Merlin Mann is an expert on productivity and speaks about how to think about time management.

Have you asked yourself recently if your time is going toward things that matter and bring value to your life? Merlin suggests that we should be examining how we are spending our time and questioning our decisions on how we allocate the fixed 168 hours we have each week. To save you 35 minutes, I have summarized some of the key takeaways from Merlin’s presentation.

An interesting concept he talks about is that when we don’t understand how valuable our time is, we are more likely to allow it to be wasted on unimportant things. For instance if someone asks you for a hundred dollars you will probably question it, but people often don’t question when someone asks you to attend an hour long meeting.

Merlin also says we should question the defaults in life, like why is it that when you schedule a meeting in a calendar app like Google Calendar, the default is 1 hour?

He also suggested to view the time you have in a week as a box: you don’t want to allow stupid things into the box. Also we should be careful about what things we allow to fall into your life. This means thinking before you say yes to a commitment. We should be able to decide who has access to your time and when. A team should share their email culture to save each other time, such as agreeing on a signal for when an email is not time sensitive or even designating a certain time of the day when team members should not expect a response to emails.

Merlin highlights the importance of renegotiation, which he borrowed from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Tweaking a project for instance can mean the difference between dreading working on it or being engaged and behind it 100%.