rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn’t the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem.

Randy Pausch on time management:
Here's what I know:
Time must be explicitly managed, like money.
You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.
Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things?
Develop a good filing system.
Rethink the telephone.
Delegate.
Take a time out.

Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.

The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?

You don't need more time, you need more focus.

Fewer projects. Fewer commitments. Fewer obligations. Fewer responsibilities.

Carefully choose what you commit to, then go all in.

It is not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do , it is that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.

The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In this existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project.
The operational aspect of time-structuring may be called programing. It has three aspects: material, social and individual. The most common, convenient, comfortable, and utilitarian method of structuring time is by a project designed to deal with the material of external reality: what is commonly known as work. Such a project is technically called an activity; the term “work” is unsuitable because a general theory of social psychiatry must recognize that social intercourse is also a form of work.

There are always distractions. So you better train yourself to manage your attention. Not your time. Because that’s the biggest mistake people make. We falsely believe that we can manage time. But time can’t be managed. The only thing you control is your attention.

if you want to become more productive, managing your time should take a backseat to how you manage your energy and attention.

Stop Managing Your Time. Start Managing Your Focus.

UNLESS YOU HAVE GOALS, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO MANAGE YOUR TIME EFFECTIVELY

Workaholism

Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all- nighters and sleep at the office. It’s considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work. Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn’t sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes — and it will — it’ll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crises. They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.

Workaholics make the people who don’t stay late feel inadequate for “merely” working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass- in- seat mentality — people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren’t really being productive. If all you do is work, you’re unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what’s worth extra effort and what’s not. And you wind up just plain
tired.

No one makes sharp decisions when tired.

In the end, workaholics don’t actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they’re wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to
the next task.

Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. And far fewer distractions, less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress.

here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things): Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things — and no more — that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.

Constantly trying to do more things — instead of the right things — leads to more stress, poorer quality of work, and lower productivity.