I am a Time Management Junkie
June 5, 2008
By: Spencer Rascoff
Author's Website: http://www.zillow.com
It’s true — I am a time management junkie. I have to be, since I literally have two jobs at Zillow — CFO and Vice-president of Marketing. Drew asked me to blog about how I keep my head screwed on straight, so here goes.
First let me say that the following description is very atypical. I’ve never met anyone else who stays organized this way. And it might not work for you, but it works well for me…
Like many people, I manage everything through Outlook. But instead of using “tasks” or offline “to do” lists, I manage everything though my calendar. I create meeting invites for myself to show what I need to do when. So it will say “12-12:30 blog on geekestate”. If 1230pm rolls around and I haven’t had time to do the task, I’ll move it out a few hours, or days, or weeks. At the end of the night I’ll usually have four or five meeting invites of tasks that I haven’t gotten done that day, so I move them out to the next day. I also have a lot of recurring appointments with myself (“blog” each day from 7-730am; “email” each day from 9-930am). It doesn’t mean that I’m really going to do that thing at that time, but it reminds me that I need to do it SOMEtime, and then I can just move the meeting to whenever I have time to do it. I also paste a lot of things in my meeting invites with myself. So for example, I might type in the notes section of the “blog” meeting invite a list of ideas of things that I want to blog about. I also paste emails into the invite itself — this is particularly helpful if there’s a recurring thread at work with a lot of emails on the topic. I take all of the relevant emails and paste them into a meeting invite with myself which says “figure out XXX” and then when that time increment comes up on my calendar, I deal with that particular issue. And in the meantime, I’ve gotten all of those emails out of my inbox.
My blackberry synchs meetings very well (even though it doesn’t reliably synch contacts or my email inbox), so I can move my meetings with myself around on my BB and they adjust immediately on my computer’s calendar.
Other things I do:
- Keep my email inbox very clean. I never go to bed if I have more than 30 messages in my inbox, and I never let Monday morning come around with more than 15 messages in my inbox (this is no small task, since I get over 400 emails a day).
- On my Blackberry, I’ve created dozens of autotext rules. It takes seconds to create one and it saves a ton of time. These rules allow you to type something and it spits out something else. Some examples that I’ve created: Z = Zillow, res = real estate, re = about, wo = without, w = with, r = are, bb = Blackberry, etc. Once you’ve added a few dozen of these, you’ll be able to type SO much faster on your Blackberry. It’s shocking that MSWord and MSOutlook haven’t added this functionality (or maybe they have and I don’t know about it). As a result, I actually type faster on my Blackberry than on my keyboard.
- I haven’t done a great job of creating email rules in Outlook. I only use a few reliably — one puts emails from a particular sender (a parents group that sends me dozens of emails a day) into a subfolder; and one that flags emails sent only to me and no one else. I’ve seen other people use a lot more email rules than this, and it seems to improve their efficiency, but I haven’t invested in that.
- Color code my calendar. I’ve created categories for meetings (e.g., “needs prep”, “phone call from office”, “phone call from car” etc) and I use those liberally to keep things organized.
- I recently switched the way in which I read all of my blogs from using my myyahoo page to using RSS into my email in Outlook. This was a fantastic move for me. I find it so much easier to stay on top of the ~50 blogs which I read via RSS into Outlook.
- Tabbed browsing in Firefox, and I open up every article or blog post that I want to read into my browser. So at any given time, there are usually 5-20 tabs open with things that I need to read.
How do you manage your time?
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Communication
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Comments
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Graeme K. Brown on June 5, 2008 10:11 am
I had no idea about the BB auto-text feature; I am going to set that up right away. I was actually missing the Pearl I owned previously b/c of it’s assumptive text abilities. Thanks much!
–Graeme
Ryan B From Zillow on June 5, 2008 11:45 am
Word and (by extension) Outlook have the “auto-text” feature you described. It is the feature called AutoCorrect. It is prepopulated with (c) converting into the copyright symbol and
turning into glyphical equivalents of the emoticon, but this is also how Word catches “fat finger” typing mistakes such as teh when you mean the. The apparently lesser known fact is that you can add your own shortcuts to this just as you described.
I’m also a convert to viewing my RSS feeds through Outlook 2007; that’s how this post was delivered to me for instance. This has the nasty habit of saving your feeds in your .ost exchange post office by default. If you are using an exchange server, this practice will very quickly chew up free space. To correct this create a new .pst and then drag and drop the RSS feeds there. Outlook is smart enough to continue subscribing to the feed, but you won’t be consuming potentially valuable server space with that GeekEstate Blog feed you’re constantly reading.
Joel on June 5, 2008 12:56 pm
Spencer, excuse the plug here. But if you’re a time-management junkie, you’re going to love what Merlin Mann will speak about at the keynote at Connect.
He has some fantastic tips on email management and dealing with the overflow of information.
Good article on email productivity in this month’s MacWorld too. You should check it out.
Spencer Rascoff on June 10, 2008 2:57 pm
Ryan,
Thanks for the tip. I didn’t know that MSFT had implemented this in Outlook and word. Good to know.
Debbie on June 13, 2008 1:05 pm
I could swear I wrote this article myself. My time management is quite similar. Especially my inbox; I tease our director of technology b/c my stomach turns when I see her inbox – over 2000 messages!
Glad to have the tip on AutoCorrect too. Thanks Ryan.
Nida on June 22, 2008 10:55 pm
Spencer, this is great! I knew there was more of us out there. I am a color coder myself. I definitely would recommend investing some time and creating more email rules in Outlook to filter and organize important vs not so important emails.
Miss Marlow on July 4, 2008 9:43 am
I must not be managing my time very well, as I’m just reading this a month after posting.
However, what little time management I am able to do is sift everything through my email program and create separate files for each client. It keeps everything in one place, and is accessible anywhere that way. On a side note, I also have a paper back-up of all my contacts in case I lose them. Because I have to use the Supra software to access keyboxes, I also am forced to use a TREO, and they don’t always synch correctly so when forced to do a hard restart, I have lost all my data. A plus with this software is that it records all the agents who have gone into my listings, with both an email address and phone number. If I’m on the go and want to get some feedback from a seller about a house that an agent just showed, I can contact them easily as the TREO will just phone them automatically.
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