​I love lists.

I'm forever making nice new ones, often in Google Calendar or Trello, where you can have lots of lovely bright different colours for different areas of your life - and haven't we all got complicated lives, full of different things we have to attend to?

We do, don't we? We really have to get through everything on our to do list, or else, why did we put it there in the first place? 

And there's lots of stuff out there to help you Manage Your Time...but actually we all have the same time. It progresses at roughly sixty seconds per minute and we've all got it. 

The difference is, what we do with it, how we react to it. Just as I said earlier, it's about how we react to what's happening that matters. I'm sure you can think of an example where you got so caught up in what you were doing that you totally forgot the time. And when you're a child, doesn't it take ages for Christmas to come! Now we are all grown up it seems we have only just got over the last one before the next is upon us. 

You can see where I'm going. It's all a matter of perception, how much time we've got - and we have some choice in how we do this. 

Back to the lovely lists - here are a few tips on how to ensure you manage them and they don't manage you.

It helps me to remember that they are only lists - marks on a page, pixels on a screen - and they have no reality in themselves, only what you give them. So with that proviso, let's see how we can best use them. 

• Have as many things on your list as you like. Put everything on that you can think of, when you think of it (then it won't hang around and haunt you). 
• Each morning when you start your day, pick from that list the three things that absolutely must be done, or there will be undesirable consequences.
• Write down the time and do the first one. Just do it. Set a timer, or keep an eye on the time and don't go past an hour without a break or a rethink. 
• Notice how much time it has taken you. 
• Do the same for the next two items. 
• Then do something completely different - go for a walk, dance round the kitchen, phone a friend, practice your scales - whatever takes your mind off it. In NLP we call this 'breaking state', putting the attention somewhere else for a few moments. 
• Then back to the list. If there are three more things that must be done today, follow the same steps. 

But on a day to day basis we want to be efficient at work. Stephen Covey, who wrote 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People', distinguished between things that are important and things that are urgent. Often we get swallowed up by the urgent things, whereas if we took care of the important things first, like planning, we wouldn't be forever fire fighting. 

What do you think?