The Internet is jam packed with a plethora of time management ideas. So many people seem to be drowning under a tidal wave of paperwork and to-do lists. People spend their lives juggling endless competing demands from all directions, and the internet revolution has only accelerated the task overload. Fortunes have been made in the fields of time management consultancy. Individuals set up time management systems and tickler files and companies spend millions on office productivity software. Yet we all seem busier than ever!

The time management solutions you prefer will depend on your circumstances, working environment and objectives. Here are twelve simple and effective techniques which have helped me. They do not require any special system, or task lists, but can be applied on a flexible basis to suit different circumstances and environments. The great philosopher Wiliam of Occam said that the simplest solution was always the best, and indeed I have applied many of these with great success. Here are twelve powerful time management ideas:

1. Apply the Pareto rule, ruthlessly. As Richard Koch explained in his masterly book “The 80/20 Principle”, 20% of all inputs result in 80% of outputs and 20% of actions deliver 80% of results. You can be sure that on hubpages 20% of the hubbers write 80% of the pages and doubtless the Adsense revenue statistics are similar. Identify the critical few factors that make a real difference in your life, and multiply these. Eliminate the rest or allow them to wither on the vine.
2. Eat that frog! This is Brian Tracy’s famous menu – the idea that you start the day with the biggest,ugliest,most urgent task – the “frog”.Once the frog is eaten, a significant achievement has been made and the flow-through from this will carry you through the remaining obstacles and challenges.
3. Do It Now. An old self-help saw. Tom Hopkins famously quoted success advice he was given as an young man – “I must do the most productive thing possible at any given moment”. This may be an ideal standard rather than an attainable one, but anything that breaks through procrastination is a good thing. It is always good to remember that “The purpose of life is not knowledge, but action” (T. Huxley)
4. Eliminate bottlenecks. In a factory, engineers will identify constraints in the production process. According to Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, they will optimise work flow up to the bottleneck (so you don’t have inventory stacking up just before it) and then seek to elevate, or raise, the bottleneck. What are the bottlenecks in your own life and how can they be first managed and then resolved?
5. Remember the power of completion. Margaret Thatcher once stated that it was easy to start something, but the hardest thing to do was to see it through to completion. Whether an admirer or an opponent of the British prime minister, everyone agrees she got things done. There is something psychologically gratifying about setting a specific, timebound objective and accomplishing it.
6. Turn off Outlook. The tendency to check for incoming email, and treat the most recent email as the most important, is deeply ingrained in most office workers. Remember the Pareto rule again - 80% of email will likely add no value.
7. Control access. Don’t make yourself too available. This is the problem with open-plan offices. Their great virtue – enabling communication with co-workers – can become their great drawback. Put your phone on voicemail, if you can. You can respond to people in your own time.
8. Make appointments with yourself in Outlook. If you have some control over your work flow or location, go to another area (a coffee shop, or quiet area, even the staff canteen) and dedicate the time-slot solely to addressing the most urgent problem
9. Do less. Leo Babauta at Zenhabits.net recommends the “haiku” approach, in which by deliberately limiting yourself to a few tasks (similar to the word constraints in haiku poetry), execution will be cleaner and more effective. Learn to say no to managers, co-workers and your own direct reports.
10. Eliminate waste. This means any non-value added activity. This could mean social networking sites or aimless phone calls. I lived without television for two years and my free time increased exponentially.
11. Place an imaginary value on your time. Imagine you are a top lawyer charging $1,200 an hour for your services. If you treated your time as if it were that precious and your life as full of so much potential, not a second would be wasted.
12. Yamazumi Your Life! A Yamazumi board is a colourful stacked bar chart in a factory showing the time taken in an industrial process. Necessary set-up time is labelled yellow, blockages and delays are coloured red, and effective value-add time is shown as green. It is a tremendous visual tool to identify where delays and roadblocks are occurring in a process and can be eye-opening. You can see an example at the website below.

So here are twelve time management strategies to kick-start your week. I hope some of these ideas are useful, and good luck with your time management revolution.