Chip Joyce, an Account Executive with the David Allen Company, took this photo of his home office. His comment about the photo was, “I’m violating a GTD best practice: something’s on my desk that’s not reference, equipment, decoration, or supplies.”
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
—Peter Drucker
Our friends at Think Visual developed this cool visual harvest of a recent GTD Weekly Review webinar. It really captures the creative fun you can have while getting your weekly review productivity boost.
Click on Start Prezi in the center of the screen. When it starts in a couple seconds, you can advance the slides manually by clicking on the arrow, or choose Autoplay from the lower-right. You’ll see it zoom into each step, and you may still want to click the full screen option. Enjoy!
This excerpt is from a recent issue of David Allen’s “Productive Living” newsletter. It’s free and sent about every 4 weeks. You’ll find essays from David, thought-provoking quotes, and productivity tips you can use every day.
Hi Folks,
Is it possible to still be productive when you feel like you are drowning in a culture of interruptions? You bet. But, the strategies won’t come from traditional time-management approaches. My Food For Thought this month shares my approach to interruptions and how to effectively manage them versus how to just tolerate them.
All the best,
I often get this question/pushback as I’m teaching: “All this personal productivity methodology sounds fine and good, but what about all those interruptions that plague me during my day?”
There are plenty of traditional “time-management” suggestions about dealing with “time wasters.” But I’d rather not waste time dealing with time wasters. For most of the people I interact with, the standard tips are either self-evident and in play, or impossible.
So I don’t spend a lot of time on time management tips. Not that they don’t have value—many of them do. But there are a billion exceptions to the rules. I have a more radical suggestion. Two actually.
1. Keep the inventory of everything you have to do current, complete, effectively organized, regularly reviewed, and instantly retrievable at a moment’s notice, while maintaining regular thinking about the projects and bigger things that you really want to accomplish. Then you can much more confidently and maturely differentiate between inappropriate disturbances and unexpected opportunities or useful interactions as they show up.
2. Get your act together about how easily and quickly you can take in any input, store it safely, and effortlessly glide back to whatever you were or now need to be doing, without having to process or complete it in that moment, knowing it will get handled at a better time.
We have three terrific public GTD webinars coming up in April. These webinars are 60-75 minutes long, and are held via GoToWebinar. Tuition is $49 per registration.
Click here to learn more about GTD webinars.
Procrastination can hide behind busy-ness. Find out more in this excerpt from Todd Brown’s blog post for Next Action Associates.
Too busy? Maybe you’re procrastinating
After a busy day, are you leaving the office tired and satisfied? Or just tired? You’ve spent the day in nearly constant activity. And you may have been procrastinating the whole time.
“Huh?” you say, “I can’t have been procrastinating. I’ve been really busy.”
Here’s the thing: when we’re busy we can easily trick ourselves into thinking that all of that activity means that we’re not procrastinating. We’re busy, sure, but we’re not focused on the things that should really have our attention. If someone were to tap us on the shoulder and say, “that thing you’re doing, is that the best use of your attention right now?” we would hesitate to agree.
We’re busy procrastinating.
The explosion of digital channels and smart mobile technology makes it very easy to integrate busy-ness and procrastination. There are a lot of “channels that lead to you.” Email, sure. But also Facebook and Twitter and instant messaging and LinkedIn and…
The inputs in these channels come at us thick and fast. That makes it tempting to let the real-time arrivals drive us. Procrastination is always only a click away.
Ask yourself: what are the odds that that e-mail at the top of your inbox is the best thing to focus on next? If not and you choose to deal with it anyway, then you’re being driven by “latest and loudest,” letting your channels dictate your priorities.
Or maybe your procrastination looks like this: you’re snacking on quick wins. This is what I quite often see when people say they’re “cleaning up email.” They’re scrolling down into the older strata of their inbox, looking for things that can be handled quickly, ideally without much thought or energy. But in doing that I’ll often see them scroll right past something that’s strategic, critical even. But it’s too big, or too complex. So it doesn’t get any attention.
If you’re struggling with procrastination, then what’s to be done? To get it under control, we need to make getting moving on the right things as attractive and friction-free as possible.
You can read other blog posts and find out more about Next Action Associates, the only Certified International Partner for GTD in the UK, here.
Trust yourself to do what you really feel like doing, and what you feel like doing will change. Don’t, and it will plague you.—David Allen
David Allen shares tips for staying productive when you travel. He talks about preparing for travel, maximizing your productivity in those windows of weird time, keeping it together on the road, cool tools, and surviving reentry. This is a recording from a public event David did last year.
(This video is streaming from YouTube, so it may take a few seconds to load.)
This excerpt is from an interview that Mike Williams, President and CEO of David Allen Company, did with Inc.
OWNER’S MANUAL | Jeff Haden Mar 5, 2013
Best Way to Start, Well, Anything
The road to success starts with asking–and answering–one simple question.
To be more productive and truly engage other people, always start with that one question: What does a wildly successful outcome for this meeting, this project, this sales call, etc. look like?
Don’t start anything until you know the answer.
Read the full article here.
A client recently asked us for our best practices around email communications, to share with their globally dispersed teams. They had learned the keys to getting inbox zero, but their productivity was stymied by the sheer volume of unproductive emails being sent around the company. These tips were born out of the shared practices we use here at the David Allen Company with our own staff, and I wanted to share them with the GTD community.
1. Appropriate Use — Match the message to the best medium. Recognize when email is not the best method of communicating. There are times when a face-to-face meeting is better than a string of unclear or sensitive emails going back and forth. Just because the topic started on email, doesn’t mean it should stay on email. On the flip side, are there meetings being held that could be more efficiently be done over email if you trusted people were getting to inbox zero on a regular basis? (See David Allen’s article on Getting Email Under Control for great tips on that.)
2. To: vs. Cc: – Be discerning about your use of To: vs. Cc:. Why? Ever receive an email where it’s unclear who has the action because everyone is in the “To:” field? We designate the To: field for who has the action (could be multiple people). Cc: is simply for their information–with no expectation that they will take action on the email, other than receive it. Personally, I find I am much more conscious about what I am asking for, and from whom, when I clearly delineate between who has action and who just needs to receive the information. And, I appreciate when that distinction is made for me in return. I’m still processing the email to get to inbox zero, but it’s very clear to me that no action is expected of me in return.
3. Subject Lines — Use clear subject lines that clearly describe the topic. I bet you’ve had times when you’ve done an emergency scan of your email (particularly on your mobile device) and appreciated having clear subject lines (versus the proverbial “checking in” or “update”). Also, don’t be afraid to change subject lines if the topic has changed and you want to make the it clearer what the email string is about. While it might have initially started as “checking in,” now it’s moved into the “Q3 budget”–change the subject line to reflect that.
Another spin on effective subject lines is to use code to indicate the end of a message, when appropriate. This kind of kind of code, such as “EOM,” can be useful for those times when you just need to send a quick bit of information back to someone and it can be done through the email subject line. For example, for short responses such as acknowledging with “thanks” or “I’m on it.” simply append your subject line with “EOM” after your text, to indicate “end of message.” What that means to the person receiving it is that everything that need to know is in the subject line and they can process it based on what they are seeing in the subject line, without even opening the email. For example: “Re: I posted Q2 spreadsheets to the database. –THANKS! GOT IT. EOM”
4. Reply to All — Resist the urge to simply click reply to all, if not everyone needs to receive your reply. Many clients tell us that their staff seem to use the Reply to All function because it’s quick and easy–not because it’s productive. On the flip side, if you’re sending emails to your designated groups, pause to consider if everyone in that group (and subsequent replies to all) really need to be receiving that email. Are their roles in the company relevant to the information? If you’re not sure, ask them. I bet they will appreciate being asked about what they are getting to help with their own email management. Another tip to avoid the Reply to All cycle is to use the Bcc: field for all recipients, when appropriate. That way only the sender will receive the replies.
5. Response Times — What are your agreed upon response times for internal and external communications? If that’s never been made explicit, there’s a good chance those who think it’s “asap” are feeling resentful about the ones who think it’s “when I can get to it” and think they are breaking an agreement. And the “when I can get to it” folks get annoyed by the “asap” folks who ask them in the hallway, “Did you get my email?”
At the David Allen Company, we have a standard to reply within two business days to all internal communications. And, it’s important to note that responding doesn’t mean completing the action. It may just be a simple acknowledgment of “I’m on it” so the other person can relax about it. Two business days is our standard that works for us. You may find you need a shorter or longer time period in your organization. The key here is not about the time, but having an agreement that’s explicit so that everyone is clear about the rules to play by.
I hope these best practices have been useful for you. I encourage you to take these ideas back to your team and organization. Get some healthy debates going about them! Adapt them to make them more your own.
—Kelly
Kelly Forrister is a Senior Coach & Presenter with the David Allen Company.
