I don’t know if it’s possible to say anything truly new about time management. The problem for me has always been figuring out what’ll work for me. There must be a zillion books out there on the subject, but who has time to read ’em?

After I got laid off from my day job and decided not to get another job, I thought I’d have all the time in the world. Think again! The To Do List expands to fill up all available time, and then some.

But here is something that I learned a long time ago: You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Or if you do improve it, you might not know it. And if you know it, you won’t know how MUCH you’ve improved it.

So this is something I started doing about a year and a half ago: I track my time.

When I walk into my office in the morning, I start a new time log for the day. I have a pad of paper and I tear off the sheet from yesterday and start with a clean sheet.

At the top, I write something that looks like this: “Time Log: M, 8/20/2007”.

Below that, I write the starting and stopping times for every major task throughout the day. By “major task” I mean things that take more than a couple of minutes. I don’t track my time spent eating (unless I’m doing something “productive” while eating, which I try not to do, because mealtimes should be fun times).

When I finish working on a task, I calculate how much time I spent on it. I do that all day and then record the total time spent on various tasks in my planner. (I don’t actually use my planner for planning. I use it for keeping track of where my time went.)

You may be asking what good it does to track your time? Well, how many times have you asked yourself where all your time went this week? If you track your time, then you know. And that will often suggest things you need to do more of. Or less of. It will also teach you how much work you can expect out of yourself. We all have limitations. When I see that I’ve been working 12 hours a day all week, I know that I’m working too hard and I’m going to soon get sick of it and start wasting time. I can’t and shouldn’t work 12 hours a day, week in and week out.

Looking at my time log for today, I see that I worked on two important projects for about the amount of time I had planned. I also got sideswiped by an emergency project that had to be done TODAY, right away. That took an unplanned hour and forty minutes, which is why I didn’t get everything on my list done today. Oh well, it had to be done. Crises happen.

I also see that I had a block of time mapped out for a fun project. I changed my mind when that time block came up and used the time to watch a movie instead. The movie was fun, but it was just different from what I had planned.

Despite the changes to my schedule, it was a good day. That raises an important question. What makes a “good day?” How do you measure whether it was “good” or not? And how do you make sure that most days are good days? I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Several of you had excellent comments on my post from yesterday.

Mick noted that he uses GMail as a free online storage system. He just zips up various files (so they’ll be tidy and small) and mails them to his own GMail account. I know a number of other novelists who do the same. It’s a good idea.

Lynda asked what I meant about buying back my book from my publisher. When a book goes out of print, the publisher is relinquishing all rights to publish the book. (It’s actually a little more complicated than that–there is often some sort of time span during which they can bring it back into print, depending on how your contract is written.) They will typically offer you any remaining books in their warehouse at dirt-cheap prices. They will also offer the art-work and the electronic files of the text, in case you want to republish the book yourself. This generally costs around 100 bucks, and is worth it, in my opinion. This was what I was referring to in my post.

Karri claimed that DOUBLE VISION is just about the best book ever written. Thanks, Karri! I guess I owe you a fee for that endorsement. It was a fun book to write, and I hope it’s a fun book to read. One of the main characters has Asperger’s Syndrome. One of my writer friends is a clinical psychologist, and after she read DOUBLE VISION, she asked if I have Asperger’s. I took that as a compliment. I don’t have Asperger’s, but I know perfectly well what it’s like to not be a Normal.

A few closing thoughts on organization: I’m not naturally very organized. I made it through high school and halfway through college living my life pretty randomly. When I hit upper-division physics in college, I had a professor for several courses who was probably the most meticulous person alive. And I learned from him that if I was going to get anywhere in physics (or anything else) I had to learn how to write neatly, to take good notes, to put dates on papers so I’d know when they were written, and all sorts of other things.

I’m still not great at keeping things tidy. My desk is NEVER all squared away and clean, but I’ve learned to periodically take a few minutes and put away some of the mess. If I don’t, then inevitably my productivity goes down and down until I can’t get anything done.

Those of you who listened to the “Clean Up Your Act” teleseminars that I did with Allison Bottke know that Allison is super-good at keeping things organized, and that she doesn’t come by it naturally–she has ADD and is totally right-brained and if she didn’t constantly stay on top of the mess, she wouldn’t be able to get ANYTHING done. Allison is a poster girl for the idea that good organization can be learned by anybody.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk some about time-management, which seems to be a common bugaboo for most writers. For the past year, I’ve been working hard at learning to use my time effectively, and I have a few thoughts on the matter.

Thanks to everyone who wished me and my wife happy anniversary yesterday. We did have a good one.

I promised to talk today about how to manage all those pesky drafts of your novel on your hard drive. It’s really not complicated. The idea is that you always want to be able to get hold of any version of your novel, and yet not have the old stuff clogging up the new.

I organize my hard drive as follows. In my Documents folder, I have three main subfolders:
1) Archives
2) Friends
3) Personal

The Archives folder contains stuff from years ago–anything that I’m not currently working on or likely to work on ever again. I back this up to CD periodically, and also back it up to my iPod every few months, or whenever I move a bunch of new data to it. This folder doesn’t change very often, and the only changes I make are to add new stuff.

The Friends folder contains anything that friends send me that needs short term storage. Mostly, it contains electronic versions of novels. I don’t back this up at all. My feeling is that people only send me stuff that they have backed up all over the place. And it’s usually just rough drafts of things.

The Personal folder contains all my current stuff, including email, financial stuff, web sites, internet products, consulting jobs. And it also contains a special folder called Books. This is a very important folder. It holds all the books I’ve ever written and anything I’m working on now.

I back up the Personal folder to my iPod, but then I also back up certain of the other folders elsewhere as redundant backup. For example, I have a folder named “Critical Records” that contains all my financial stuff, such as tax records, etc. This gets backed up to a USB Flash Drive that I carry in my pocket all the time. I also back it up to online storage.

The Books folder is quite large, and is backed up to online storage. When I start a new book, I create a new folder inside the Books folder. For example, for my novel DOUBLE VISION, I have a folder named “Double Vision”. Inside that folder, I have a bunch of other folders.

One of those folders is named “Snowflake” and contains a Snowflake analysis of the book. (Actually, several Snowflake documents, since I produce several, and I update them as the story develops.)

There is another folder named “Proposal” which contains every version of the proposal for the book.

There is another folder named “Research” where I save all the online research for the book, including web archives, pictures, spreadsheets, pictures, etc.

Now we get to the point of today’s blog post. There are also several folders named “Draft 1”, “Draft 2”, etc. Each of these contains a series of Word documents. I use a naming convention that will make sure the files are in order. For this book, the naming convention is: “Double Vision Part1.doc”, etc. The book has four parts, so there are four documents.

Some of the folders have comments that my critiquers sent me for that draft. For example, The “Draft 4” folder has the Word document for the draft, along with a couple of folders for the two critiquers who reviewed this draft.

Now that the book is out of print, there is a new folder named “Out of Print Docs” that contains the electronic version of the text that I bought back from the publisher. If and when I decide to republish this book using some sort of POD service, I can easily find the files I need.

Here is my procedure for doing revisions. When I write the first draft, I write it straight through and save the files in the “Draft 1” folder. When it’s done and I’m ready to start revising, I duplicate the folder, rename the copy to be “Draft 2” and delete any files inside it that are irrelevant to the task of revision. Then I just start revising the Word files in “Draft 2,” secure in the knowledge that I have a copy of “Draft 1” elsewhere.

As noted, I backup my Books folder to multiple places–my iPod and my online storage service. When I leave the house, if I’m not taking my laptop, I take the iPod. If the house burns down, I’ll have either the laptop or the iPod AND I’ll have the Books info redundantly saved online somewhere. Call me over-cautious, but my books are important to me, and I want to make sure that it’ll take an Xtremely bad run of luck to lose all copies.

I spent a few icky hours this weekend going through my email in-box, trying to sort through all the stuff that came in since early 2006 that I never dealt with.

Yikes! It’s embarrassing how many emails just fell through the cracks and I never responded to. In my defense, I do answer 98% or 99% of my email quickly. But I get an enormous amount–hundreds per day, if you count all the separate emails in the digests of the numerous email loops I subscribe to.

What goes wrong sometimes is that somebody will email me with a request that takes more than a minute or two to answer. So I move on to the next one, fully intending to answer it later “when I have more time”. Often, I do get back to it.

But sometimes, I don’t. What happens is that more email comes in, and the one I intended to answer drifts up past the top of my in-box.

When that happens, it’s trouble, because if it’s out of sight, it’s out of my mind, probably forever. As I sorted through the email from the last 18 months, I came across any number of old requests that I had lost track of. A lot of people must think I’m too snooty to answer my email.

I’m embarrassed. But I’m also human.

My goal is to get better at dealing with email this year. One way to deal with the problem I described above is that I’ve created another email folder labeled “Answer Today”. My plan is to never leave email in my in-box. As it comes in, I’ll either deal with it immediately or move it to the “Answer Today” folder. Then when the daily work is over, I can get to those things and answer them. Hopefully today. So nothing should get lost in a bulging in-box with thousands of items in it.

That’s the theory anyway. I’ll let you know how it works.

That raises a question for you all. What tricks do you use to tame the email monster? How do you handle the flood?