Archive for the ‘productivity’ Category

Getting Things Done works nicely with Google Calendar

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

I gave myself the “Getting Things Done” treatment in 2008 and really valued how David Allen’s approach helped me manage obligations to multiple clients and personal responsibilities as well. Most valuable to me was the “Someday/Maybe” list, which gave me a place to park ideas until there was a time or need to put them to work. Without fail, every couple of months a “Someday/Maybe” item graduates onto my current action list.

One obstacle in adopting the GTD methods was using an online task list. I didn’t want to buy a specialized program for this, so I tried to use Microsoft Entourage to manage the list. But Entourage couldn’t easily set up the (fairly simple) two-level hierarchy GTD defines. So I had to set up the main hierarchy using Entourage and then add the second level as a prefix to the task itself–such as “Online – email Brent congrats on new job,” or “Read/Review – Switch.” And the sort didn’t always work: all the “Read – Review” items were scattered on the list, not clustered together.

Recently I started using Google Calendar, and I’ve been impressed with how functional it is, and how easily it allows you to set up GTD-style task lists. I set up separate lists for “Next Actions,” “Waiting For,” and “Someday/Maybe.” Within the Next Actions list it’s straightforward to set up sections for “Online,” “Computer,” “Calls,” etc. In fact, Google Calendar allows you to add numerous hierarchy levels if you wish to.

Now I could be frustrated to think that a free tool is a lot better at helping me GTD than something I paid real money to Microsoft for. But I’m happy just to have found something that makes it easier for me to stay organized. Google Calendar is it.

Related posts:
The Getting Things Done Treatment

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Giving myself the "Getting Things Done" treatment

Monday, October 13th, 2008

I knew I had to improve my organizing skills early in the summer when I missed two scheduled conference calls in the period of a month. In the moment, I blamed the meeting organizers, who had not attached reminders to the meeting requests, so my Blackberry didn’t buzz 15 minutes in advance. After reflection, I realized it wasn’t the responsibility of the meeting organizers to account for my time-management peculiarities. I also realized that making a habit of missing conference calls I had committed to attend was bad business.

Around the same time, I listened to a podcast interviewing David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. I liked what he had to say, and a few mouse clicks later I had ordered his book, determined to give myself the GTD treatment.

It wasn’t painless, and it took quite a while, but I’ve been more or less successful at organizing my work and home commitments. I feel like I’m getting more done, and the stress level has decreased because I have all my commitments (work & personal) documented in the same list, and I review that list regularly (though the review could be more regular and more thorough).

First, a look at Allen’s key prescriptions:

  1. Collecting all items that need to be looked at in your inbox
  2. Emptying the inbox frequently
  3. Deciding what to do with an inbox item immediately (acting on it if it can be done in 2 minutes or less, disposing of it if no action required, scheduling action or adding to task list otherwise)–i.e., no returning items to the inbox!
  4. Filing inbox items where they can be easily retrieved
  5. Organizing task lists by context (computer, phone call, errand, on-line, reading, waiting-for)
  6. Reviewing your calendar and task lists regularly

There’s a lot more, obviously, that you can find in the book, but those are the highlights.

In my experience implementing GTD, here’s what I found:

  • Collecting all my stuff and processing it took a long time–upwards of two weeks. I had to-do’s written on note cards in my bedroom, written on my white board, in notebooks, on existing task lists, and in the inbox already. I had piles of unread books in several places, and articles I wanted to read scattered in my computer directories. At the end, the collection pile measured more than one foot high in my inbox and another three feet or so on the floor beside it.

  • Filing was easier than I thought. Allen recommends one alphabetically-arranged filing cabinet, rather than files organized by some subject (like home, work, finance, etc.). This works for me, although I keep my finance files in a separate accordion file. All the others are in one cabinet.
  • I ended up with a large task list (probably 75-80 items), and it hasn’t gone down much if at all. Some people find such a large list intimidating (God, what a lot I have to do!). For me, it was a relief to know that I had everything on paper, and didn’t need to carry it in my head–a key benefit that Allen cites for his system.
  • Personal organizer systems don’t deal with the Allen approach very well. I tried both the Macintosh iCal system, which didn’t allow for even a first-level categorization, and Microsoft Entourage. Entourage allowed two levels of categorization with manageable sorting problems, but couldn’t handle three at all… and I wanted three for my list. I was able to work around the problems, but it would be nice to have an automated application that could sync with a mobile device and handle the entire GTD system.
  • Like many people, I don’t review the lists enough. I schedule a brief review every day, and a more comprehensive review on Friday. I usually get through the every-day review, but the Friday review is frequently no more substantial than the dailies. I need to work on that.

Like any major change in habits, GTD takes a lot of commitment, time and persistence. For me, at least, it was worth it. I feel more in control of my life and prepared to take on more work than I was a few months ago.

Would anyone out there like to comment on their GTD experiences?

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Corporate IT maximum-security is damaging innovation

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Exhibit A: A fellow I serve on a board with recently got a new job with a city government. I asked him for his updated contact information and he said, “I can’t give out my work email address. They don’t like anything that’s not 100% city business done on their computers.”

Exhibit B: another friend who works for a large telecom company tried to access my new site The Mistake Bank from work and found that corporate IT had blocked all social-networking sites.

Exhibit C (counter-example): Google’s CIO, interviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal, says the company’s policy allows users to download their own software, supports multiple operating systems and uses public resources (like their own blogger.com) for work-related activities.

Andrew McAfee, for one, has often pointed the finger at internal IT shops for inhibiting the adoption of transformative Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Accurately so, in my opinion.

Why? Reasonable concerns regarding security risks and productivity impacts have spawned draconian, corporate-wide policies that essentially prevent employees from learning anything except that which is corporately-sanctioned.

A company worrying about people frittering away time on Facebook simply closes off access–and thereby prevents employees from keeping track of and developing valuable contacts that can help them deliver better results in their jobs.

Obsessing over use of work IT resources only for work–such as the concern about non-work-related emails my friend encountered–forgets that more and more work concerns things outside the company–learning about the issues facing customers and partners, researching competitors, understanding innovation. It also conveniently forgets that knowledge work frequently spills over the boundaries of the work day–thereby forcing some non-work activities into the hours of 8-5.

In sum, while this throttling of external IT resources for more and more companies may or may not make them more secure and productive–it certainly limits the horizons of employees, depriving them of oxygen needed for learning, innovative thinking, and being a whole person.

And is that a reasonable price to pay?

Related:
How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

(Photo: Alcatraz Island from amagill via Flickr Creative Commons)

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A few companies are not counting the hours you take off

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Companies’ continuing obsession with measuring their employees’ input, rather than their output, is one of my pet peeves. “If you’re not at your desk, you’re not working,” and its corollary, “If you are at your desk or at a meeting, you are working,” are among the most persistent myths in white-collar corporate America. These myths ignore two facts:

  1. Some people who aren’t at their desks are, in fact working.
  2. Some people who are at their desks are not, in fact, doing anything productive.

A related issue is accounting for vacation time. In today’s Times, reporter Ken Belson writes about IBM’s policy of leaving it to employees’ and their supervisors’ discretion as to when they take vacation time. Peer pressure certainly puts bounds on how much time can be taken, and IBM’s intense work culture, according to Belson, leads to workers taking less time than they are allowed. Nonetheless, any move to allow workers and direct managers control over how and when time is spent at work is a major step forward in my mind.

Here’s my favorite quote from the article:

“When you have a work force of fully formed professionals who have been working for much of their life,” Patty McCord, the chief talent officer of Netflix [which also leaves vacation time to employees' discretion], said, “you have a connection between the work you do and how long it takes to do it, so you don’t need to have the clock-in and clock-out mentality.”

(Photo by smartnetny via stock.xchng)

Posted in New York Times, balance, management, productivity, work ethic, workaholism | Comments

Take a vacation, why don’t you?

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Regular readers of this blog may already realize that I’m hung up on sleep, or lack thereof (see here). Perhaps it’s because, with children just having emerged from the wake-several-times-a-night phase, I’m on a first-name basis with sleep deprivation. It also may be evidence of a career-long struggle to find balance in a culture that celebrates and honors workaholism and sleep avoidance.

At any rate, more good news for people who just want a rest arrived today. The New York Times’s Frequent Flier column profiled consultant Mark Rosekind of Alertness Solutions , a former director of NASA’s fatigue countermeasures program (now that’s a job title). His assertion? In addition to getting more sleep, you also need a vacation. Says Rosekind:

I just completed a study for Air New Zealand that suggests that if people actually took their allotted vacation time, they could improve their performance by more than 80 percent.

If you still don’t get the message, Rosekind includes a truly frightening anecdote about a TV reporter who, apparently out of story ideas, went without sleep for three days. What she experienced the last day will make you want to take a nap straightaway.

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Posted in New York Times, balance, productivity, sleep | Comments