Work. Kids. School. Sports. Second job. Partner’s job. The next great American novel. Your knitting circle. Remodeling the guest bathroom. Taking your car in for its 30,000 mile tune-up. An on and on and on — it seems like we have things to do in abundance. What we don’t ever seem to have enough of is time.

I think we all know what we should do, but the prospect of sitting down and getting everything together, taking the time to set up a system that we trust to work for us (and that we trust ourselves to make work) is daunting. And, what’s more, it’s time consuming — and time’s exactly what we don’t have.

We’re too busy to manage our time!

But, what if you could do it in 12 hours? Maybe not even all at once — a couple hours a day over the course of a week, maybe, or even a half-hour a day over course of a few weeks? That seems a lot more doable, doesn’t it? Like something you might be able to get yourself to do?

Here, then, is the backbone of a good system you can implement in 12 hours (or less). Give yourself a week or three to get it up and running, and see if the time you invest in it now isn’t returned to you several times over down the line.

1. Set up your calendars (4-6 hours)

Use an online calendar like Google Calendar or 30 Boxes to set reminders for every conceivable event in your life, particularly recurring events like bill payment dates, your kids’ soccer games, and your shopping trips. I recommend a calendar rather than a reminder service like Sandy because you are going to want to look at your upcoming events once in a while, and a calendar is a format we’re all familiar with.

I recommend you put these into a calendar other than your main calendar. If you like the idea of looking at everything in, say, Outlook, most of the online calendars offer a iCal feed that you can subscribe to in Outlook. Call it “Reminders” and open it as a second calendar. If you put the al into your main calendar, you may find that it becomes too cluttered to be of any use — especially in the month view where most calendars only show the first few items per day.

Put all of these events into your calendar:

• Gas bill due date
• Electric bill due date
• Mortgage/rent due date
• Phone bill due dates (landline and mobile)
• Cable/satellite bill due date
• Insurance premium due dates
• Backup computer (daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your usage and level of paranoia — automate this if you can)
• Trash pickup (set reminder for the night before)
• One day every three months for oil changes
• One day every year for auto tune-ups
• One day every three years for major auto tune-ups
• One day every 6 months for dentist appointments
• One day every year for doctor, eye doctor
• Any other recurring medical appointments
• One day very month for prescription refilling (two reminders — one to call in refill, one to pick up)
• Netflix/Tivo/XM/other service billing dates
• Write grocery list (one day before your regular shopping day)
• The day the exterminator comes
• The time and day of any TV show you watch regularly
• The last day of January (to check for tax paperwork)
• One or more days at the beginning of the year to do your taxes and.or contact your tax preparer
• April 15 (or whatever day taxes are due in your country)
• Start and end of the school year, start and end of school vacations
• Birthdays, Anniversaries, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, other important holidays (set two reminders — one on the day itself to remind you to call or take some other action and one two weeks earlier to buy a gift, if needed, or plan a party)
• Monthly, quarterly, and annual home maintenance (see checklists below)
• Any other date which requires a concrete action at specific times every week, month, or year

Also add these dates, without reminders:

• The end date for all of the above billing cycles
• The pay dates for any automatic payments (and it’s a good idea, while you’re at it, to set up automatic payments for as many bills as you can)
• Direct deposit dates
• Automatic bank transfer dates
• Stock dividend payment/reinvestment dates
• Any other date it’s important for you to know about but which does not require any immediate action on your part

In your main calendar, the one you use for keeping track of your schedule day to day, schedule blocks of time for the following:

• Grocery shopping (weekly)
• Laundry (weekly)
• Family meals
• Bill paying (bi-monthly — the first and third weekend of the month might be good. List in the note section all of the bills that come due in the half month after each bill-paying day)
• Any weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meeting
• Kids’ sports events (e.g. weekly football games every Saturday from September 15 through December 15)
• Other kids’ activities (art classes, piano lessons, every 3rd weekend at grandparents’, etc.)
• Weekend chores/cleaning
• Commute time
• Gym sessions
• Golf/bicycling/other sports
• Weekly review (schedule 2 hours whenever you’re least likely to be interrupted) — make sure you use your weekly review to add any new reminders you might need!
• Writing time (if you want to write an hour a day, schedule an hour a day — don’t assume you’ll just “find” a spare hour each day.)
• Other hobbies (same as with writing)
• Any classes you’re taking
• Goofing off time (I schedule at least an hour a day for whatever strikes my fancy)
• Any other regular blocks of time you know you need to be at a specific place or doing a specific thing. The only exception is your regular 9-to-5 job, if you have one — schedule the activities you’ll do at your job, not the job itself.

You’ll have to use your own judgment about which of these scheduled events needs reminders and which don’t. I don’t set reminders for commuting time, for example, since it’s enough for me to be able to look at my calendar and see that those times are blocked off. On the other hand, I have reminders 15 minutes before all the classes I teach, so I know when I need to start heading to my classrooms when I’m on campus.

2. Set up password system (2-3 hours)

Use a program like KeePass, or a password protected spreadsheet, or whatever system you feel most comfortable with, but use one — if you have a lot of passwords and no system, you’ll waste a lot of time either trying every possible password you can remember or searching frantically though your emails, files, or scraps of paper on your desk for wherever you recorded your password. In one or two sessions, record every login and password you have. Make sure you get information for all of these:

• Bank accounts (including debit card PIN)
• Credit cards
• Stock accounts
• Email
• Internet service
• Online payment services
• Phone service
• Utilities
• Website memberships (Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, flickr, Wordpress.com, Digg, Reddit, Blogger, OpenID, etc.)
• Your site’s login, FTP, and admin panel info
• Any MySQL or other databases your site uses
• Work accounts
• Parking permit services
• DMV online/other government services
• Web applications
• Software registration keys (not technically passwords, but many password managers include sections for registration keys — useful if [when] you need to reinstall Windows)
• Any other account you have a password to

3. Create checklists (2-3 hours)

Make a new folder on your computer called “AAAAA Checklists” (or “@Checklists” for you David Allen fans), so it sorts to the top of your Documents folder.  Create a set of checklists for recurring tasks and save them to at folder, so you can easily print them off whenever you need one. Some checklists to think about creating include:

• Grocery list (with everything you commonly buy and space for additions; my list is organized by aisle in the store we shop at, so I can move quickly from back to front with minimal interruptions)
• Monthly home maintenance (e.g. change air filters, test smoke detectors, etc.)
• Quarterly of semi-annual home maintenance (e.g. clean gutters, replace smoke detector batteries, check fire extinguishers, etc.)
• Winter/Summer car preparation (e.g. check coolant, flush radiator, add chains/snow tires, etc.)
• Trip/vacation packing
• Christmas decorating

4. Keep up to date with a weekly review

You scheduled a weekly review in part 1 — make sure you keep that appointment. During your weekly review, take 10 minutes to set up reminders for any recurring events you might have missed in your initial setup, as well as any new commitments you’ve taken on. Check your schedule and make sure that you’ve left adequate time for any new tasks that you need to take care of in the coming week If necessary, move some of those blocks of scheduled time around. Check, too, what’s coming up that you’ll need to add to your schedule — for example, if your child’s birthday is coming up, you’ll need to schedule a block of time to pick up a gift, and another block of time to plan a party, etc.

Better, not perfect

There’s plenty of room for improvement, of course. This is meant as a backbone to a system; you will find that other ways to make yourself more efficient occur to you. Password management, for example, is just one kind of reference system that will save you time on a pretty regular basis — you will probably think of others that fit your own particular situation. In my home, keeping the mail sorted and in some semblance of order is a big task, so I set up a mail management center, with trays for my partner’s and my personal mail, a tray for bills, and a tray for coupons and flyers (it took about 30 minutes, in case you want to add that to your 12-hour commitment). You might not have a problem with mail, but you might need to work on keeping track of magazines.

Having a solid structure in place will help you wrangle with the other, smaller “time sinks” in your life. Once you start looking at your time in a “big picture” view, you’ll start seeing everything that falls outside of your existing system in a new way, and solutions will suggest themselves. Instead of fretting about it, just schedule an hour or two to take care of it — for bigger projects break it into three or four 2-hour sections.

Once you’ve started getting a grip on your schedule, you’ll find that not only are you more on top of your schedule (instead of it being on top of you!) but your mind will be more at ease. Instead of worrying about what’s coming up, or even what you should be doing right now, you’ll just check your schedule and know. The energy you used to use for worrying and occasionally freaking out, you can put to better use pursuing your dreams.

What about you? What 1-2 hour activities do you recommend to help get a grip on time?

Dustin M. Wax is a contributing editor and project manager at lifehack.org. He is also an anthropology and women's studies professor in Las Vegas, NV where he lives with his partner and three children. His personal site can be found at dwax.org.

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