Effectively using my Time…

Last week, I read about Time Management and I am currently following this in my work

1. I prepare my Action Items(To Do list) with priorities the previous night. I try to accomplish everything on the list. Initially, I was having too many action items in the list for every day (inexperience). Now a days I see to that I have only important tasks that should be done for the day. If something new comes up, I add it to the list and prioritize.
2. I follow the STING method more often now a days. I am finding it very useful.
3. Starting this week, I decided to spent less (no) time on my personal work during office hours. By personal work, I mean – checking personal email, reading blogs etc. Even I am making a practice of looking at my official emails only 2 /3 times a day. I have disabled all those silly new mail reminders and keep my outlook closed most of the time.
4. I am maintaining a time Journal as suggested by Dr. Randy Pausch..
   From this journal I identified that I was spending time without any specific objectives in my mind. For example, I had an RSS Reader installed on my office computer and have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS feeds. I used to open the reader atleast 2-3 times a day – just to mark all the entries as read Gosh.. I was maintaining the RSS Reader like my Inbox. I didn’t want to see any unread items there. Crazy way to spend my time…. Now , one of my low priority task is to clean up the RSS reader and have it subscribe to only ** selected** feeds. (At one point of time I decided to uninstall it completely. But then, blogs are one of the effective ways to learn; so decided to keep)My time journal is a simple XL file which contains 3 columns – Time (15 mins interval), What I did, Whether its productive Time / Unproductive time. I update this sheet every 30 mins. Try this and its an excellent method
5. We are now doing kind of Pair Programming in office. No, not to the extend specified in XP. But its just a start. My team mate and myself are finding it very useful. We alternate (drive) the key board every 1.5 hours. We start with a specific goal in our mind for each session and continue until the goal (task) is accomplished. Benefits : Effective use of time, no distractions, learn from each other.