The key message of this book is that appropriate planning and prioritisation is the key to managing time effectively.

Limoncelli offers a system called ‘The Cycle’ which is simple to implement straight away and tune to your workplace and methods. Small changes to your daily plan will result in more time to finish interesting projects. The key messages I took from this book are :

• Do not check your email in the morning as your first job.
• Do spend the first five minutes of the day planning your todo list for the day. This replaces your ‘global’ todo list and should contain the ‘right’ amount of work for one business day. Plan time against each todo item, and then prioritise it. If the work cannot be done, ‘manage’ your todo list and move the item to tomorrow.
• Do use a single personal organiser, and carry it with you everywhere. If using an electronic organiser, check different calendaring software, you may find Date Book 5 better than the built in software for the cycle.
• Keep your organiser by your bed when you sleep – if you remember something important which prevents you from sleeping, you can record it and rest more easily (this helps me enormously).
• Document procedures in a step by step manner. When the process is documented it can be automated or delegated. A wiki is a simple way to keep documents up to date and give other people access to the documentation.
• Always use a ticket/job system to record work.
• Break projects with several stages into each stage for your todo list.
• Respond to user requests. This might be done automatically by your software.
• Email is a single touch mechanism. Receive an email, reply to it, or create a job in your todo list.
• Manage interruptions – if you work in a team, share the role of handling inbound calls, tickets, and monitoring alerts

This system helps you meet deadlines, and also create better deadline estimates.