Handling Little Things and Managing Time
Someone in every business has to make sure the little things do not fall through the cracks. The devil is in the details. As a startup CEO, many of these little things often fall to me. They fall to me because I do not want the company’s main producers distracted by little things, or because I can knock them out more quickly than I can delegate them, or because they deal with sensitive matters that cannot be offloaded to regular employees.
I used to live by the fire-only policy. Just ignore stuff until it’s a fire, then spend your days putting out fires. Under constraints, that is sometimes the only way to operate.
However, the fire-only policy is draining, often results in fines, and can cause the company to miss out on opportunities.
Now I manage the little things much more efficiently. I use the Remember the Milk website to manage all things, both big and small. The app is light-weight and easy-to-use. There is a mobile version too, but I mainly use it on my laptop.
Little things get deadlines. Big things in progress get allocated days of work. Priorities rise to the top. Each day’s tasks are easy to see. Long-term ideas get into the list too, albeit without deadlines.
I always have Remember the Milk open in my browser and most of my work is driven by it, well at least my non-email work.
I also use it to keep track of ideas for this blog. At any point in time I have a dozen of potential future blog posts sitting in the queue. So I’m never at a loss about what to write each night.
How do you manage the little things?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
Kyle Porter
Calendar for meetings & trello for tasks. I’ll often boomerang myself emails into the future as well when I want to entirely forget about something until it’s due.
Lastly, for blog ideas I create WP drafts, although in retrospect, I rarely use them and write about what’s on my mind in the moment.