This is our very first guest post, thanks to our friend Judi Huck.  She has words of wisdom about getting it all done!

Judi Huck is a community consultant at FeverBee, which has developed a professional community management training course. 

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To get out of the trenches, the only thing you need as a community manager - or any other position - is a plan.

Community managers like David Spinks of Zaarly would say that there's a short list for essential community manager skills. In his opinion, they are: time management/personal productivity, people skills and tech skills. This post touches on the first ones.

Being able to master your to-do list, particularly if you wear multiple hats like most community managers, is hard. But it doesn't have to give you a migraine. Having just come from a productivity app, I know a thing or two about productivity. Managing your time and being able to execute isn't rocket science (thankfully!). You don't necessarily need to download e-books about it.

Below are some very basic tips to help you overcome a growing and constantly changing to-do list.

Multi-tasking is dangerous.

Or more like, multi-tasking isn't appropriate for every situation. You could probably participate in #cmgrchat (a chat for community managers held every Wednesday on Twitter 2-3pm EST) and simultaneously read, or do other tasks that don't require your complete attention. Blogging, however, wouldn't be one of them. Unless, of course, your blog entries reflect a random stream of consciousness. The key, however, is separating activities that require a lot of focus from those that do not. 

You can certainly implement the following tip to take this to the next level. 

Creating time-blocks is obsessively sweet.

This is one of the easiest ways to organize your day. I sectioned off a couple of hours for support-related tasks and found it to be very efficient for being able to close out high volumes of ticket requests. At the end of the day, it's this efficiency that matters. Juggling endless tasks? Not so much.

And finally, set aside some time for what follows.

Cleanliness is next to awesomeness.

You must clean your inbox. You must check your to-dos on a regular basis - try weekly. It may suck to hear it, but you'll be glad to get in the habit of this in the long-run.

Being able to find stuff in your inbox is crucial to growing up. Put filters to work. Feel free to auto-delete. Archive messages when no future actions are needed. Maybe you won't reach "inbox zero," but emptying out your inbox - even if it's every several days (versus every single day) - makes correspondence simpler.

Take that extra moment to get more organized now.

Reflect, reflect, reflect.

Lastly, you may want to review what you accomplish and what you didn't get to accomplish for any given month or week. I say this for goal setting and self-awareness. Ultimately, all complex undertakings can be broken down to bite-size pieces. Know what you've eaten, and know what's left on your plate. 

I believe in you and best of luck with the new year. 

Bonus:

Get geeky with filenames.

A few developer friends title files like this: YYYYMMDD + File name.