I used to have a very good way of managing my own time.

I had a list in my head and every now and again I’d remember stuff that I needed to do and I’d do it. Don’t get me wrong, I always did my PM documentation but just didn’t manage my own tasks in the same way.

This made me a pretty good intuitive project manager and thankfully my memory was good enough to pull it off.

Then I got older…a little more forgetful..and I managed bigger projects… and more people. I progressed to writing my lists down.

My lists got too big, and my working life got too mobile so I progressed to using outlook. DOH - that didn’t work. I ended up just staring at a screen of red tasks. My husband swears by Outlook (so each to their own) but for me it just didn’t have enough manual dexterity to it.

Meanwhile, my personal life was getting pretty complicated. Moving cities, buying a house etc so I started keeping lists on my phone and tasks in my diary.

Then I started managing my own business…

I thought I had things fairly under control until one day I realised I had a list on my phone, a list on basecamp, a list on tactile AND a list on each of my many desks and…it went on!

I didn’t want to go so far as to say that lists didn’t work for me anymore but clearly something had to give.

It helped when I got my own desk. Just one solitary desk to manage, on which I could keep just one solitary piece of paper with one master list of tasks.

Then I realised one day that I had 45 tasks on my list and they were all due that day. So the nice concise list I had started with, was now spilling from a page of A4 onto post-its that stuck to my coffee cup and threatened to escape down the table-leg out into the corridor.

“This isn’t very Agile” I thought to myself.

Whilst pondering on Agile, I started to wonder why I had spent a great many years trying to manage my own time in a completely different way to the way in which I managed my team’s.

And then it hit me; I had been managing my own time in a soul destroying way. There was a chunk of time allocated (9 - 6pm) and I had to fill it with “stuff”. I was making endless lists that could have gone on forever (and what’s more), even if I came to the end of the list, if it wasn’t 6pm yet - I WOULD JUST KEEP GOING!

Like an Agile team with lots of Sprint Tasks but no Sprint Goal, I was just aimlessly churning out “stuff” until the customer (i.e. me) said that they were satisfied. As I’m quite hard to please, this would sometimes end up being 4am in the morning. So in fact, I wasn’t very good at time-boxing either!

Finally, I realised the power of goals. Every day, just one - and if that goal got done, my day was done too.

So now I have a goal in my head and every now and again I remember stuff that I need to do to complete my goal and I just do it. I cross it off my considerably smaller written list which was created not as a memory aid, but purely for the purpose of being able to triumphantly scribble it out.

I used to have a very good way of managing my own time. Now I don’t manage time at all… just my own expectations.

Read Timothy Ferris author of the 4 hour work week, on “why bigger goals are best and more achievable” here

I don’t proport to be the author of this idea of concentrating on goals rather than tasks and have almost certainly nicked it from Harvard. Three rather than one is certainly more ambitious and I find 2/3 often occurs. But if you (like me) don’t like failure, imagine the other two as back up “should have” goals Read more here