Master Your Workday Now {review} & Time Management Tools

When I originally planned this post, I intended to round up some of my favorite tools and posts about Getting Things Done. (That’s a time-management system I’ve been using with a good deal of success for almost 7 years now.) But in the meantime I came across the book Master Your Workday Now, and I like it even better. (I guess late May/early June is a good time for me to find new time management tools! I first read GTD when Sophia was a new baby, and today is her birthday!) I still think GTD has some good foundational things to teach, and I am going to round up some of those posts, but I want to introduce you to MYN (stands for “Master Your Now”), too.

Master Your Workday Now

Master Your Workday Now has some things decidedly in common with Getting Things Done, and the two are fairly compatible. (Your to-do list “layout” will look slightly different from one to the other, but apart from that, they integrate quite nicely.) But it has some things that really set it apart – from everything else. Key concepts include:

a bottom-up approach – Many (most?) time management systems start with long-term goals and work down to the day-to-day. In theory this sounds great, but in actuality most of us intuitively recognize that doesn’t work. If we can’t get a handle on the day-to-day, we stay so busy putting out proverbial fires to have time for setting goals. This bottom-up approach doesn’t ignore goal-setting; it just recognizes this reality that we have to get a handle on our days so we’re free to get working on the bigger picture.
long-term to-do lists that don’t bog down the current list – The list system almost integrates a “tickler file” format, so you aren’t getting bogged down in tasks you know you aren’t ready to look at again yet. This is a bit different – and considerably easier – if you’re using a computerized system, but I’m a diehard pen-and-paper girl. (Whenever I’ve tried to go to a digital system it has just crashed-and-burned for me; it’s not my style.) In a pen-and-paper format, this does require some recopying sometimes, but it works.
next actions – like Getting Things Done, MYN emphasizes the inclusion of next actions in your to-do list. If the thing on your list is not the very next task, you’ll tend to procrastinate. It’s human nature. (This was one of the most revolutionary things for me when I discovered GTD.)
lack of artificial deadlines – We all know we just ignore artificially-imposed deadlines, anyway. That means they become meaningless – and we’re likely to overlook the real ones! So this system does not try to schedule every task or impose unnecessary deadlines on work, because that doesn’t fool our minds, anyway; it just creates mental clutter.
the “now” horizon – We all have a natural cutoff between what we innately/subconsciously consider important to occupy brain space at the moment and what can “wait ’til later.” Universally, this is somewhere between one and two weeks, so the MYN system sets it at 10 days. Nothing outside of that 10-day horizon is in the constantly-in-front-of-you, under-review task list.
newer items take priority – The newest items are designed to “float to the top” of the list in this system, because it seems to naturally be the case that “aging” tasks gradually decline in importance (as a general rule) rather than the other way around. (This especially makes sense when you consider the fact that probably a lot of them are as old as they are precisely because they weren’t as important as other items when they first appeared on the list. The more important items you already did and crossed off!)

Master Your Workday Now does not make use of contexts as GTD does. To a large extent, they simply aren’t needed because the inherent method of delaying tasks that aren’t for now is plenty effective (and less complex). However, I have found the concept of contexts to be helpful for household tasks that belong to a particular “day” of my week (Kitchen Day, Errand Day), etc. I can integrate these contexts into my list easily by simply prepending these tasks with a brief “tag” in all caps. That way I can scan for them – or scan past them – easily as the need arises.

I’m using a somewhat larger Day-Timer than I did in the past. It’s still wirebound – I like that because it eliminates some of the bulk – but it’s 5.5×8.5 instead of the approximate size of a checkbook. However, for some unfathomable reason, Day-Timer doesn’t seem to think users will ever need to add anything to these planners, so there are no add-in pages available. (Or punches. That’s what I really wish they’d make – a punch that would punch the edge for adding in to a wirebound book.)

So I had to hack my own, which is kind of a pain, but doable. I think I’ll leave that for another post, because this one is already getting long; for now it’s sufficient to know that I did. So here’s what I have in my Day-Timer:

Items that must be done today are written into today in the original planner page. Only things that truly must be done today. If my meat will be spoiled tomorrow, cooking it today is a legitimate “must do today” task. If I have an actual deadline on something for today, it’s a legitimate “must do today” task. Other sorts of things are not.
“Do now” tasks are on a long, thin, list-style sticky note from Day-Timer. These are things I would like to do today or within the next few days. These items are all on this side of the “now horizon.”
Further pages – that I printed light lines on and punched as I’ll describe in that future post – contain lists of tasks that I want to review/consider again “soon” (to be looked at weekly, at least), monthly, every three months, every six months, every nine months, or every year.
“Significant outcomes” (things I’m working on that are larger than regular tasks, but not quite as complex as “projects”) are noted at the top of the sticky-note list. (It has a separate little section at the top.)
My monthly goals are written into the “to do in [month]” page of my Day-Timer.

This system is pretty new for me, so we’ll see how it works over the long haul, but it “feels” pretty intuitive to me. The only thing that’s kind of a pain is integrating my email with everything else, but I struggle with that in any system because my general time-management system is analog. (There’s no way to “beam” those emails onto a paper list, unfortunately!)

The author comes across as very down-to-earth, and everything in the book makes a lot of sense. The only thing some readers might find a little “weird” is the section about “vision goals” in the “create” section of the book. (This is the “bigger picture” section.) It gets a little more touchy-feely overall than I’m comfortable with. BUT, even at that, the explanation always seems to come back around to something that just plain makes sense. Good stuff!

Anyway, let’s take a quick look at some tools I’ve used and/or posts I’ve written about Getting Things Done or other time management methods.