it later, I usually grab it with Evernote. If its a new blog I find worth following, i use my google reader and when it’s just an URL with e.g. a tool of some sort, I bookmark it with delicious.com. I use the same procedure, when I look through the twits I get over night.
After having cought up with the over nights stream of information, I move on to organising my day …