For me, this was the most helpful strategy in my time management. In the past, I started the day by opening email and it used to take up one or two hours of my morning to follow up with messages. Since I started the rule of not opening email until after lunch, I tend to do more or at least reduce waste of productive morning time.

However, I think that they key is to manage expectations, and the fact is that we all have a problem with creating in our mind’s eye some realism with respect to what we can accomplish in any given day.

The first problem is that most don’t actually create a schedule, and those that do, create unrealistic schedules that are just impossible to follow, and rely on everything going perfectly … which hardly ever happens!

The second problem is that an unrealistic, ideal day leads to a week / month / year of dashed expectations, and a general feeling of un-productivity, regardless of the facts. This feeling is what most all of us are fighting, rather than some objective standard.

This isn’t to say that we should stop having these feelings (we can’t) but we can modify them by giving ourselves more fact-based expectations each day. At least, the, we know that we are fighting expectations vs. accomplishments, versus just feelings based on a vague notion that we should be doing more.