Aug
22
2007
One of the toughest aspects of any system for personal management is sticking with it. I don’t care what magical solution is being pitched this week, if you don’t do it consistently then it’s nothing more than another time-sucking task. So how do you keep your butt on the wagon and make progress?
Habits
We all have habits, some good, some bad. The trick is they’re just that…habits. In many cases we do them without thinking or if we don’t do them it nags at the back of our mind until we do. Trick one is to get your productivity tasks to be come habits. You want to feel incomplete without completing them. It usually takes things a few weeks of frequent repetition to become a habit so be prepared to remind yourself often. You can bribe yourself with some small reward for maintaining your habit if it helps or chastise yourself if you fail. The most important part is…find something that works for you.
Testing the habit
“How do I know when it’s a habit?” I hear this one a lot. The easiest way I know how to test this is to see how hard it is to break. If you’re working on capturing everything in a single notebook see if you can make yourself not use the notebook and use a post-it instead. If it feels “wrong” you’re getting close. If it’s easy, you’re not ready grasshopper.
Habits go everywhere
Your habit needs to follow you wherever you go. If your habit is to capture your gas purchase for mileage tracking (yep, something I do every fill up) you have to set things up so you can facilitate your habit rather than skipping it. I keep a pen in the glove box so I never have an excuse to not write down my mileage on my receipt and then I log it in a Google Spreadsheet. I know it’s a habit because if I don’t do it, it bugs me until I do.
Expanding your habit
Try to cultivate habits that can expand and encompass other aspects of your life you need to manage. If you’re working on managing your finances and your habit is “capture everything” find a way to capture your finances so you work on that at the same time.
Keep looking for something that works for you…discard what doesn’t…and work what does over and over again.
Aug
14
2007
Those being my USB Drive and Instant Messaging. Pidgin, which is quickly becoming part of my instant messaging mainstay:
Pidgin Portable 2.1.0 has been released. Pidgin Portable (formerly Gaim Portable) is the versatile Pidgin instant messaging client packaged as a portable app, so you can take your IM settings and buddy lists with you. It has all the same great features as Pidgin, including support for AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and Jabber networks, but there’s nothing to install on the local PC. You can also add portable encryption plugins for secure, encrypted messaging. It’s packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it’s open source and completely free.
Oh happy day!
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Aug
14
2007
One of the common traits of a personal productivity program is the idea of “capture it now”. Rather than trying to remember everything, write it down and deal with it when it’s time to process. I could use all kinds of computer references or philosophical axioms to illustrate this but it’s just not necessary to do.
If you write it down you can’t forget it!
There’s a reason that they keep a written record of court trials…a reason they want paper ballots for voting. Capture it and you free up the space in your mind to address the next thing that comes along.
About how long do you think something stays in short-term memory? 15 – 20 seconds. In other words, if you don’t do something with a thought, you lose it in less than 30 seconds. So if you want to capture those $50,000,000 and 50 cent ideas and everything in between, you better act fast.
Over at SlackerManager.com they have a number of suggestions about capture methods and techniques (although the one about the legal pad in the men’s room for the convenience of the VP is a bit beyond my reasoning) following the simple habit of writing everything down does free up lots of mental space and energy. Try it…you’ll be surprised.
Technorati Tags: GTD, productivity, management
Aug
07
2007
A 3-Step Cure for Digital Packrats, and How to Know If You’re One of Them | zen habits
How to Know If You’re a Digital Packrat
The main way to know:
1) you feel that you should keep a lot of files “just in case”; 2) it takes you too long to find stuff; 3) your digital life is becoming complicated, with multiple email accounts, drives, storage mediums and either a mess of files or a mess of folders.
But here are a few symptoms:
- Do you have 20 or more folders and sub-folders in your documents folder on your hard drive?
- Is your list of Internet bookmarks long and overwhelming?
- Is your email program nearly full, or do you use more than one email account because of all the storage you need?
- Do you have multiple duplicates of photos, and is it hard to find a photo you need?
- Is your hard drive 75% full or more?
- Do you have multiple accounts for similar things, making it hard to find stuff?
- Are any of your digital file systems overwhelming?
- Do you have email from 5 years ago?
- Do you have project files from 2 years ago?
- Do you have folders of stuff to read that would take a year to actually read?
Ack! I’ve got 9 out of 10!
Technorati Tags: organization
