I am fre­quently asked how I man­age my time, and how I man­age to get so much done. I don’t know that my approach is right for every­one, but in case it helps here are some com­ments on how I work.

One of the main traps that peo­ple fall into is to do things that are urgent, but not nec­es­sar­ily impor­tant. They react to the urgency of dead­lines, and demands of col­leagues, and end up spend­ing a lot of time on things that don’t really mat­ter much. Often the most impor­tant things don’t have dead­lines and aren’t urgent. For aca­d­e­mics, the impor­tant things include writ­ing books and research papers (which are usu­ally not urgent), while the urgent things include attend­ing meet­ings and doing admin­is­tra­tive tasks (which are usu­ally not important).

I main­tain a “to do” list of every­thing that I am work­ing on or that needs doing. Each item has a dead­line (which may be a long time away) and a pri­or­ity. I try to work on things that are high pri­or­ity and spend as lit­tle time as pos­si­ble on things that are low priority.

I use an incred­i­bly use­ful free online tool to man­age my “to do” list called “Too­dledo”. Strange name, but a great tool. It allows items to have dead­lines and pri­or­i­ties. My to-do list inte­grates into Fire­fox with this add-in or into Chrome with this exten­sion. Then my list shows in a side­bar on my browser (Fire­fox) or in a drop down list (Chrome) and it is easy to add tasks, change dead­lines, mark items as com­pleted, etc. The tasks can be ordered by pri­oirty or by dead­line, or by some mix­ture of the two. Because I usu­ally have my browser open, this keeps my to-do list vis­i­ble as well and reminds me what I should be work­ing on. There is also a handy iPhone app so that I carry my to do list wher­ever I am.

In addi­tion to the to-do list, here are some addi­tional ideas that I find helpful.

• Work in an unclut­tered, tidy envi­ron­ment. I find I work bet­ter if the envi­ron­ment is neater. I’m sure this says some­thing about my personality!
• Have a struc­tured day with time for breaks, meals, exer­cise, etc. Work­ing for long hours with­out a break tends to lead to less being achieved, not more.
• Exer­cise. If I don’t get enough exer­cise, I find I work slower.
• Get enough sleep. If I’m tired, I work slower. Stay­ing up late to fin­ish some­thing is a sign that you are not plan­ning properly.
• Don’t waste time. For exam­ple, I almost never watch tele­vi­sion (the only real excep­tion is that I some­times watch cricket dur­ing summer).
• Set real­is­tic dead­lines. I’m not very good at this — I tend to imag­ine I can get things done more quickly than I really can.

I’m sure other peo­ple have other approaches which work for them. But this is what I do, and it seems to work for me.