Now look over your data carefully. Where is your time going? Meetings? Commuting? Do you regularly get interrupted by phone calls in the early afternoon? Are you most productive in the morning? Be as objective as possible, looking for patterns that can point to areas requiring improvement as well as examples of when you best take advantage of your time.

From here you can begin to restructure your schedule. I tend to get tired and unproductive around 3 p.m., so that's when I try to do something else: go out for a walk, take a short nap, pay bills, etc. By focusing on something else for a short period of time, I've discovered that I can get back to what I was working on in a shorter amount of time, usually feeling refreshed in the process. It definitely beats turning into a vegetable in front of my computer monitor, re-reading the day's headlines on the Web. I've set up a 15-minute repeating event in Date Book that triggers an alarm at 3 p.m. each weekday. To set up one for yourself, create an event, then tap the Details button. Tap the Repeat field, then the Week (not Day) button at the top of the screen. Highlight the days of the week next to Repeat On, then tap OK to exit the dialog box.

Prepare ahead
Despite my general state of holiday-scheduling preparedness, the weeks usually end up feeling as hectic as ever unless I perform one last vital activity: prepare for tomorrow today. Before you leave work or go to bed at night, take some time to go over the next day's appointments and tasks. Anticipating tomorrow's planned elements does wonders when you're in the thick of it and unexpected pressures and tasks threaten to disrupt the whole endeavor. For many people, knowing how tomorrow is going to work out helps them sleep more easily the night before.

Illah Nourbakhsh is a professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.