Entries Tagged 'Productivity Tips' ↓

Email can be a major time drain and without proper email management, we can spend literally the entire day on email. There are two approaches to tackling the email Inbox. Some productivity gurus promote deleting all non-priority emails or filing them in folders, until your Inbox reads zero. On the other side of the spectrum is the strategy of never deleting email. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

The Email Inbox Zero Approach

Productivity guru Merlin Mann advocates striving to get your email Inbox to zero. He writes,

Just remember that every email you read, re-read, and re-re-re-re-re-read as it sits in that big dumb pile is actually incurring mental debt on your behalf. The interest you pay on email you’re reluctant to deal with is compounded every day and, in all likelihood, it’s what’s led you to feeling like such a useless slacker today. Maybe? Think about it.

The main argument of this approach is that having emails in your Inbox uses up mental energy. So if you can either delete or file every email that comes in, you are eliminating the mental burden. Additional benefits of getting your Inbox to zero are that you don’t have to re-read emails that you have read before and it can lower stress and bring you peace of mind of being finished. The downside of the Inbox zero approach is that each time you delete an unimportant email, it takes a few seconds. These seconds can add up if you multiply it by 1,000 for the week. Although if you limit unnecessary emails by unsubscribing to newsletters, turning off alerts, and even telling your friends to stop sending funny cat pictures, getting your Inbox to zero suddenly becomes much easier.

You can read about Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero series at http://www.43folders.com/izero

The Never Delete Email Approach

I take a starkly different approach to managing my email Inbox, I never delete email. The thinking behind this approach has to do with the presence of a search box, which most email Inboxes have. Why waste time sorting and deleting your mail, when you can instantly summon any email by entering a few keywords that you recall. If an email requires action, write a quick note on your to do list. When you have time for the task, search the name of the person who sent the email and chances are the email you need is at the top of the search results. The benefit of this approach is that you don’t spend time deleting and sorting email and you always have access to emails that you need in the future.

Do you have a preference or a different email strategy? Share it in the comments.

There is a good case for the argument that the improvements in technology, especially information technology, has made our lives more difficult. We are now constantly connected to others via our mobile devices, and constant streams of information from the internet can be overwhelming. One of the consequences of the abundance of easily accessible information is the potential to distract us from focusing on high priority tasks. The previous post about the myth of multitasking discusses the inefficiency of switching between tasks.

Find a Zen-like place to work

Sometimes I struggle to focus when working from home because there are many distractions. I will notice clutter that I should organize or be tempted to watch a show I recorded on DVR. I have found it helpful to escape these distractions by finding a place where I can better focus on the task at hand. For me this is a Starbucks, for others it could be the library, or the park.

Lock away your mobile device

Many of us are addicted to our mobile devices. For some it is an extension of our bodies and we can feel incomplete without it. To avoid being tempted to check your mobile for text messages, the Twitter stream, or being interrupted by calls, put your mobile device out of reach. This could be in the other room or in your coworkers desk. Anything that makes it more difficult to habitually check your phone should help.

Let go of the need to know everything

Former Apple and Microsoft executive Linda Stone wrote this over at BusinessWeek:

In the case of continuous partial attention, we’re motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There’s a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With CPA, we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly scan for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

The fear of missing things is often overblown. The book The 4 Hour Work Week suggests that you should completely avoid reading news and rather ask others if anything interesting is going on. It is good to revisit the consequences of not reading every blog post in your RSS reader or reading every Tweet from the people you are following. You will see that a lot of the information that you consume on a daily basis is insignificant and you would be just fine if you ignored most of it.

Photo by totalaldo

The 2 minute rule is a really easy way to simplify prioritizing tasks from David Allen’s getting things done. If there is something that you need to get done that will take 2 minutes or less to do, get it done first. This will shorten your to do list and prevent you from wasting mental effort thinking about it later. David Allen says in GTD that our brains are often reminding us that we have to do things at the precise moment that you can’t do anything about it. By sending that thank you letter first, you have to spend time thinking about it later, especially when you are driving on the freeway or at a meeting.

Sometimes we avoid getting started on a task because the time commitment is too daunting. That is where a technique called timeboxing can be useful. The idea is that you set aside a box of time in which you will try to make as much progress in the task as you can within the alloted time. It is okay if you don’t finish the task, but at least you are making progress.

Steve Pavlina describes it like this:

First, let’s say you want to get something done, but there’s a risk it could end up taking far more time than it’s worth because it’s the kind of task where you might exhibit perfectionist tendencies. So you give yourself a specific amount of time, which you won’t go over, and you simpy do the best job you can within that time.

It is also a good tool for avoiding procrastination. You may dread engaging in a tedius project like taxes for instance. As a result it gets pushed back until you have to rush to meet the deadline. However if you commit to just spending 30 minutes a day on it, it can be much more palatable and your work may be much better in quality since you don’t have to rush.

It is also helpful to perfectionists who may waste valuable time striving for perfection when good enough will do. If you commit to spending 30 minutes that day on a project no matter how much progress you make, it can prevent you from stretching out the time a task or project takes to complete.

Photo by gregoryjameswalsh

by Marc Evers

This post is about the principles of time management that underlie the book Do It Tomorrow by Mark Forster:

Have a clear vision
Have a clear vision of your goals, of the things you want to do and the things you don’t want to do. A clear vision directs your priorities. Setting priorities is only meaningful between projects, not between tasks that have to be done anyway (’project’ is loosely defined here as an activity that leads to some desired result and that cannot be finished in one go).

Your vision is not something static: it will change over time. So frequently revisit your vision, to keep your priorities clear as well.

One thing at a time
Focus, focus, focus! Use for example timeboxing or working with a pair (like pairprogramming) to work in highly focused way. Don’t dilute your focus by having too many projects at the same time.

Little and often
Work on things frequently, in small bits, iteratively and increment, so that results grow over time. If you want e.g. to write a book or finish a Ph.D. thesis, work every day on it. Actually doing something and keep doing it is more important than the amount of time spent.

This works for writing, uncluttering your home or office, bookkeeping, and many other larger activities.

Define your limits
Creative thinking works better within clear boundaries. An example of limits is timeboxing your activities, e.g. using the pomodori technique.

Defining limits is also important for your projects: determine the boundaries (and frequently re-determine them) to get a clear focus of what you’re doing and what you aren’t doing, instead of being busy with a cloud of all kinds of vaguely interesting and possibly relevant stuff.

This week, I’ve started to make a map of all the projects that I currently have and that I want to take on this year. Being an independent consultant, I don’t have an organisational context that sets a lot of boundaries for me so I’ll have to set them myself in order to be effective.

Closed lists
A closed list is a list that has a line under it and that will not change. For every day, you make a Will Do list, a closed list with the stuff that came in the previous day and your recurring tasks. As the list is closed, it will only shrink when you’re finishing items from the list. This will give you a feeling of accomplishment at the end of each day, when all the Will Do items have been checked.

Anything that comes in during the day and that is not a real urgency, will be put on tomorrow’s list or below the line of today’s list. You’ll first finish all the items above the line, before doing the newly added things.

This approach enables you to plan most of the work you do, so you can work much less reactively and much less governed by self-inflicted urgencies. Your day to day planning will become more predictable and you’ll get early feedback when you’re structurally overloaded.

The Will Do list is limited by your daily processing capacity (so you will need to find out what it is), so you prevent backlogs from building up. If you get more work each day than you can handle the next day, you’ll have to either cut down on your commitments, make your systems more efficient, and/or allocate more time for the stuff on your lists.

Willem asked, what do you do when the telephone rings? It depends: you can answer the call, make a note, and take action tomorrow (unless, of course, it’s about your house being on fire). You can also decide that you won’t answer the phone during certain activities, listen voicemail later on, and get back to the callers the next day. It depends on the nature of your work and your preferences.

Another advantage of closed lists is that you don’t have to prioritise between the items. They all need to be done and if the list is limited by your daily processing capacity, it will be finished. Prioritizing doesn’t make sense for stuff that needs to be done anyway.

Working this way gives peace of mind and reduces waste: you don’t have to spend your energy making difficult decisions about priorities. Prioritizing is waste: it’s work that adds no value, but just increases the pressure on you! You’ll have more time and energy left for actually doing useful stuff.

Forster’s recommendation is to start with the least urgent things first. If work has to be done anyway, why not do it right away?

A bright, grand idea like writing a book is not something you can finish the next day. This becomes a project, a task that recurs (a little attention every day) until the work is finished.

Reducing random factors
By preventing most ‘urgencies’, you will reduce a lot of (self-inflicted) variability in your day to day work. Closed lists system make the underlying systems problems visible. You can’t eliminate all variability and randomness, but you can reduce them substantially, giving you more freedom, making sure your important things get done, and enabling you to handle the remaining randomness better.

Commitment vs interest
You can be interested in a lot of things, but you can have only a limited amount of commitments. It is important to know your commitments, as these provide a framework for your decisions. It’s like the pigs and chickens metaphor used in Scrum (chickens are only involved, but pigs are committed). A pig only has limited ham and bacon it can provide… (the pigs and chickens metaphor has its limitations, but that’s another story)

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Netherlands License.

Photo by beketchai

Bill Gates swears by his three monitors for greatly enhancing his workspace productivity. Now a new study suggests that using two monitors instead of one can increase the speed of certain computer tasks.

According to the New York Times:

In a study commissioned by the electronics company NEC, researchers at the University of Utah recently asked office workers to perform several common tasks using various monitor configurations. They found that people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive at certain text-editing operations than people using a single 18-inch monitor.

People have gone to a multiple monitor setup say they will never go back. With the low cost of flat LCD monitors, it is a no brainer that you should use two monitors, or maybe three.

One of the best benefits of multiple screens is to able to view multiple applications at once instead of having to switch back and forth. You could keep an internet browser open on one monitor and your word processing application on the other.

PC World has a great video that explains exactly how to set up dual monitors.

Image via Flickr

The article entitled “The Man’s Guide to Getting Productive” in January 2009 edition of GQ had some very good productivity tips.

Make a Deal with Yourself

Stephen King will go to a quiet place and make a deal with himself that he will just 5 pages done. He says that once he gets started he will often want to do a little more. Often getting started is the hardest part so setting a goal can help motivate you to get the work over with.

Get Sufficient Sleep

According to the article “missing just a few hours of sleep every night for a week will give you the wordaday cognitive ability of someone who just chugged five beers.” They suggest that the average 35 year-old needs 8 hours of sleep a night. You may think if you sleep 4 hours a night, you will have more time to get things done, but everyone knows what it is like to try to think when you are dead tired. It is not effective and you will be better off if you take time to get rested.

Prioritize Tasks

The author of the story had a coach from David Allen’s Getting Things Done company come to help him become more productive. One of the first things the coach did was to set him up on a system of prioritizing tasks that the author had deemed important in his life. She had him write down everything that he wanted or needed to do. “This is your in-box. Now we take action on each item in the in-box.” If an item can not be acted upon at that time it goes into the “file for future reference”. Next, you start executing tasks in the “in-box” that will take 2 minutes or less. The next step is to take the tasks that will take longer and organize them in managable lists like “home”, “errands” and “office”.

You can learn more about becoming a more productive executive by reading “The Man’s Guide to Getting Productive” in the latest edition of GQ.

Image by orphanjones