a.m., and you want to leave at 5:30 p.m., or in about nine hours. With three hours already blocked out, you are left with six hours to allocate to your remaining tasks. Figure 5-2 shows you what the day already looks like.
Step 2: Create Today's To Do List
Now you create the list of to do items that are on your plate for today and calculate how much work (in hours) you have. Normally, you'd have some items already scheduled. You'll add any others that come to mind (that brilliant idea you had while walking through the parking lot), and if this is the first day of the month, you'll process your life-goals list (more about that in Chapter 7).
Since this is the first day you're using The Cycle, your to do list is blank. However, you can add some items that you know you have to do. Write them in your own shorthand, not full sentences. When you write it into the to do list, it looks like Figure 5-3.
As you can see, the shorthand only has to be enough for you to understand the task. You can record as many other details, such as phone numbers, usernames, etc., as you think are necessary, but try to keep it succinct.
If you have voice mail waiting, this is a good time to listen to it and transcribe any messages. I tend to write down an item for each message that I get, even if the message requires no action on my part. In that case, I can mark the item as 'done' right then and there. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment.
How much work do you have today? Use a column in the to do list to write an estimate of the time each item will take (Figure 5-4), and then total the estimates.
In this example, you can count the hours items (marked with an 'h') quickly to see there are eight, and then total up the fractional parts (unlabeled times are in minutes) and find that they total one hour. Therefore, the amount of work on your to do list totals nine hours.
Step 3: Prioritize and Reschedule
Next, you mark each item based on a simple priority system. I tried a priority system in which I ranked items from 1 to 100, and it was too complicated. A friend pointed out that there are really three priorities in life:
The deadline is today, and it really needs to be done now.
The deadline is soon.
Everything else
For the sake of simplicity, let's call these A, B, and C tasks, and that's how you will mark the tasks on your priority list. Figure 5-5 shows you how I have prioritized tasks for this first day.
Dealing with overflow
You have nine hours of tasks on your to do list, but only six hours of time to spend working on them. How can you handle the overflow?
The wrong thing to do is to stay late. Your social life is valuable. You don't do your employer any favors by ignoring social time and becoming irritable. You work better when you eat right, get plenty of sleep regularly, exercise, and participate in nonwork activities.
The easiest thing to do is to shift the C priorities and enough of the B priorities to the next day. That's one of the benefits of having one to do list assigned to each day. We can move items around. Here are some ideas that work well:
Move lowest-priority tasks to the next day. This is the most common choice for me. The reason you set priorities is because everything can't be done at once. Therefore, you take a few of the C and B priorities and move them to tomorrow.
Bite off today's chunk. Bite off a more manageable portion of the task and move the rest to tomorrow. For example, installing the new tape backup system involves many, many steps. Today you can unpack it and make sure all the parts are there and that the cables will reach. Tomorrow you can recruit a volunteer to help lift the system into the rack and install it. The next day you can configure the drivers.
