Austin Property Talk

10 Tips for Time Management in a Multi-Tasking World

A good article that came to my email inbox this morning on time management.  However, I guess I broke one of the biggest rules here - working on the most important task before checking email - oops. 

Time management is one of those skills no one teaches you in school but you have to learn. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you can't organize information well enough to take it in. And it doesn't matter how skilled you are if procrastination keeps you from getting your work done.

Younger workers understand this, and time management is becoming a topic of hipsters. One of the most popular blogs in the world is Lifehacker, edited by productivity guru Gina Trapani, and her forthcoming book by the same name is a bestseller on Amazon based so far on pre-orders.

In today's workplace, you can differentiate yourself by your ability to handle information and manage your time. "Careers are made or broken by the soft skills that make you able to hand a very large workload," says Merlin Mann, editor of the productivity blog 43 Folders.

So here are 10 tips to make you better at managing your work:

Fancy Hands

I always have my eye out for cool ideas.  I subscribe to a lot of blogs in my Google Reader, but I'll admit I rarely devote the time necessary to get through them many of them.  There is one blog/website in particular that I check on a regular basis.  Daily Dashboard is a website by Dean Jackson and his wife Sony.  Its geared toward real estate agents but they usually post interesting content. 

This morning I went over there to see what they have posted recently and I came across a post that Dean wrote yesterday about Fancy Hands.  Fancy Hands (@fancyhands)?  What is Fancy Hands?

Fancy Hands promotes itself as "Personal Assistants in the Cloud"  Okay, still what the heck is that?

Well, Fancy Hands is a new start up side project by Ted Roden that provides a blanket virtual assistance service for all tasks menial.  For an introductory rate of $30 per month, the team of assistants at Fancy Hands will take 15 small tasks off of your plate.  These tasks can range from calling to make a dinner reservation to scheduling car service to researching Fantasy Baseball statistics for your upcoming draft.  You just send Fancy Hands an email with instructions for what you want to accomplish and they take it off your plate.  This frees your time up to spend on something more important. 

"It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore." That is how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands.  

When you think about it, that is pretty cool.  For example, on my way home late last night, my Service Engine Soon light came on.  I have been holding off on getting service done on my Infiniti because I don't want to take it into the dealership anymore.  They always take one of my arms and one of my legs when I'm done servicing my car there.   Maybe Ill get fancy hands to research a local shop that can service my car in the next day or two because I don't have the time or the desire to research it myself.   

In his post on Daily Dashboard, you'll see that Dean asked for some help in finding a local store that had an IPAD in stock for him to pick up over the weekend.   The response that he got was pretty neat and probably saved him a good 30-45 minutes of research.   And that is just one task.  He gets 14 more.  My guess would be that this service wont be this affordable for long but it might be worth giving a test run at such a low introductory price. 

Here is another review/article about Fancy Hands.