On mindful time management...

One of the things I'm not great at, sometimes, is making sure that the things I need to get done actually get done, at least in a reasonably efficient and coherent way. So, I like to experiment with ideas that I pick up along the way.

One idea, which I really liked the sound of, was to plan tomorrow today. The theory is that your sub-conscious gets to work overnight on the the tasks ahead, giving you a head start on the next day's tasks.

So I had a go. I sat down one evening and made a detailed list of what I needed to do the next day and filled in the time in my diary for when I was going to do it. Then I read it through, handed it across to my subconscious and toddled off to bed.

The next day was a conspicuous failure. I spent pretty much all of it losing focus on the thing I was supposed to be doing at that moment, because I was thinking about the next thing that was coming up oh-so-soon. And as for the subconscious having processed these tasks? Well, it seemed more like good old subconscious had looked at the list and the filled out calendar, complimented conscious on having got on top of everything and worked away on other things during the hours of darkness. And the result was an increase in general frazzlement and a reduction in productivity.

Which wasn't entirely the intended outcome.

However, all was not lost. I changed my approach, with the idea of attempting to hook the subconscious' interest. That evening, I spent 10 minutes glancing at the appointments in the calendar, the to-do list in Outlook and the emails in the inbox. And left it that.

Result? Well, if not triumph, at least a real improvement. I woke up with a sort of innate sense of where the day was going to go. Things got done. And, instead of a crammed, intense looking diary, space was there to spend time in between tasks talking with the team about their ideas and workloads and all the rest.

Which suggests that the trick, if there is one, is not to try to create a clear, delineated, formalised plan for the brain to work on overnight, but to present the generality of what needs doing. I sort of visualise it as presenting a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces and waking up with something that's pretty close to a complete picture.

So, anyone else who has that slightly daunted feeling that comes with an apparently insurmountable to-do list, I can recommend ten minutes after work just noting what needs to be done and what needs attention.