I am a Time Management Junkie

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?