Discovery of the Day

The Productivity Cafe has a great list of the top ten New Years Resolutions complete with actions you can take to acheive them.

Setting Priorities

I touched on setting priorities in my post about My ideal time management system, but here is a separate review of this topic.

Julie Morgenstern’s Return on Investment:

• Deadlines
• Estimated time
• Steps to results

Alan Lakein’s ABC Method:

• A-important tasks that contribute to goals MUST do
• B-moderately important SHOULD do
• C-least important COULD do

Stephen R Covey’s time management matrix:

• Quadrent I-important and urgent
• Quadrent II-important but not urgent
• Quadrent III-urgent but not important
• Quadrent IV-not urgent and not important

Increase Quadrent II activities, decrease Quadrent III and IV activities, and manage Quadrent I activities.

Time Management Tools has an article by Brian Tracy on Setting Priorities and couple more by him on other topics.
Always ask: “What is the best use of my time right now?”

Update

Luciano’s comment was a good reminder about the idea of time boxing. Dave Cheong has a good explanation of time boxing. David Seah’s tools are all about keeping on task too. Using a timer increases awareness of time passing by and focuses attention on high priority tasks.

I was also reminded of the good ole 80/20 rule. Jim Temme in the book “Productivity Power” says that we spend about 80 percent of our day working on job description activities (what I think of as repeating tasks) that yield only 20 percent results. The challenge is to use the remaining 20 percent of discretionary time on goal-related activities that yield 80 percent results.

Unwrap Your Gifts

Every day is a gift, that’s why they call it the present. -Eleanor Roosevelt

Life is made meaningful by what we have given.

Love is a treasure for which we never can pay, the only way we keep it is to give it away.

What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God. -Eleanor Powell

The power is in the focus

I spent an hour last night listening to an awesome webinar featuring Jeffrey Schwartz (author of The Mind and the Brain) and David Rock (author of Quiet Leadership) as they discuss the neuroscience of leadership at strategy-business.com. It covered some very interesting ideas and I highly recommend it. Fascinating stuff.

A couple of gems from it: “A working definition of wisdom is prioritizing in ways that help you keep your eyes on the prize.” We have the veto power to recognize distractions and focus our attention back on what’s important. Rather than think “focus, focus, focus” simply notice distractions and re-direct with “no, that’s not what I’m going to work on.”

Total Picture Radio also has a 27 minute audio interview with David Rock.

Discovery of the Day

Terrific post by Lisa Peake on the dreaded inbox via LifeDev.

What’s working for me

System review

How I handle:

• Calendar & Email: Yahoo. maybe someday gmail.
• Ideas: At home-clipboard. At night-bedside notebook + pen that lights up. At work-project folders.
• Master List: index cards in a holder.
• Projects: a version of Tammy Cravits Post-It Portable Workspace plus a project list on an index card to carry with me.
• Repeating Tasks: lists and email reminders. I still long for a better way to integrate these automatically into my system.

These are things that need to be brought together to do the weekly review.

Things I’m beginning to see about Getting Things Done

The Next Action list is really a version of master list, that pulls together the next actions needed for all projects. If you like to see the actions listed with the projects, some kind of method is needed that automatically combines all the next actions into the master list and still enables you to view them in the context of the project. I read a post about this somewhere that I can’t find now, however it used tools I don’t have.

Michael’s thoughts on this are quite interesting. Ditto Genuine Curiosity’s GTD Odyssey.

Contexts are not very important to me. Whether at work or at home, I virtually always have access to a computer and a phone. Although I do have one page of home projects and another of work projects.

Mindsweep is a word that actually makes my brain freeze up. Of 4 ways to trigger ideas at GTD Portal, walking around appeals to me most.

Repeating Tasks

What are the tasks that you must accomplish on a regular basis at work and at home? Determine what must be done on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Time yourself as you perform the tasks for an estimated time, and note if the task is best performed at a certain time or place, if peak time or a tool is needed, etc. Use checklists for any repeating tasks.

Work duties: check job description or O*Net.

Home: check the repeating tasks list on the Sticky Wiki. Homemakers practice a variety of skills.

What We Control

Many problems result when we attempt to control that which is outside of our control.

• Emotional Competency-What You Can Change and What You Cannot
• “Control, Power & Influence: Six Basic Ideas to Consider” is the title of an article by C.S. Clarke, Ph.D.
• Part of the Serenity Prayer is about recognizing the difference.

Which of these things do you think is within your control?

• Thoughts
• Where we were born
• Actions
• Race
• Values
• Age
• Education
• Intelligence
• Feelings
• Birth family
• Wellness
• Health
• Ourselves
• Physical attributes
• Others
• Weather
• Traffic

There are three things we control-our own:

• thoughts
• feelings
• actions

In Rational Emotive Therapy Albert Ellis shows how our feelings come from the thoughts we think. Learn your emotional ABCs (pdf) or use this Worksheet.

Although we do not control others that does not mean that we are powerless.

Through what we say and do we may choose to:

• Share information
• Express our opinion
• Ask for what we want
• Pray
• Influence
• Persuade
• Set limits
• Recognize what is and is not love

Base your intentions on love. Adversity happens. It doesn’t build character, it reveals it. This doesn’t mean we can’t set goals and work towards them. It does mean that we have to accept that there will be unexpected obstacles in life that can affect our outcomes. The alternative is to drift aimlessly without making any attempt to shape your life.

Survival Needs

As I think about what I’ve been spending my time on lately, I’m reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We must take care of those important survival needs before moving on up to higher things. Do you think I’ve been:

a. surviving winter

b. preparing for the upcoming holidays

c. improving training designs at work

d. all of the above

The answer is: d!

For one who is supposedly into planning, I wasn’t all that well prepared when a snowstorm hit. I think exposure to the Just in Time theory is partially to blame. Also the small size of my home which simply does not allow for huge stockpiles of supplies. However, there are certain things it’s good to have plenty of when you’re snowed in: coffee, milk, pet food, and so forth. The snow is melting now and it would be a good idea to give some more thought to this.

I try to keep things fairly simple for the holidays. Still, there are extra things that must be done, and these extra things just take some time. Thankfully, packages have been sent and cards (mostly) mailed now. I can almost relax and enjoy it now.

I’ve been developing a staff blog to communicate information to assist in training new employees and to share opportunities for learning. I think it’s got the potential to be helpful.

Email Management

Managing email is a major task. Luckily, there is lots of information available on how to handle it. Listed below are a few links to articles I have found helpful.

Process and Organize Your Email to increase productivity at Microsoft. The four D’s for decision making are similar to the ones for paper management.

With How to Process Email and Deal with Information Overload, the Productivity Pro adds two more D’s and some detail.

Getting To Done: email triage at Lifehacker describes a folder system.

Phil Gerbyshak outlines his 4Fs for email success at Make It Great!

Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload by Stever Robbins.

Five simple rules for keeping an empty inbox at Download Squad is especially helpful for Gmail users.

43 Folders has an “Inbox Zero” series. For those interested in Getting Things Done, Gmail has a GTD Firefox extension.