Every time someone thanks me for all the blogging, podcasting, vlogging and that other stuff I actually do for living, they can’t hold back but ask: “I don’t know where you find time to do it all!”; Now as much as I try to bite my tongue and not say “Perhaps you should not have freeones as your home page”; I politely thank them and walk away. 

Honestly, most people just have no respect for their time. Karl Palachuk has spoken and written on many occasions about how every minute of his day has to be accountable. Howard Cunningham has a similar procedure that only applies to business.

Last year I made a committment to myself to spend less time working. I’ve been able to cut down my workdays from 20 hours a day to about 6 but unless you’re fluent in PHP and PowerShell it just doesn’t apply to you. I challenged myself to spend at least hour a day automating the tasks I was doing, even if that meant I couldn’t keep my ETA and SLAs alive. I figured that if I had the discipline to start gradually reducing the repetitive tasks from my life by the end of the month I’d have a lot more time on my hands and more time to do automation. So March was an interesting month to say the least.

Since Jan 1 I’ve done so many things that have virtually washed away hours of committment from my schedule. Most of these things can be done by anyone in any CxO-ish role. I’ve broken them down into categories:

• Outlook 2007
• Going Virtual
• Google, Google, Google
• Meetings, appointments and chats
• Karl Palachuk(tm) & Erick Simpson(tm)

Over the next five days I intend to talk about these five things that helped me reduce the time committment and stress related to running a business. I hope everyone reading this blog would share their own tips on their blogs so we can circle-blog the entire effort and give people that are struggling with time management some indication to the light at the end of that tunnel (or that suite or that office or that starbucks you spend 90% of the daylight hours hunched over a laptop)

Just to make it interesting, the winner gets a free Think Geek shirt and a Shockey Monkey shirt. Behold the power of the free shirt!

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