This is a 101 collection of classic time management tools. It helps you to become more productive or more relaxed (which in turn will make you more productive).

I wrote everything here with the needs of PhD students and postdocs in life science laboratories in mind. You may find it useful if you work in a different field, although you may find the biologists' humour hard to understand.

I hope the time you spend reading this ebook will be time well spent ;-)

• Quotes on Time
• Multitasking does not work
• Activity Log
• SMART Goals
• The Covey Matrix
• Five Options
• Ten Ways to say No
• Saving Time with Pomodoro
• Using a Kanban Board
• Gears of Work
• When the Time Fairy visits
• Tools mapped to problems

• Instructions for Trainers
• Preparations
• Warm-up exercises
• Managing tasks exercise
• Poster session
• Question & Answer Session

(c) 2015 Dr. Kristian Rother

Distributed under the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike License 4.0

You are allowed to modify and share this material, or even use it in a commercial setting, given that you reference the author. So ideally you get rich, I get famous and everybody else gets their work done super-effectively, so that we can live happily ever after. :-)

The sources of this document, all images and material for exercises can be found on https://github.com/krother/time_management.

I would like to thank Jörn Manz for sparking my interest in Time Management, the PhD students Kasprzak J, Milanowska K, Musielak M, Philips A and Puton T for helping me field-test, Toastmasters International for many hours of practical expertise as a trainer and Wojciech Potrzebowski for the opportunity to present this content before a large audience.