I've become keenly aware lately of how increasingly time-poor I seem to be. There simply aren't enough hours in the day! This is probably a fairly common story, especially for those of us who aren't satisfied with simply punching the clock 9-5. Realising this problem has undoubtedly been solved before, I started looking into patterns of time management. Jumping on the "Getting Things Done" bandwagon, I came across a couple of really good Google Talks which are at the end of this post.

Watching these videos, I got to thinking about techniques I had already used and suddenly the light bulb came on - Scrum! Perfectly obvious *cough*, right? It was one of those magical moments when you simply know intuitively that something is going to work, and then you get to relish the process of satisfying your curiosity as to how.

The simplest approach I could think of was to use a To-Do List, as follows:

To-Do Scrum

• Each day is a Sprint
• To-Do items not due today form the Product Backlog
• To-Do items due today form the Sprint Backlog
• Completed To-Do items are considered Done
• Overdue To-Do items are considered Failed Items and are re-prioritised
• Each morning take 10-15 minutes to do Sprint Planning
• Each evening take 10-15 minutes to do Sprint Review & Retrospective
• When completing a To-Do item take 5 minutes to do Stand Up

I'm also trying out the Pomodoro Technique to help reduce the multi-tasking and focus on single tasks in contiguous blocks. Not sure how comfortable I am with this yet - bit apprehensive about potentially excessive routine which could reduce flexibility. Probably just need to practice it a bit more and find the balance that works for me.

Trying out a new To-Do List on my iPhone - the new 2Do application. The tabbed categories feature is pretty slick - you can drag 'n drop items between them.