It’s all well and good to say “I need a better way to manage my time,” but it’s not the kind of thing you can just wake up one day and start doing differently. To develop a time management strategy that will be effective over the long run, you have to first do an honest self-assessment. With that in mind, I pulled out my copy of Julie Morgenstern’s Time Management from the Inside Out, and completed four of the exercises:

• What’s Working?
• What’s Not Working?
• Your Time Management Preferences
• Your Energy Cycles and Sources

While reviewing my answers, I realized that I haven’t been capitalizing on my peak energy times. I am a morning person. I wake up early and begin my day as early as 6:00. Some days I get as much done before 9:00 as I do during the rest of the day! Unfortunately, I often treat the early morning hours as extra time (as in “most people aren’t working yet so I don’t need to either”) and have squandered it on lower priority tasks such as answering email, and checking Twitter and other social networking sites. As a result, I’m not spending my prime time on my greatest priorities. In addition, because it’s so easy to lose track of time during those activities, they often use up more time than they should.

I have always fought against the advice to not deal with email first thing in the day, arguing that I need that information to help plan my day. The truth is, for the most part, my week is planned in advance, so the only emails I need to pay attention to first thing in the morning are those that pertain to projects I’ll be working on that day. So, under my new system, I download my messages and deal only with the essential ones right away.

Next, I devote the rest of the morning to my #1 priorities, which in most cases will be a client project or two. By starting my most important work good and early, I’ll get it done sooner, leaving me time later in the day to respond to the non-urgent emails and visit my social networking sites. And since I am very good about finishing work at 5:00, I don’t have to worry about spending too much time on those particular activities.

Following Alex Fayle’s example, I’ve broken my days into eight one-hour blocks. (Although it seems that I work more than eight hours per day, since I start so early, by the time I factor in meals and breaks, I’ve realized that it really isn’t.) And taking a tip which Stephanie Calahan posted on Twitter last week, I am only scheduling 6 of those 8 hours, keeping the remaining 25% free for the unexpected.

Yesterday was my first day with the new system and it went quite well. My scheduled tasks took longer than I anticipated, so I was really glad I kept a good chunk of time open. I will continue with this for the rest of the week (except for Friday, when I will be attending the Forum on Virtual Assistance) and plan to further refine my schedule and systems in the coming weeks.