Einstein's closet contained seven identical suits—one for each day of the week. This was, the story goes, so that he could conserve his brain power for physics and not waste it on the mundane task of deciding what to wear each day. Maybe this is why Steve Jobs always wears black turtlenecks. (Personally, I have many pairs of the exact same socks, but that's just so I never have more than one unmatched sock when I do laundry.)
With the help of this book, you're going to eliminate the excuse 'I forgot' from your vocabulary. You may miss a deadline for other reasons, but it won't be because you were trying to remember so many things that it slipped your mind.
Getting tasks, instructions, and knowledge out of your brain and onto paper or in a digital repository is the first step to getting help with those tasks. While our brains are single-user, and no one, I hope, can read our minds, external formats are multiuser and open up the possibility of others helping us with our work. For example, documenting a procedure and putting it on a web site means other people can study and hopefully do the procedure. Using a request-tracker database means other SAs can take items, customers can see the progress of their requests, and management can gather statistics. Why try to memorize the list of services that need to be tested after an operating system is upgraded? Keep the list in a spreadsheet rather than your brain. Now you can share the spreadsheet with others to see if you are missing anything.
Develop Routines and Stick with Them
A good software developer tries to be lazy: if a bit of code works, he reuses it as often as possible. I write a lot of Perl code. People think I'm a Perl expert. The reality is that I know about 10 really good Perl idioms, and I reuse them over and over. Rarely is a program truly written from scratch. You're going to manage your time the same way. You're going to turn regular activity into routines so you spend less time planning things that are going to happen anyway.
I used to spend hours each week playing phone tag to figure out when I could talk with my boss. Now we meet at the same time every week for a brief status meeting. No more guessing. It's a routine we have. Establishing this routine saves us both time and reduces the 'thinking' we have to do each week.
To make sure that I don't spend a lot of time managing all my time management techniques, I work them into a routine, too. At the start of the day, before I've even checked my email, I review my to do list and set priorities for the day.
It's important to stick with your routines because other people start to count on them. That helps them plan their days. Everyone is helped.
Develop Habits and Mantras
Habits are routines you do without having to think. Mantras are mental triggers for rules of thumb.
I refill my gas tank every Sunday. It's a good habit. Sometimes I can't even remember why I do it, but I trust the habit and use it. Ah! That's right! It all started because I was often late for work on Monday morning and didn't want to be
Rules of thumb are like habits that don't happen regularly. They are ways to mentally record responses that are generally good for particular situations. When I activate a rule of thumb, I have a mantra, or saying, that goes along with it. For small tasks that I'm likely to procrastinate on, my mantra is:
Sooner is better than later.
For example, I once had to periodically empty the water-collection bucket on a portable air-conditioning unit in a small computer closet. (Yes, in the long term, the better solution is to install a drain pipe or to use a cooler that evaporates the water into the exhaust. This was a temporary solution.) The bucket had two levels--'Time to empty the bucket,' and 'You idiot, you should have emptied it already.' It could take a week before the water level reached the first mark, which gave me a good excuse to ignore the bucket for days at a time. This caused three problems. First, emptying the bucket when it was very full was much more difficult than emptying it when it was fairly full—splish-splash. Second, as luck would have it, most times I noticed that the water level was too high to ignore, it always seemed to be at the end of the day when I had to be somewhere after work. Now I would be late because I had to spend 15 minutes emptying the water. Third and most important, I ran the constant risk of overflowing the bucket. Though a detector on the unit automatically shut off the air-conditioning before the bucket overflowed, this fail-safe could result in a room temperature hot enough to fry all the computers.
As you can guess, all of this was improved when I employed my 'Sooner is better than later' mantra. The first time I noticed the water level above the first mark, I said to myself, 'Sooner is better than later' and emptied the bucket. Problem solved. This mantra is closely related to the adage, 'A stitch in time saves nine.'
Eventually habits and mantras become second nature. Developing habits and mantras are investments we make so that our brain isn't cluttered in the long run. When they become second nature, they stay
