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There are a lot of “time-management systems” out there. Some cost money, some are complicated, and some divide the world into two types of people: “Those who use our great system, and those losers who don’t.”

They all seem silly to me. So I invented my own: The Dean One-Page Plan.
I’ve been doing this for years.

I have a section about this in my upcoming book for O’Reilly publishing, YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts that I’m writing with YouTube rock star Alan “Fallofautumndistro” Lastufka.

(System text covered by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. System is not patented or trademarked, it is in the public domain. Do what you like with it and pass it on however you’d like, just keep the name “The Dean One-Page Plan” in the attribution.)

The Dean One-Page Plan
It’s simple. It’s free. And you can start doing it right now.
I organize my life with one one-page document a week. Every Thursday (you can start on any day you like) I print out a page from a simple three-column, many row template I’ve created. The three columns are labeled “DO”, “BUY” and “CALL.”

• Things in the DO column are things I need to do in the coming week.
• Things in the BUY column are things I need to buy in the coming week.
• People in the CALL column are people I need to contact in the coming week.

“DO”, “BUY” and “CALL” seem to cover almost everything I need to think about in a given week, month or year.

I include “e-mail” and “mail something to them” in the “call” part. You can change it to “Contact” instead of “Call” if that makes more sense to you, but I like the one-syllable-each simplicity of the sound of “DO”, “BUY” and “CALL.”

I keep the template for this document on my desktop. I print it out once a week (twice a week in a week with many small tasks), and scribble things out as I complete them. And write things in with a pen in the printed copy as they come up. At the end of a week, I print out the list for the next week, removing things that have been done, and adding things in to do. It really works well in my life.

You can download my template HERE, or make your own.

I deal with long-term goals by getting a calendar every December. I usually get one with kitty cats on it, but you can get one with whatever you feel like looking at for a year. Make sure you get one with a big enough space to write a few things for each day that you need to (like an inch and a half square). If you get as busy as you’d probably like to be, you’ll need it. I also write notes at the margin between the calendar itself and the photo at the top, for things I need to do at some point this month.

Enjoy your more-organized life, and tell two friends.

(Kitty in photo is Fuzzbucket McFluffernutter. Photo by Michael W. Dean)

This entry was posted by Michael W. Dean on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:30 pm and is filed under MWD's Cool Stuff, Super happy fun blog!, The world is a strange and beautiful place. 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.