Time Management

“Elephants” are those huge tasks that feel too intimidating to start — launching a side project, getting certified, finally building that website. Here’s a practical system for tackling them one bite at a time.

A daily schedule is one of the most powerful planning techniques out there — right up there with the classic to-do list. It gives you real control over your time and helps you make the most of every hour. But when it comes to actually building one, most people hit a wall. Which tasks go where? What order should they be in? How much time do you give each one?

When you learn what the most expensive productivity advice in history cost, you’ll want to know both the advice itself and how to give advice that valuable.

If you can’t remember what you did by Friday, keep missing deadlines because of “surprises,” and dream about the gym but “don’t have time” — this one’s for you. We break down why the week is the perfect planning horizon and show you exactly how to build a working system in SingularityApp. Bonus: cheat sheets and a quick-start algorithm.

Time management techniques tend to require you to have margins in your schedule.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The term was born when an experiment by American aerospace engineer Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr. failed. He wanted to measure how many Gs people would experience in a newly designed airplane. To find out, a special sled with a rocket engine was fired up and abruptly stopped. Unfortunately, the sensors did not show its true G force as the technicians had installed them wrong.