When I say setting limits...I mean it! It's hard, it's work, and it helps you make good decisions and live your life to the fullest. Here is a little passage from http://de-materialize.blogspot.com/2007/09/haiku-productivity-fine-art-of-limiting.html, not only will it help you set limits for your horsemanship, but help you make time for you!
Haiku Productivity: Place Limits on Everything
For those who enjoyed Zen To Done (ZTD), this is an extension of those concepts.
The rule of Haiku Productivity is: put limits on everything you do.
That’s it. One rule. What are the things you do? It’s different for everyone, but common ones might be: email, RSS feeds, goals, time wasters, tasks.
What limits should you set? It’s different for everyone. And it’s arbitrary (there are no logical limits for anything — it’s necessarily arbitrary) but based on your own experience and experimentation.
Here are the limits I’ve set for myself that seem to work — but remember that they will be different for you. And also note that while there’s a nice order to these, that’s mostly coincidence (I put them in a nice order), and there is no need to keep an order like this.
1 Goal: The number of goals I’m allowed to have at any one time. I can only really focus on one goal at a time … any more than that and I lose focus and energy.
2 times to process email: If I only allow myself to check email twice a day, I cannot let email control my life. It makes me much more efficient. When I process email, I process to empty. Now, there are other times during the day when I have to send email, such as emailing a post to one of my editors. At that time, I might respond quickly to one or two emails, but I don’t process my email during that time.
3 MITs: I choose three Most Important Tasks for each day, and focus completely on these. Any more than that and I might not get them all done.
4 batch tasks: Aside from MITs, I also give myself 4 smaller tasks that I try to batch all at once. This usually takes me 30-60 minutes at the end of the day.
5 sentence emails: I got this idea from Mike Davidson, whose article came at a perfect time as I was limiting other things in my life, and was also trying to keep my emails short at that time. His 5-sentence rule (no email can be longer than 5 sentences) fit in perfectly with everything else I tried to do, and I’ve adopted it. It forces you to write only what’s essential. I broke the rule at first, but I’ve been pretty good lately. This rule also limits the amount of time you spend replying to email, and makes processing a breeze.
6 RSS posts: I’ve been adjusting this as I’ve experimented, but I’ve settled on reading 6 posts per day. The method: I open my Google Reader in list view, scan through the headlines, and choose just 6 to read, opening them in new tabs. I then “Mark All as Read” and go and read my 6 posts in further detail. It has made RSS reading super fast.
7 minutes of wasted time: This is just for fun, but when I’ve done a task, I reward myself with 7 minutes of being able to do anything I want. That means I can read a humor site, or go and read comments on this blog, or look through Delicious or Digg or a forum, or whatever I want. For only 7 minutes. Then I get back to work. This allows me to have a little fun sprinkled throughout my day, but limits it. I set a timer. Totally works.
10 RSS feeds: While I’ve talked about reducing my RSS feeds before, I got the idea of only having 10 feeds from a friend, Ann, who bested my 16 feeds (at the time) with only 10 of her own. I thought that was a great idea, and now I only allow myself to subscribe to 10 feeds. That means I have to choose the 10 that give me the absolute best info for the time I spend reading them.
100 things: Actually, I haven’t done this, but it was one of the inspirations for this post, so I had to list it. It’s also something I’d like to try out in the near future. I don’t think it’ll be that difficult for me, as I doubt I have much more than 100 things. But anyway, the gist is that blogger Dave Bruno decided to do a 100 thing challenge, where he keeps only 100 personal items (not counting books, and not counting non-personal items such as dishes, cleaning supplies, etc.). Read the entire series. 100 things is, of course, an arbitrary limit, but again, that’s the idea: set a goal and try to limit yourself to it.
Again, your limits and the things you limit will vary depending on your situation. I am in no way suggesting that you adopt these limits. But by restricting yourself to a small number of things, you force yourself to focus only on the essential.
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