What are your best time management strategies, if so?
What about the best books about achieving goals and/or time management?
You guys can tell me, since I'm not an A+ grade success at this yet, though I am getting there.
Here's some things I've done that have helped so far:
Ranked lists of goals:
Most of us who are into this kind of thing have big lists of goals ranked by the importance of each, sometimes ranked over some timeframe we're trying to work within. (You've probably heard a lot of noise from success gurus about the importance of putting specifics, including timeframes, on goals in order to spur you toward putting the right level of energy and intensity into them and actually get them done, instead of being too vague about when you achieve them and letting time drag on.)
I used to make these lists of goals in my computers, but while I would knock some stuff off my list and achieve some successfully, there was a tendency to periodically forget about them for a stretch of days in a row sometimes.
Habit forming is a big deal so that you condition your subconscious to actually expect to keep doing a key habit so much that it becomes 2nd-nature rather than a temporary struggle to force disciplined action. After a period of time you literally get your brain and subconscious and physiology wired to crave certain positive things, like exercise and good habits (not just bad habits and negative compulsions, heheh).
Anyway... improvements so far that have worked for me:
Improvement #1: Using handcrafted journals
I started buying these nifty handcrafted journals so I'd actually have cool looking tangible objects staring me in the face, not just electronic files getting lost in the background of other computer interface windows (web browsers, brokerage apps, etc).
They actually make tons of these handcrafted journals that are leatherbound with cool designs and aren't very expensive. (E.g. there's some really nice ones for between $10-20 even though they look pretty fancy.
)Some even have artificially aged-looking paper so they look like ancient relics that D&D nerds would probably be very into, LOL.
I decided to use these rather than just loose sheets of paper, because (at risk of sounding pessimistic) I suspected I'd end up with various stacks of papers that I'd sometimes be temporarily forgetting about, similar to the computerized lists.
So far this definitely made a big difference.
Also, I think there's something to be said for filling a cool looking journal with records of actual successes.
Sometimes people who quit things actually made WAY more progress in various positive ways than they ever consciously gave themselves credit for, so it's a good idea to keep track of how much you've actually achieved, even if a lot of this kind of thing is too personal to want to share with anyone else since they might start breaking your balls (if you're the type who doesn't like that or is in a dangerous environment where it could actually lead to worse problems, heheh).
Improvement #2: Blackboards
I started using blackboard/whiteboard things on the walls of the mancave office, LOL.
Some guys use whiteboards, but I like "dark mode" in apps, so I bought this adhesive wall sticker stuff so my mancave office has these big blackboard sections where I write down the top stuff I'm working on and top goals.)
So I use those to write down top goals and other stuff that ideally should be staring me straight in the face as the top things to do. Having it staring/yelling right at you all over the walls where you do most of your work is pretty damned effective.
In the journals:
There's the question of logging time, "blocking out" time in advance, vs just setting daily goals/targets...
At first I was logging my time, but I have so many different areas I need to work on every day that it turned into a slog where I'd do a lot of record keeping but not necessarily hit every key area, and then if something urgent came up (e.g. great daytrade setups or uninhibited women demanding sex), I'd sometimes drop the ball and stop logging time altogether.
So I have switched to instead listing my ten main areas where I want to achieved something each day, and using that like a checklist.
Then if I miss any of the main 10 areas on one day, I highlight those on the next day's list to do first/earlier.
I like this much better than logging time, personally.
Some guys are so into building discipline in their habits that they actually block out their entire day's schedule and force themselves to operate inside those time windows. I actually used to do this when I was super-motivated and living in this concrete-block cell-like bachelor apartment in an old 1940s building in a US city, and I was in the best physical shape of my life at that time in my mid-20s. There is something to be said for the "extreme" of blocking out your time in advance, though the more extreme you are sometimes, the more likely it is human nature to stop persisting might come up, so maybe my currently lazier "daily checklist" is something to fall back on?
Improvement #3: Battery operated handheld timers
To stop myself from doing sub-par activities, I got these little battery operated timers so that when I'm indulging in some activity I ideally shouldn't put too much time into, I can stop myself by setting the alarm off and have an annoying beeping thing go off at me. (An example of this would be looking at Fintwit, which does help me as a trader even though I go based 95%+ off pure charts, but tends to be entertaining enough that you can get sucked into looking at it too much.) These timers are small and inexpensive so you can take them anywhere.
Re: an "allowance" for !@#$ing around doing whatever you want each day too:
It's way easier to get away with doing misc fun stuff if you're a stock trader or other 100% self-employed business (I have several as well as scaling into more trading). I used to actually have a problem of needing to force myself to stop working and actually relax so (not uncommon in driven self-employed types who actually injure their objective health because they don't rest enough), so there's something to be said for messing around in a totally relaxing way each day too.
One obvious way to do this is to set up a reward system for yourself so you can @!#$ around with some fun stuff you like maybe after achieving some specific other goals.
I am also doing way more fun stuff lately as a deliberate doorway into more physical relaxation, because one of my top goals is to build muscle so I can try to stay in great shape once I hit my 40s onward (and am also traveling around to some developing countries), so I converted away from a sitting desk to this big reclining setup so I can lounge around like a male lion or something even while I'm working.
Reminds me of the Reg Park Hercules lounging around on some "divan" or whatever while females feed him grapes, LOL. Or Robert Shaw as the SMERSH hitman in From Russia with Love, when he's lounging around in the beginning with some buxom little blond babe in a blue bikini massaging his muscles before he starts his mission...
