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!'"

My Forster Admiration Continues

I literally finished reading Mark Forster’s How to Make Your Dreams Come True just a few moments ago and wanted to put some thoughts down and share them in public.

The title of the book makes you think it’s yet another get-rich-quick ripoff that promises far more than it can possibly deliver. But in reality it’s actually a very profound, moving book about the meaning of life, the role of the individual, and how we should spend our time on earth. It’s only possible to appreciate these qualities by reading the whole thing, because the book was written in a unique way, using a dialog technique that created and developed the themes as Forster was writing.

I think the book spoke to me so well because it is very much in keeping with my own background and beliefs. Forster combines a comforting, down to earth, practical Englishness with a very American understanding of the value of self-interest and creativity. As a first generation American of English parents with individualist leanings, it touched me deeply. Mark, thank you for this gift.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled irony.

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.

Do It Tomorrow

My favorite band, the White Stripes, is based on the idea that limits enhance creativity. They generally stick to three-part schemes – black, white and red; guitar, drums and vocals – and believe that imposing artificial structures on themselves forces them to find new ways to make music.

Mark Forster’s book, Do It Tomorrow explores this idea from a productivity standpoint, recommending that we impose limits on ourselves in order to manage the stream of incoming work, email, interruptions and paper that we deal with so that we can create buffers for ourselves and think before we act.

These days, buffers are more important than ever. Information comes at us so quickly that we either find a way to filter, examine, and deal with it or risk being buried under an enormous pile of email, blog feeds, paper, voicemails, text and instant messages, and meeting notes. Buffers and limits are a matter of survival. We need to build walls, slow down, and create systems that allow us to spend our time and attention wisely.

GTD is an important tool in this struggle, but I think many of its adherents, myself included, still find themselves at a bit of a loss. We are told to complete our two-minute actions and choose from our contexts on the fly, which risks leaving us at the mercy of our already-strained attention and energy. Do It Tomorrow, on the other hand, provides us with concrete tools and ideas for reducing interruption, combating procrastination, and making sure our time is spent on the things that matter.

I don’t want to give too much away, because you should really read the book, but I will share a few of the deceptively simple tools Forster suggests. First, there’s the big one, in which you measure out a day’s work for yourself by dealing with things in a batch. Everything that absolutely doesn’t have to be done today is put off for tomorrow. Today is reserved for yesterday’s incoming work, email, voicemail, and paper. Since yesterday is over and no more work can be added to the batch, you know exactly how much you have to do, and how many other tasks you can count on doing today. Interruptions and urgent requests may come up, but at least you have a plan that is in keeping with your priorities and goals.

Here’s an example. I read a selection of RSS feeds every day for this blog. They’re kept in a folder in Google Reader. In the morning, I go to that folder and read all the posts from yesterday, starring the ones that I think I might like to post about. I then go back to my starred items and winnow them down, finally deciding on the ones that I will use. I post about them, and I’m done for the day. No longer is blog posting an overwhelming, never-ending task. There won’t be any more to deal with, because yesterday is gone. I do the same with my email and any paper mail or receipts that accumulated yesterday. Mark Forster’s techniques have given me a concrete and practical way to measure out a day’s tasks and deal with them.

I’ll explore more of Mark’s ideas in future posts, but for now I strongly recommend that you buy the book, and visit his Web site at www.markforster.net.

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.