Assess your time management skills by filling in this questionnaire:

What do you find most difficult to get down to? Reading? Writing? Revision? Preparing presentations? What do you do to avoid doing them, are any of these familiar?

Rate each one on a 1-5 scale: 1 = very like me to 5 = not me at all.

1. I can only really get down to work when there’s a deadline looming

I’d give this a 4, because when I have everything I need to do a job, I like to dig right in and get my hands dirty. It’s not all that uncommon, however, for things to have difficulty coalescing until late in the project, which results in the same hectic pace as deadlines near as procrastination.

2. I often feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work to be done

This is a 1 for me. As a parent, a student, a business-owner, and chief bottle washer, I can be spread pretty thin sometimes.

3. Planning is a waste of time, I prefer to work intuitively

Well nobody’s perfect, so this is a 4 for me. Occasionally, I just dive right into a project, but mostly I live by the adage “the sooner you begin coding a project, the longer it will take to complete it.”

4. I always seem to underestimate how long a piece of work will take

3 — For familiar tasks, I have a realistic idea for how long they will take; if I underestimate, it’s usually for a reason, but it is just so hard to prepare for all possible interruptions of a development cycle!

5. I’m a perfectionist, I never really feel a piece of work is “finished”

2 — Sometimes it’s hard to know when to say when!

6. I’m not really sure of what is expected of me

4 — I can’t say I’m a “5″ only because I’m expecting a lot of changes when I graduate, and I’m not sure sure of what will be expected of me in the near future.

7. There are some things I am always “putting off till later”

3 — My brain operates on a sort of “voting system”, where things are prioritized according to urgency and value. Urgency often trumps value, because it is profitable (it generates service calls and other billable work) yet at the same time, may not provide as much value as other items which were preempted.

8. I find it hard to concentrate on just one thing – I tend to hop from one thing to another

4 — Can you say “A – D – D”, boys and girls? Lol~ Yeah, I’ve got it, and I get phone calls and emails, and chats, and all kinds of things to reach out and take my attention away from one project and on to another. I think I do a pretty good job of going full circle, though, to make sure that everything that is both urgent and valuable gets taken care of.

9. I’m often tempted by new/different options or ideas

4 — I am an XP developer, and so I live and die by CASE tools and technologies which aid in the rapid development and deployment of business solutions. The adoption of these techniques over the last decade has completely changed the way that I work.

10. My room is chaos, I’m forever losing things

2 — Others may sometimes see my workspace as chaotic, but I know exactly where everything is! Don’t touch!

11. I like to keep an “open door”, always ready to spend time with/for others

3 — You never know where the next big idea will come from, so you have to listen when opportunities come knocking. At the same time, you also have to have balance for development tasks which need to be done in continuous, uninterupted blocks of time.

12. I can only work from a clear desk

5 — I can work from any desk, even yours! All I need is a powerful enough computer, a private login, and internet access, and I can work from anywhere.

13. I find it hard to say “no” to people

3 — it’s hard to be “immune” to this one… generally, when customers give me a project that I don’t “want to say no to”, I simply bump the price up enough so that I DO want to do it, and leave it up to them.

Let’s face it, the real reason why you might legitimately want to say no to someone is because you’re feeling like you might be putting into it more than you get out of it, in terms of some sort of value, or maybe because you have something else to do which is of even greater value to do that day, even if it is as simple as spending time with the family. In such cases, you just have to either find your own acceptable compromise, or else figure out how to extract the needed level of value from the request.

14. Instead of getting down to work I…

2 — I Check my email… Hmmm, lots of things in there would like my attention today… Ooops, the phone just rang… dangit, can you believe the other line rang at the same time! One phone call needs a new email account created, the other needs a new feature added to their Access database. As soon as I hang up the phone(s), I get 3 more emails regarding the database changes, so I read them. Half way through, the phone rings again — it’s a telemarketer, and I shut them down quickly.Â

I remember that I also need to work on “dotProject” for class, so I open DreamWeaver, and then I realize that I do not have a site configured, nor even the site root created, so I open File Explorer, create the root folder under wwwroot, go back to DW, create the site root, and just as I finish, I get a notification about the database changes… They need them NOW, instead of the following week, as is the norm.

And so forth…