This is the first article of the two I have prepared for you regarding dealing with email – this one is about tips and tricks of getting a life outside of email. The second part will be about key practices of getting email done and processing to empty.
First thing – let’s try to get a life… a life Now, the big question – how to deal with email? How to reply to all of these hundreds of emails that come flooding your email inbox daily?
Outside of Email.
There was a time when email was ruling my world – I’d have my email program popping up whenever I got a new message, I’d go and check my email messages every 5-10 minutes, I’d read some email messages three to five times…
And I couldn’t get most of my stuff done.
I had to take some drastic measures to get my life back and convert my Email from being my king… to being just a tool for communication…. ‘cos that’s what email is. It’s just a tool (or one of the tools) for communicating…
Here are three tips that work for me when fighting email addiction:
Step 1. Disable email auto-checking
Don’t have email check you – it’s you who should be checking email. Try to check email manually every hour or even every two hours if you’re so brave. It’s really a great thing for a start.
Step2. Remove auto-preview of emails
Many desktop programs like “Outlook” or “Thunderbird” or “The Bat” have an auto-preview pane where you can see the email message when you just move between messages in your inbox. This made me crazy. I was reading some messages many, many times…
When you disable this feature, you’d have to click on the email subject to actually “open the message” and read it. This is a real change – from just scanning the messages you’re deciding to open a message if you’re ready for it.
Step 3. Don’t create too many email folders.
If you’re an organization freak like me, you’d create email folders for anyone you’d correspond with.
Why would you do that? Why would you spend your day organizing and moving email folders? Are you a librarian or a busy professional? Stop today – just use the search feature to find the message you need.
That’s all there is to it for now – try to implement these three simply techniques as they worked perfectly for me:
1. Disable email auto-checking
2. Get rid of the message auto-preview
3. Stop creating folders – use search
Make sure you try these and also let me know in the comments about your tips and tricks that help you regain your life outside of email.
Michael Sliwinski from Nozbe has another one of his quick, two-minute productivity videos up for us to enjoy. Michael has kindly notified us first so GTDTimes is once again the first site to be airing this video. Are you ready to learn about In-boxes?
Michael Sliwinski of Nozbe has started producing two-minute videos featuring different tips, techniques and GTD-related concepts. He’s been kind enough to provide GTDtimes with the initial exclusive on this fun and helpful information. Enjoy the video, it is two-minutes well spent.
Incidentally, if you need a good two minute timer to help you determine what you can accomplish in just two minutes, there are a number of resources available to you online. There are so many countdown widgets for so many platforms that instead of naming one or two, here’s the Google search result so you can simply choose the one you like yourself.
We all strive to make everything easier-to-use, more accessible, etc.
We strongly believe that if all of our applications and all of the tools we use on the daily basis are properly optimized, we can get more done and have everything accomplished.
This is true in 80% of the cases…
I couldn’t agree more – I love it when everything goes more easily and automatically. Actually I’m always coming up with ideas on how to make certain aspects of my life “more automatic” to make sure I’m not doing the same boring stuff over and over again.
But in 20% of the cases… I’m trying to complicate my life… on purpose.
I know this sounds weird. It struck me the other day upon a conversation with a fellow GTD-er Testeq that as strange as this may sound, this is actually a good thing to do.
So why would I want to complicate my life if I can get stuff done the easy way? Why would I do something manually if I can have it done automatically or semi-automatically for me?
The answer: to fight temptation… and reduce procrastination.
Let me give you an example. I love blogs and RSS feeds which let me read great up-to-date information from many sources across the web in one place. To read RSS feeds, I used to use a great plug-in for Firefox called “Sage”.
Sage works really great, just press “CTRL+Z” and your RSS feeds appear on the left side of your Firefox browser and once you click on the feed that you want to read, you can see all of the feed’s content right there in the browser. Neat.
The problem… I would turn on “Sage” too often… and instead of actually browsing for the stuff I needed for my work, I’d happily turn “left” to check how the feeds are going and if there is some new interesting info that has been published…
When this “habit” of checking feeds turned into a temptation I couldn’t resist, I decided to put an end to it. I removed all of my feeds from Sage and copied them to my Google Reader account.
Now when I want to read the feeds, I need to explicitly log in to my Google Reader account and start reading… and since I’m not logged in to my Google account for most of my day, this takes several steps to do.
A “Tempting” habit turned into a conscious decision…
Now, instead of “clicking and checking what’s up” I need to decide: “OK, now I’m going to log in to my Reader account and read the feeds for 30 minutes”. After that I’ll log out and won’t be reading them any more.
You can apply the very same thing to email. If you use Gmail like I do - just log in to your Google Account only when you want to check your email. Decide to check your email. Once you’ve processed your email, log out and continue with your next action on your Next Actions list.
Conclusion: focus on your next actions and help yourself resist temptation.
So there you have it. I’ve made my life a little more complicated, but then again, I don’t get distracted all that much anymore. When I want to read my feeds, I log in to my Google Reader account – once I’ve read them, I log out. When I want to process my email, I log in to my Google Mail account and also log out once I’m done. However to make sure I know what to do next, I’m always logged in to my Nozbe Account to see my list of “Next Actions”.
How do you fight your distractions? Do you complicate your life as well?
Please do let me know in the comments what your daily temptations and distractions are and how you fight them. I’ll be happy to learn from you!
By Michael Sliwinski
“Don’t try this at home” (MTV – Music Television)
As I mentioned in my last article, being at the GTD seminar and listening to David Allen inspired me to try out different approaches to GTD.
I decided to actually try GTD at home.
I had a pleasure of talking to other fellow GTD-practitioners about their positive experiences at their homes. This short article will include tips and tricks for implementing GTD at home gathered from my friends’ homes and from my very own.
Although in my case the experiment is an ongoing work-in-progress, I’m really happy with the results. Here’s a small fraction of GTD concept you can introduce in your family to get more done and motivate (and inspire) each other and have a happier home:
Inboxes for everyone!
First step is to prepare inboxes for each and every member of the family. Put the names on each of the inbox and instruct the family members “what is the inbox and why do they need one”. Some practical tips on setting inboxes for family members:
• Don’t put all of the inboxes in the same place – put each inbox in the place the family member will most likely see and pay attention to it. Why? If the inboxes are grouped together – the items will most likely “migrate” from one inbox to the other instead of being processed and done by the family member they belong to. Family members really understand the concepts of “delegating” too well.
• Locate the inbox in a place where the family member will pay attention to it. I initially placed my wife’s inbox in the hallway of our apartment. She would repeatedly ignore it. When I relocated her inbox to a spot near her cabinet with jewelry, the results improved tenfold.
• Motivate your family members to process their inboxes. Initially assist them in processing their inboxes and from time to time remind them about the piled-up inbox that needs to be cleaned to zero. I even heard a tip by one of the fathers who would actually put occasionally a 1-dollar bill or another kind of “pleasure-item” to encourage inbox-processing among his kids. I think this kind of bribery is worth trying out.
Work on the projects together
A family is a team and there are many projects, especially home-related ones, that need to be planned and executed together with several family members. Planning a project like “cleaning up the house”, “redecorating one of the rooms” or “family Sunday dinner” can be planned with a simple to-do list for each of them. In my home one of the places for these kind of to-do lists is on the fridge.
A simple to-do list won’t be enough, though. When planning a project like this, it’s important to pay attention to these two things:
• Clearly point out each other’s responsibilities in the project and delegate the tasks to each of the family members.
• Clearly define Next Actions for each other so that everyone knows what they should do right away.
Encourage the 50,000 feet level thinking
Make sure you talk to your loved ones about the meaning of their lives. About their overall area of responsibility, their goals – both long-term and short.
Try to schedule these kinds of talks to on at least monthly basis and make sure everyone (including yourself) really knows why they are doing what they are doing. Why they participate in their projects and review their priorities and analyze the motives of their actions.
I’ve started this kind of ritual with my wife and found out one of the best moments to do it is Sunday morning, right after our breakfast, when there is no pressure to go somewhere or do something.
Apply the great 2-minute rule at home!
After my last article about the “2-minute rule”, one of my friends told me how he applied the 2-minute rule at home and gave me several examples of daily rituals that could be accomplished within this short period of time, or faster (and I never realized that!):
• Take out trash
• Clean the table after the dinner
• Put the dishes into dishwasher
• Start the dishwasher to actually clean the dishes
• Make the bed
• Turn off lights in the rooms unoccupied by other family members
• Put the shoes into the shoe-drawer
• Grab a beer from the fridge
• Etc.
I’m sure there are many more quick 2-minute tasks at home that you can add to this list. I’d encourage you to identify these quickies with your family members. Once discovered, nobody will have an excuse to procrastinate and leave these tasks off for later.
Tip: To motivate my family members and myself, I’ve actually created a list of these 2—minute “quickies” and posted it on my fridge for others to see.
Do it now – start introducing GTD in your Family.
I’m hoping I’ve encouraged you more than enough to try and start GTD in your family. Creating good habits is very important in a team such as a family that lives under one roof and wants to live in harmony, love and respect for one another.
To foster family-friendly GTD I’ve introduced a “family plan” in my Nozbe web application where you can set up an account for up to 6 family members to manage projects and next actions together and spread more GTD-goodness among your loved ones.
Please post your comments about GTD in your family and share your successes and challenges below – I’d be more than happy to discuss my experiences with you!
First off we have a great video by one of our very own contributors, Nozbe founder Michael Sliwinski. If you want a quick explanation of how to get started with GTD that is very faithful to David’s own methods this is a great 30 minute investment.
Late Night Video Bonus Feature:
It’s late, I’m working on my Mac - I have to get up early in the morning for a conference call and what? It locked up? Oh noooo…. (Has this ever happened to you?)
Just in case, as a Mac user like me you ever start to feel smug or superior…
Do you have a good GTD video you’d like to share with the GTDtimes community? Please send it in: editor at GTDtimes dot com. Thanks.
By Michael Sliwinski
“You have to think about your stuff more than you realize but not as much as you’re afraid you might.”
David Allen, “Getting Things Done - the Art of Stress-free Productivity”
Last week one of my dreams came true and I had a chance to participate in David Allen’s GTD seminar and talk to the “guru” himself in person. The great thing about this seminar is the fact that you can actually get a sneak-peak of how David applies his methods in his real life. He showed us his desktop, the applications he’s using and actually demoed to us his very own GTD workflow.
One of the “a-ha” moments - 2-minute rule.
When we talked about processing inboxes and checking email, he reminded us about the 2-minute rule:
“Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.”
We thought, “yeah, right… but what can you do in just two minutes?”.
And then David went ahead and played us the 2-minute timer he has on his computer and asked us to watch it closely… the first 15 seconds… 30 seconds… and we thought it would take ages for the 2 minutes to go by… 1 minute to go… I’m bored already… and David said: “look, we’re just in the middle of the two minutes…” 30 seconds to go… and I thought 2 minutes was as very short period of time!
You can get lots of stuff done in just 2-minutes!
When I came home I quickly set up my very own 2-minute timer and started checking out what I could do in just under 2 minutes. Here are my results (in no particular order):
The key to successful application of the 2-minute rule - quick decisions!
My tip for you - in order to apply the rule successfully you need to decide fast what to do with the item you’re processing. When you’re reading an email - decide what to do now - reply if you can. If you can’t respond at this moment, convert it to an “action”. Don’t hesitate, don’t open email messages more than once! The same applies to anything you process. Decide fast, don’t think too much. “Just do it. Nike” ☺
Try it for yourself! What can you do in 2-minutes? Let me know in the comments!
Please challenge me and let me know what you discovered you could do in under just 2-minutes and I’m hoping to learn something new myself. I’ve known about this rule for so long and never really applied it and now I’m glad I finally did. You’ll amazed yourself. I’m sure of that.
I’m actually so happy about this rule that I’m adding a small javascript 2-minute counter to my Nozbe web application (the feature will be out next week) to remind my users that maybe before you add a task to Nozbe, it can be done in just under 2-minutes?
BTW, it took you around 2 minutes to read this article… Wasn’t that fun?
By Michael Sliwinski
I’ve read the book “Getting Things Done – the Art of Stress-free productivity” many, many times. I actually own the English, Polish and German copy of the book… and I’m buying the Spanish one now. Every time I’m reading the book in different language, I keep discovering new things, new “hidden gems” and re-discovering techniques I thought I mastered already. It’s like reading the book from different perspective each time (because the translators tend to take a little different approach each time).
One of these hidden gems is the concept of what David Allen calls: “Cranking Widgets”.
The concept is simple – according to David – one of the healthiest jobs psychologically is the one where you show up at work and you see three things:
• A bunch of un-cranked widgets
• A widget-cranking machine
• A bucket to put the cranked widget
Isn’t your job now tad simpler? All you have to do is just take the un-cranked widget, put it into a widget-cranking machine and later put the cranked widget into its bucket.
Why is the concept simple?
It’s because all the “thinking” has been done for you. All you have to do now is just to do the job and go home. At home your mind will be free – you won’t be thinking about your job and about your widgets… and you’ll have all the energy to do something else, spend time with your family, do sports, whatever you wish… isn’t that great?
Converting our office work into a “cranking widgets” job
This is the key of Getting Things Done. If we want to master the GTD techniques, we should learn to convert our tasks into a series of widgets to crank. We should actually think about them as “widgets”.
Of course, our “widgets” will be a little more complicated that the ones shown in the example above, but still, they will be only widgets. How to convert your actions into widgets which are simple to crank? There are three main rules to keep in mind:
1. Each Action must be “actionable” and must represent a small step.
How many times we catch ourselves putting actions on our to-do lists like “prepare dinner” or “prepare power-point presentation” or “check all the systems settings”, where all of these actions are actually projects which should be split down into small, very small actionable items. In our “prepare power-point presentation” example, we can divide this into:
• Gather data to show in the presentation
• Prepare pie-charts with representing data
• Prepare a structure of the presentation
• Prepare presentation template
• Add first slides as a presentation structure
• Add data and pie-charts
• Fine-tune the layout of the presentation
• Add animations and other effects…
• Etc.
Get the picture? Each of these steps is a small actionable “widget” to crank and once you have this list, all seems very logical. What seemed like a tedious project is now a series of simple widgets to crank.
2. Choose “Next Actions” of as many projects as you can and try to move them forward.
This is one of the rewarding thing that happens to you when you practice GTD on your daily basis. Just choose a next action of each of your projects and put them all into your “next actions” list. Start cranking these “next actions” and by the end of the day you’ll feel simply great.
Completion. You’ve moved each of the projects forward! Although they were small steps, yet you’ve progressed in so many of your projects and you’ll feel like you’re the king of the world. I live in my “next actions” list every day and I know how rewarding it is to see your “next actions” list done and completed.
3. Try to avoid binding your actions to time. Don’t be a slave of your calendar.
With Outlook or other calendars we tend to plan our day with a minute-to-minute schedule. Like I’m going to call Ted at 12:14 and I’m going to “Gather data for my presentation” at 12:18 until 12:47 when I’ll be replying to the email to my boss… etc. You get the picture.
Then all of the sudden, Ted’s line is busy, gathering data for presentation takes longer than 30 minutes and your boss has already phoned you and you don’t need to write him any email… your nice structure is gone forever and you feel frustrated and unproductive.
David Allen repeats several times that your calendar is a sacred place and you should put only appointments there. Or any other time-related stuff for that matter. Something that happens on this particular date and time, or will not happen at all. Other stuff can be done at any time.
Once you have your widgets ready, you can crank them at any time you wish. You can change the order of them or choose to skip some and do the others, depending on your contexts. It’s all up to you. Don’t be a slave of your calendar, focus on flexibility when cranking your widgets.
You can convert your sophisticated office work into a simple “cranking widgets” job.
It’s easier than you think , it’s very rewarding and you feel like you’ve done so much when you master the “cranking widgets” method. I’m still learning this but the more I succeed the better I feel about it.
What tools to use to create your “widgets” list and “next action” lists?
Any to-do list will do. A sheet of paper will do actually. I’m using my Nozbe web application as it gives me the ability to easily mark with a “star” a next action in each of my projects and later see all my “next actions” in one list. I can even reorder my next actions list too while I’m completing them. I actually spend my day looking at this list in Nozbe and I’m trying to crank as many widgets as I can.
How do you crank your widgets? Let me know in the comments!
Over the years that I’ve been learning and mastering GTD I’ve stumbled across many great individuals who taught me a lot about how to implement GTD in my personal and business life.
Some of them have been exposed to GTD since the day the book was published and have gradually become black belts… and there are others who have never heard of GTD or “Getting Things Done” but if you have a look at the way they work – it’s incredible to see how they follow the book’s advice without ever reading it.
I call them: natural born GTDers.
Who are natural born GTDers? To understand that let’s get back to the question: “what is GTD?” To me, GTD is not just a set of methods, it’s more like a set of habits. Powerful habits. n order to be successful in implementing GTD in your life, you’ll need to develop a series of habits:
• habit of putting all of your thoughts into your inbox and not keeping them forever on your mind
• habit of processing your inbox and deciding what to do with each item
• habit of managing projects and putting all of the project-related stuff where it belongs
• habit of “cranking widgets” – getting things done without thinking too much about your system
• habit of weekly review and re-organizing your actions for the next week
• habit of extracting “next actions” from a pile of to-dos in your projects
• habit of not putting everything into your calendar… just the time-specific meetings and actions
…and you’ll discover more of these as you read the book by David Allen.
Now, much to my surprise, they are people who “get” these habits… they have never read the GTD book, never learned any theory about time-management or project-management – they just intuitively know that this is the way to go and they are just doing that every day. They even don’t have any sophisticated systems for this, they use good-old pen and paper, old-school calendars and whatever applications they have pre-installed on their computers. But these tools don’t matter. The key to their success is the fact that they know the “habits” it takes to get things done and are just following these every single day.
The first natural born GTDer – Luis.
Just after I’ve read the GTD book, I started doing business with a guy named Luis who is to this day one of my business partners and a great friend. I remember I was greatly impressed by the concepts from the book by David Allen but what really struck me is that after a week of working with Luis I found out that he is following his daily habits in the same way David Allen describes it. I set down and talked to him about GTD and he was surprised there is such a thing as GTD. When asked about his daily habits, he just said it was so obvious that he never gave too much thought to it.
He just knew he had to make his actions list in the morning (“Next Actions”), he had to revise his projects and tasks every Monday morning (“Weekly Review”), he had to jot down all the stuff there was to do and later make sure to process it and attach it to a particular project (“Inbox processing”) and he had to spend his day with his list to make sure everything he had planned has been done (“cranking widgets”). No rocket science, he said, just a way to get stuff done and move along.
He just had his regular habits and mastered them. I didn’t. And what he said there wasn’t all that obvious to me at the time. The same thing happened when I met my future wife and discovered she’d been following similar habits and getting tons of stuff done… and neither has she ever heard of GTD before.
They are natural born GTDers – to them GTD is just obvious. I guess David Allen feels the same way.
Habits are not that “obvious” though. I had to “discover” all of these “obvious” techniques and learn my habits. Really study them, learn, fail and try again. And again. And again. And boy it wasn’t all that easy. These natural born GTDers make it look easy. It’s not. Maintaining good habits is a tedious task. Sometimes we feel too lazy to remember them, we try to talk ourselves out of them or simply unconsciously find ways to avoid them.
We tend to get flooded with lots of information and let ourselves be carried away by the pace of work and accumulate stuff to never find the time for the habits of processing, organizing, reviewing…This is why some of us (me!) need tools to help us. We need the tools to help us remember about our habits and guide us how to perform these habits. We sure will be covering some of there on the GTD Times blog. They range from simple pen and paper, calendars, computer based applications, web-based applications, you name it.
I developed my own web application to help me remember about my habits – Nozbe – and boy it helped me a lot – I finally had my projects, to-dos, notes, files… etc. in one system and could easily choose next actions for each day. I’ve initially used it only by myself for more than a year or so… but later decided to show it to the world and now there are thousands of busy professionals from all over the world getting more done thanks to my web application.
Are you a natural-born GTDer?
If you are – congratulations. However, chances are you’re like me so you need a way to develop your habits and a way to keep you on top of them. I’m sure you’ll find the book by David Allen a great read and if you have already read it, find your tools for the job and create a perfect habits-empowering system that will help you get things done and live a happy life. Feel free to post about your system in the comments.
Editor’s Note: I first met Michael Sliwinski at the Office 2.0 conference last fall. He and I and his lovely wife and Marc and Sue Orchant all went for dinner and Marc and Michael totally connected. Marc was very impressed with Michael’s application, Nozbe, which is an exceptional tool to help you stay on top of your projects, plans, and next actions. I’ll be reviewing Nozbe in a future post, however, if you’d like to try this application for yourself, visit Nozbe.com and you can give it a test run free of charge.
Michael Sliwinski is a creator of a web-based tool for getting things done -Nozbe that helped him master the GTD methods. Now he’s happy to help thousands of busy professionals and businesses be more productive and stay on top of their “next actions”.
Michael holds a Masters Degree in Business Management and a Bachelor Degree in Marketing and Advertising. He speaks four languages fluently (English, Spanish, German and Polish). He currently runs his Internet marketing and development company: apivision.com (creators of Nozbe).
Michael is also a gadget-man who never leaves his home without his TabletPC. When not creating web applications and blogging about personal and business productivity Michael loves to travel. He also holds 1st Kyu Brown belt in Karate Shotokan (black belt exam is his “next action”!). Michael lives in Europe with his wife, Ewelina, who is lucky to be a natural-born GTDer and an IT/IP lawyer.
