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?
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.
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.)
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, 2013THINK 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.
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
If you’re being asked to do more work than before, with less time for your personal life, you’ll relate to this excerpt from Todd Brown’s blog post for Next Action Associates.
Want your people to be more productive in the office? Help them get more of their personal things done.
Published on January 22, 2013 by Todd Brown
Why do people have so many personal things on their minds? In my experience it’s because they are better set up to handle things at the office, because that’s where “work” happens, and productivity is expected. Personal things are allowed to take a back seat. But here’s the rub: If the personal open loops aren’t handled appropriately, they are just as likely to generate stress, relationship problems, and mental distraction, both at home and at the office.
The problem is exacerbated by the current economic reality. One of my clients, the head of HR for a firm here in London, told me last week that while staffing levels are down on last year, work levels definitely aren’t. We’re hearing similar thing from many of our clients these days.
With even more to do at the office, the pressure on home life is becoming even more intense. There are just as many open loops at home, and they’re probably getting less attention.
So if your goal is to enable your people to deal with increased demands at work, with a clear head and without distraction, support them in developing a “whole life” approach to managing their open loops that helps them get their personal life under better control.
This doesn’t mean they’ll spend a lot of time at the office doing personal things. It does mean that when open loops present themselves in their personal lives, that they’ll have the confidence that they can handle them appropriately. And at work they’ll be able to focus better, undistracted by the open loops at home.
That’s what I call a “win-win.”
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.
What’s the common denominator among people who are doing GTD? Find out in this two-minute podcast. It’s available for download now on the David Allen Company podcast page.
Question: At what point did answering email become my job?
David Allen’s answer: Well, at what point did answering anything—your mail, having conversations in your hallway—become your job? It’s all your job. You just have to decide what your work is. As the late, great Peter Drucker said, that’s your biggest job, to define what your work is.
So how do you define what your work is, and therefore should you be doing that? The good news about this overwhelm is that it’s forcing people to make executive decisions that they never felt like they had to make before. “I need to do everything that comes my way.” No, you can’t anymore, sorry. You are going to have to do triage. That means you are going to have to have a conversation with your boss. You are going to have to show up with a list of everything he or she has given you and have a conversation. “Gee, thanks for these new things, can we talk? Because I am not going to be able to do them all.” It’s forcing those kinds of conversations.
That’s why people have this attraction/repulsion to GTD. It ain’t lightweight stuff. If you are really going to work this, that’s what’s going to start to show up.
Excerpted from David’s interview with Xconomy.com.
The Power of Moms has a very useful post on how to methodically get your house organized. There’s even a handy PDF download.
A Seven-Step Plan to Organize the House
by April Perry on Jan 8, 2013
I want my home to be a simple, functional, happy environment that enables every family member to thrive.
But if I want it to get there–and stay there, I have to have a plan.
Over the past 12 years, with 9 moves, 4 children, and a bustling schedule (like yours, I’m sure) I’ve refined my home-simplification process down to seven steps that work every single time.
Many aspects of this process are based on David Allen’s best-setter, Getting Things Done (a wonderful book you must read). Corporate executives worldwide live and breathe this kind of training, and now we’re going to have a great time applying it to our homes.
Read the full post here.
Forbes has picked up Senior GTD Coach and Presenter Kelly Forrister’s article on how to tackle a crazy to-do list, originally posted on The Daily Muse.
Crazy To-Do List? Here’s What to Tackle First
Many people try to tackle their mountain of personal tasks by sorting them by priority, and starting at the top. Seems logical—but they’ve actually got it backward. In reality, before you think about priorities, there are three factors you need to consider, because they each actually limit your choices about what you should (and even can) do next.
Limitation #1: Context
If you’re not in the right place, don’t have the right tool, or are not in front of the right person required to take an action, you can’t take that action.Limitation #2: Time Available
The second factor that comes into play is how much time you have. If you’ve got a big project to work on, but you need to bounce to your next meeting or pick up your kids in 10 minutes, it’s probably not a good use of your effort to start it.Limitation #3: Resources
The third factor to consider is what your energy is like. I don’t know about you, but Friday afternoon after a long, busy workweek is not the time to dive into anything that will take a lot of mental bandwidth. Instead, I make choices that match what my mental and physical energy is like. Not to say there aren’t times I need to just “buck up” and get in there anyway, but I like to be conscious about what I’m choosing and match that to when I think I’ll bring my best self, whenever I can.
Read the full post here on The Daily Muse, or here on Forbes.
