One success of the year - call it a resolution if you will - has been what I call my mason jar meetings with my Assistant.

You must have come across the illustration - certainly if you've been on any time management courses. This is typical: http://256.com/gray/quotes/time.html

My idea was to formalize this with myself and with my colleague (who'd expressed concerns in her appraisal along the lines of distributing her time between myself and the other librarian she works for).

So now, come Monday morning, I try to assign slots to the big rocks of work in my diary and then D joins me and I let her know what the plan is. Then we do the same for the work I'm giving her, and the work we share. GroupWise allows us to mark such events in our diary so that we know they can be moved if need by (by sudden teaching commitments or the like). But that doesn't happen too often and in general it works in letting us get to some of the 'big rocks' rather than drowning in the tyrannical water of the urgent but not necessarily important (like email!).

This is probably really obvious to everyone but the formality and discipline of doing it regularly and being accountable on the subject is something I'm finding helpful.