Nothing so useless as . . .
April 4th, 2013 GTD Times Team - Staff ContributorsCategories | Getting Things Done | Inspiration
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
—Peter Drucker
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.
Learn the keys to mind like water in our next “Keys to Getting Things Done” webinar. It’s coming up this Thursday, March 7th from 10am-11am Pacific Time.
We have about 20 seats still available. Register now.
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.
