Like most people, I am sitting here trying to cram 30 hours of to-dos into a 24-hour day. Most people that know me, know that I’m a working mom and so my do-to list consists of family duties, work duties, staying on-top of my industry activities, networking, marketing, paid consulting, free advice, family fun, and occasionally time for me. I’m sure I forgot something in there…oh yeah, pet care. Ugh.

My plan for the next three days.

Of course, I try to simplify where I can and I can cook a weeknight dinner in under 15 minutes, but you can only get so efficient. What I find really helps is a multi-pronged approach:

1. I use Microsoft Outlook’s Calendar to map out everything I need to do for the week including personal, work, and reminders of what I’d like to do for the future.
2. I use Microsoft Project to plan long term consulting projects and break it down each week for my Outlook schedule. Not to mention highlighting the tasks on my gantt chart.
3. My Firefox browser has all the important home page’s up:
   1. ExecTweets is first so I can see what the Top Business Executives think is worth tweeting about
   2. iGoogle is next for my RSS feeds, stocks, widgets, and search of course
   3. Then my Belmont email account which I have yet to setup in Outlook
   4. Next comes all the web pages of information that I found yesterday and need to read or research further. Right now, it is FusionCharts documentation, Flickr API documentation, and Facebook Pages changes.
4. My startup desktop applications include:
   1. TweetDeck for following my colleagues and their industry adventures
   2. AIM for keeping in touch with my virtual work teams
   3. Outlook with personal and BPM inboxes for “traditional” email correspondence

And then I have three phones that sit on my desk: cell, home, and work.

I think this is a pretty good system for keeping in touch with my ever-changing virtual network, and filtering through the glut of information in an attempt to find what is relevant or interesting. I still would like to have another six hours in each day.

If you have any tips for keeping organized or getting to the information that you want with little effort, I’m always looking for new options.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.