You have three categories of daily work. When you understand these, you can better clarify, manage, and renegotiate your total inventory of projects and actions.

1. Doing work as it appears:
When you turn your attention to something unexpected that turns up (your boss asks you to stop by her office, for example), you’re deciding by default that this is more important than anything else you have to do.

2. Doing predefined work:
When you’re doing predefined work, you’re working off your Next Actions lists, completing tasks that you have previously determined need to be done.

3. Defining your work:
Defining your work entails clearing up your in-tray, your email, your voicemail, your meeting notes, etc., and processing new projects into into action steps. Once you’ve defined all your work, you can trust that your lists of things to do are complete.

This week, challenge yourself to spend more time doing predefined work and defining your work. Most people spend too much of their time doing work as it shows up.

Download a free article on the Threefold Nature of Work from our Free Articles Library.

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Is your productivity affected by meetings that are poorly run or you’re not sure you should really be in? The New York Times did a story recently, called “When You’ve Had One Meeting Too Many,” about the culture of meetings that so many of us deal with these days. Looking back at this week’s calendar, how much time did you spend in meetings?

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For those of you who have iPhones, there’s a brand-new setup guide that describes how best to configure the iPhone for GTD. The David Allen Company online store has letter and European A4 sizes of the guide for sale as PDF downloads. You’ll find information here about the GTD & iPhone Setup Guide, as well as other guides. A free sample is also available for download.

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In my experience, the greatest successes don’t come from grandiose scenarios of good intentions engendered by temporarily pumped-up motivation. Rather, the most lasting and significant positive effects result from small things, done consistently, in strategic places.
—David Allen, “Win the self-help game,” in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

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Epipheo.TV talked with David Allen about how to hack through your to-do list and free up your mind to focus on what’s most important to you. It’s a very short, very fun video.

(This video is streaming from YouTube, so it may take a few seconds to load.)

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David Allen outlines the steps to get clear, current, and creative on a regular basis.  Grab the free GTD Weekly Review® checklist. Now available as a PDF download.
http://www.davidco.com/free_articles

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The GTD Mastering Workflow seminar is coming to New Orleans on March 14th!  Learn the foundations of GTD in this wonderful destination city.  If you’re just getting started with GTD, this is a perfect opportunity to get your system off the ground. If you’re experienced with GTD, it’s a great time to identify any gaps in your systems for greater productivity.  This one-day presentation is packed with practical recommendations and suggestions about how to put the proven GTD principles to work for you—at work, at home and in everything you do.

Sign up now to get the early registration discount.

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Tony Schwartz has some excellent advice about the value of relaxation for increasing productivity.  Here’s an excerpt from his recent New York Times opinion piece.

Relax! You’ll Be More Productive

By TONY SCHWARTZ
Published: February 9, 2013

THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?

Golden Cosmos

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

Read the full article here.

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Cue released data, and The Atlantic commented on it, showing that most of us wrote a novel’s worth of email last year.

What’s more surprising is that we received more than six times as much email as we sent. Even if you deleted some of that email without needing to read it, you probably read several novel’s worth of email last year.

If you’re still not handling email as efficiently as you can be, try a 60-minute webinar on email management. The focus will include structuring your email system to support action management, and dealing with backlog email.

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Do you have any pointers for perfectionists?

Just focus on doing the next action perfectly, which is a lot easier than trying to be perfect about how you approach something bigger. Be as retentive as you want. The only problem is when it stops action. Be a perfectionist about the process, which will require, of course, making decisions on the front end that might not be perfect. Think about what might go wrong if you avoid decisions and action! (If you need a negative motivator.)
—David Allen

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