Just finished listening to Julie Morgenstern’s “Time Management from the Inside Out” CD’s.

A lot of overlap with her “Organizing from the Inside Out”, which I read a few months ago. For example, it centers around her “SPACE” formula (Sort, Purge, Assign, Containerize, Equalize). It’s interesting how the the principles of time management are surprisingly analogous to the principles of space management. Both involve purging unnecessary items, trying to fit items into a limited space, and trying to put like items together in “containers”.

Some of the ideas are very consistent with the GtD philosophy, but the main difference is that Morgenstern’s approach is much more structured than GtD – e.g.: she encourages scheduling all of your todos, as if they were appointments, something which David Allen claims doesn’t work because life changes too fast. My gut instict tells me that scheduling individual todos (action items) is too structured for my life and work, but that she is on to something with her concept of “time maps” – blocking our certain hours of your day for certain types of tasks. David Allen encourages you to put your next actions into the proper contexts, but he doesn’t give any guidance on when you should switch between contexts (e.g.: “make phone calls when you’re at a phone” but no advice about when or how often you should be on the phone). Morgenstern takes that extra step and encourages you to divide up your day into blocks like “phone calls”, “family time”, “self time”, etc… If you’re like me and thrive on structure, then this is ideal.

I think my favorite title from her actually is her latest, “Making Work Work”. That has more practial advice about creating an environment with less interruptions (e.g.: limit how much time you spend on email, etc…), which I think is key in an engineering environment.