Our resident time-management guru Mark Kirby starts the first of his regular columns with hints and tips on ways to better manage your time. The techniques Mark uses have enabled him to achieve far more in the week than he ever thought possible, and enabled him to feel more relaxed when not working…

If your office is often in a mess, you forget to do laundry, you have heaps of tasks piled up with no easy way of organising them, I’ll have lots suggestions to help you out.

To begin with I’m going to list three resources which I have found very useful for improving the way I work.

1 - The book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen

Getting Things Done is the so-called productivity bible that lots of people, especially in the web industry, have been raving about. It can be quite hard to follow, and I don’t agree with everything in it, but there are certainly some excellent concepts have been really good starting points for organising myself. I recommend a skim read, and then a more in depth one if you think its for you. There’s lots of concepts in here that are discussed on the web also, and I’ll be explaining how I’ve adapted some of the ideas on this blog.

2 - The book “4-hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris

The 4-hour Work Week is a very entertaining read, and proposes some big and highly questionable lifestyle changes. At its core however are some truly superb methods of reducing the time it takes to do dull repetitive tasks, and freeing up time to work on projects that mean more to you. Like Getting Things Done, there are concepts in this book that formed the basis of some of my most useful time saving techniques, so I’ll be covering this in more detail on this blog later. Please note - this book is not available in the UK until April 2008.

3 - The web application “Remember The Milk”

“Remember The Milk” is a fantastic free application which lets you record things you need to do over the coming weeks and has many ways of reminding you to do them, including email alerts and texts. If you have an iPhone there is an iPhone app you can use for $25 a year, and if not, its easy to print stuff out and carry it with you. I urge you to sign up and give it a go, I’ll be talking more about this app later on this blog as well.

Hopefully you’ll have some luck with those, as they alone will help you a great deal. Next time I’ll be talking about how I use “remember the milk” to get the most out of it.

photo credit: °Florian