Interesting ideas and tips from the productosphere

Plan your work and work your plan

Organising my home tasks with a week planner | blog to discovery:

"There are 14 boxes each representing a different area of my life e.g. website, writing, health, friends. On Sundays I go through my home task list and add two tasks to each section on the form. This provides a spread of tasks to ensure I am progressing each area of my life, but is also a manageable number to complete in a week (although I haven’t actually completed all of them yet). There is also an area to mark any deadlines and to highlight any tasks that I am resisting."

Maybe that's why I'm always reorganizing

Simply GTD with Kelly: Shifting your position:

"Did you ever move your bedroom around as a kid? Even a simple thing like moving your bed from one wall to another? Remember going to bed that night? It felt new and exciting. Same furniture, new perspective. If that worked for you as a kid, it can work for you as an adult."

I read this paper. It's really good!

[Productivity Workflows] - Blog Archive - Getting Things Done: The Science Behing Stress-Free Productivity:

"A post on the David Allen Company Forum draws attention to an intriguing academic paper, available for download as a preprint, which seems worth a read. It is: Francis Heylighen and Clement Vidal (2007) Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity."

Who could resist a good Conan quote?

The Task Tarot at LifeClever ;-) Tips for Design and Life:

"Personally, there are days I’d rather be elbow-deep in cow guts than take another scan through my to-do list. At least a good hieromancer would give you a clear answer, from 'the crops will be good this year' to 'you will crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!'"

Little and Often - Mark Forster Part Two

When I was a kid, I had a little metal coin bank with motivational sayings on the side. One that stuck with me is "Little and often fills the purse." I think it meant that steady saving, no matter how small the amount, makes a big difference in the long run.

Productivity guru Mark Forster applies this bit of wisdom to projects, particularly ones that you’re procrastinating about. As he says in my new favorite book: Do It Tomorrow,

"For almost any initiative, the route to success is regular, focused action.”

It’s not exactly a revolutionary idea – GTD recommends a similar approach with its focus on “next actions” – but I’ve found his advice surprisingly productive in my own work.

As I wrote yesterday, one way to make progress on "high resistance" tasks that you’ve been avoiding is to work in small, non-threatening, timed bursts. In Do It Tomorrow, Forster shows how he puts this into practice while writing. He sits down for a specified period of time – half an hour, say – and just starts putting stuff down on paper. The first session results mostly in an outline. The second starts to flesh it out a bit. The third might result in a few actual complete sentences.

In each case, he doesn’t get freaked out about stopping because he knows that another draft will come soon. In between sessions, his mind gets a chance to process what he’s written and think of new ideas. He also fools his mind by using a timer and stopping as soon as it rings. The idea is that by stopping work regardless of whether you’re "done" – in the middle of a sentence for example – you leave your mind wanting more. The mind likes completion, he says, and stopping in the middle of something makes you more willing to work on it the next time.

Short bursts of focused action are also valuable, says Forster, in completing tasks or projects that are past due - what he calls a "backlog." The idea is that you pick something that needs to be done, that you might ordinarily not get around to, and do it first thing in the morning. You work on it for as long as you can, every day, until it’s done.

I’ll talk more about backlogs and current initiatives tomorrow. My timed burst is up.

Planning your day

The productivity blogs have been rumbling about a couple of new organizational ideas to explore, including Mark Forster's book Do It Tomorrow and Mission Control. I haven't delved too deeply into them yet, but one idea bubbled up that I've put into practice, which is planning your day.

At work I use a writing pad from Tops that is divided into sections. Every morning I review my master task list and pick out the tasks I'm going to do that day. I write them on my pad in the left section.

Then I print my calendar for the day from Outlook and figure out how much time I have in between meetings. I then pencil in (on the calendar) my plans for accomplishing the day's Most Important Tasks and when I'm going to do them. It's a bit like the "Unschedule" in Neil Fiore's book The Now Habit.

During the day I capture new stuff - thoughts, new tasks, phone messages - on the right side of my notepad. At the end of the day I update my master task list with the things I've completed and the new things I've captured. Throughout the day I avoid looking at my master list or my email because they distract me. My end of day ritual includes email-responding and processing.

Kate Davis has a good post that's giving me some other ideas, and which matches my experience over the past couple of weeks. She's actually created a form for herself (available for download) with a checklist.

I might go there eventually, but for now I like the freedom of my ever-present notepad. I find that I'm incredibly lazy, and even having to look in my drawer for a notebook and find a page to write on, or find an index card, is too much work. I need a capture tool that is always available. Plain old 8.5" x 11" pads fit the bill. Otherwise, I don't write things down, and I end up in a downward spiral of non-GTDness.