How to get everything done: time management without heroics
The honest answer to "how do I get everything done?" is that you don't. But you can get the important things done and stop ending each day feeling like it slipped past you. Rules, methods and books, no heroics or all-nighters required.
Your to-do list is longer than the day, and the day still has 24 hours, no matter how many people have asked for more. Somewhere between work, school, home and sleep there's supposed to be room for an actual life, and somehow it doesn't fit.
Let's be honest up front: you can't get everything done. If you could, nobody would be searching for this article. But you can get the important things done without cutting into your sleep, and end the day without feeling like it slipped through your fingers. That's what time management is for.
What is time management?
Time management is the skill of deciding what to spend your time on, and then following through. It isn't about squeezing more tasks into a day. It's about choosing which tasks get into the day at all.
In Four Thousand Weeks, British journalist Oliver Burkeman points out some simple arithmetic: if you live to 80, you get a little over four thousand weeks. There will always be more things you want to do than weeks to do them in. So good time management is about choosing, not about speed.
Why you never get everything done
We're bad at guessing how long things take
Psychologists Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked college students to predict when they'd finish their honors thesis. On average, the students said 34 days. It actually took almost 56. Only about 30% finished by their own estimate. Even their "if everything goes as badly as it possibly can" estimate (49 days) was more optimistic than reality. This is called the planning fallacy, and nearly everyone has it.
Work expands to fill the time available
In 1955, historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a half-joking essay for The Economist that opened with a now-famous observation: work expands to fill the time available for its completion. That's how Parkinson's law was born. His example is an elderly lady with nothing but time who spends an entire day sending one postcard to her niece: an hour to find the card, another to find her glasses, then the address, the writing, and twenty minutes deciding whether she needs an umbrella for the walk to the mailbox.
A task without a deadline sprawls in exactly the same way.
We say yes to everything
Every yes to someone else's request is a no to something of your own. You just don't say the second part out loud. If other people's urgent tasks fill your day, there's nothing left for your own important ones.
How to get everything done: 10 time management tips
1. Get everything out of your head and onto one list
David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, likes to say that your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. Whatever you keep in your head pops up at the worst possible moment, usually around 3 a.m. You need one list, not ten sticky notes scattered around the apartment. If you're in Telegram all day anyway, your to-do list can live right there.
2. Pick three main tasks for the day
A list of twenty items isn't a plan, it's a menu. The night before or first thing in the morning, choose one to three tasks that would make the day a success even if nothing else moves. How to put that kind of plan together in five minutes, with examples and a template, is covered in our guide on how to plan your day.
3. Start with the task you dread most
Brian Tracy calls this eating the frog, which is also the title of his book, Eat That Frog! Do the hardest task first, while you still have the energy and before it collects a layer of anxiety. After that, the rest of the day feels light.
4. Build in a buffer
Since everyone underestimates how long things take, give every task more time than it seems to need. For those thesis writers, reality ran 1.6 times longer than the forecast, so "however long it seems, plus half" is a modest but honest correction. And leave empty gaps between meetings and tasks: a day scheduled end to end falls apart at the first delay.
5. Set deadlines, even for yourself
Parkinson's law has a useful flip side: a task with a close deadline has less room to sprawl. Make the deadline specific, "Thursday, 6 p.m.", not "sometime this week". And if you keep blowing through your own deadlines, you can attach a price to them. That's how a commitment device works.
6. Separate the important from the urgent
Urgent things demand attention loudly, and important things wait quietly. If the important stuff never makes it onto your schedule, a month later you'll find that all your time went to putting out fires. The Eisenhower matrix sorts your tasks in about a minute.
7. Batch the small stuff
Calls, email, paying bills: five-minute tasks, but each one pulls you out of your real work. Group them into one batch and knock them out in one sitting, for example right after lunch.
8. Protect time for what matters
Hard work needs long stretches without interruptions: you can't do anything serious between two notifications. In Deep Work, Cal Newport recommends blocking out time for focused work in your calendar ahead of time, just like meetings. Turn off notifications for those blocks and leave your phone in a different room. If a full hour sounds heroic, start with 25 minutes using the Pomodoro Technique.
9. Don't steal time from sleep
This doesn't sound like productivity advice, and that's a mistake. In an experiment by Hans Van Dongen and his colleagues, participants spent two weeks with only six hours a night in bed. By the end, their attention had suffered as much as after one or two nights with no sleep at all, and they barely noticed the decline. The hours you save on sleep get spent later on slow, scattered work.
10. Look at everything once a week
Another habit from Getting Things Done is the weekly review. Once a week, say on Sunday evening, go through your list: what's done, what's no longer relevant, and what matters most next week. It takes half an hour, and on Monday morning you won't have to figure out where to begin.
Time management for working parents
With a baby, on parental leave, or when you're carrying both a job and a household, the rules above still apply, with one adjustment: your daily plan should be more modest than feels right. One or two important tasks done is a good day, not a reason to beat yourself up.
- Cut tasks into 15 to 20 minute chunks. A long quiet stretch may never come, but a short one almost always does.
- Lower the bar. The three-course dinner and the house straight out of a catalog can wait. The important things done well beat everything done perfectly.
- Share the load. A shared list in the family chat saves you from the endless "do we have milk?" and from the feeling that everything rests on one person.
- Batch the housework. One load of laundry for everything, one grocery run for the week, one cooking session for two days.
Time management techniques at a glance
| Technique | The idea | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Getting Things Done (David Allen) | every task goes on a list, plus a weekly review | people with lots of small tasks |
| Eat the frog (Brian Tracy) | the least pleasant task comes first | people who put off what matters |
| Pomodoro Technique | 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of rest | people who struggle to get started |
| Eisenhower matrix | sort tasks by importance and urgency | people swamped by everyone else's emergencies |
| Time blocking | schedule tasks in your calendar like meetings | people whose day keeps getting chopped up |
| Two-minute rule | if it takes two minutes, do it now | people whose small tasks keep piling up |
The best technique is the one you're still using a week later. Start with one, and add the next once the first has turned into a habit.
Time management books
- Getting Things Done by David Allen. The classic on collecting every task in one system so you can stop carrying them around in your head.
- Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy. A short book about tackling the most important thing first.
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. Its "Put First Things First" chapter made the important-versus-urgent grid famous.
- Deep Work by Cal Newport. On focused work without distractions.
- Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The antidote to all the others: you can't get everything done, and that's good news.
Time management in Telegram
In StarDo, tasks sort themselves into Today, Tomorrow and Later. Each one gets a deadline, a priority and a reminder, and recurring tasks like a morning workout can be set to come back daily or only on weekdays. For the frog you're tempted to put off for the fifth time, there's a promise in Telegram Stars: once it's attached, putting the frog off costs more than eating it. We've looked separately at when money motivates and when it only gets in the way.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get everything done without wearing myself out?
Not by cutting into sleep and rest: short sleep quietly slows you down, and the hours you save go to waste. Pick one to three main tasks a day, do the rest if there's time, and leave empty gaps in your schedule. If the exhaustion doesn't go away even after rest, it may already be burnout.
Where do I start with time management?
With a single list. Dump every task into it, pick three main ones for tomorrow and give them deadlines. Add other techniques one at a time.
Why can't I get anything done even though I'm trying?
Usually for three reasons: you've planned more than you have time for, other people's urgent tasks outnumber your own important ones, and you're sleeping less than you need. Fixing even one of the three makes a difference.
You don't have to get everything done. It's enough to get the important things done every day, and within a month you'll see the difference.
Free, inside Telegram, nothing to install.