Category Archives for gtd

Productivity aid: Scripton Chronodex Planner

One of my daily productivity habits is to spend a few minutes each evening reviewing how the day went and planning the following day. This does not take long – usually 20 minutes or so.

Part of this process is to block out time in for the following day to ensure that my MITs (Most Important Tasks) get done. I have been doing this as a simple vertical timeline which I sketch into my notebook each evening as I set up the page ready for the day ahead. This works well for me but lacks a bit of flair.

Then I found Scripton Chronodex and their DIY day planners. Put simply it is a stylised clock face on which to plant your day and your blocks of time.

It is a really creative way to visualise your day and taps into our instinctive reaction to analogue clock faces.

The website has a number of different, free to use, downloadable templates to try and some very detailed instructions for creating a calendar and todo list notebook.

My favourite way of using the system is to print them onto sticky labels. Then I peel one off each evening, put it on the next blank page in my notebook and then plan away.

I think that you might find it useful to plan ahead and enjoy this interesting visual stimulation along the way.

Use your feet to commute

Why?

 I read a recent article in a trade magazine which was about options for driving down travel expenses for knowledge workers.

One section was on the topic of commuting to work or to meetings by foot. This post is the result of my thinking on the subject.

What are the benefits of commuting on foot?

 There are some obvious benefits to walking for work:

  • It’s green – reduces greenhouse gases
  • it has physical and mental health benefits – works you body and allows time to think
  • it is cheap – no more £0.50/mile expenses to sign off!

There are some less obvious benefits too:

  • it takes longer than the equivalent drive (depending on traffic) – this gives you some valuable time to think
  • it can offer an opportunity to discuss projects with any co-walker you may have commandeered
  • it allows you to arrive at work / meetings alert and ready for action
  • it provides time for reflection after a meeting or day at work

Is it always possible to commute on foot?

In truth there will be times when it is not an option but if you commit to doing it you might be surprised how seldom walking is not possible.

I’m lucky enough to be in the position where my major client is within a 15 minute walk of my office. But several of the sites we are working on are not.

When we have a site based meeting I set off in the car in good time (often taking the client with me) and we park about half a mile to three quarters of a mile away from the site (where we can get free parking) and we walk the last bit.

This is a great way to get the bulk of the travelling done quickly but then get the benefits of walking and talking the last bit before the meeting starts.

It is amazing how often we can discuss and agree a point of view on agenda items, work out tactics and the like as we walk that last half mile.

A great example of the walking commute can be seen here in my home city in the legal quarter. All through business hours the solicitors can been seen walking between each others offices, some times alone, often in pairs or small groups and always ‘switched on’ and getting on with the business of doing their business.

“But you’re wasting time, adding 30 minutes to the duration of every meeting”

If you are unlucky enough to have a boss or co-workers who cannot see the benefit of walking on company time then give them a few points to consider:

  • as knowledge workers we can always ‘work as we walk’. Not everything we are paid for is a ‘thing’, we don’t just ‘do’, we think. There is no better way to find some thinking time during the work day than to get out of the office for 15 minutes and get away from the phone, email and your colleagues
  • your performance at work or in a meeting will be enhanced by the thinking time you gained and the buzz from having done 15 minutes of low level exercise
  • it provides time to reflect after work or a meeting

Also – is it really wasting time? If the journey on foot will only take 15 minutes then I ALWAYS walk. By the time I have rung forward to ensure a parking space will be available, walked to the car, driven a mile, parked, got your stuff from the boot etc. I could have walked there and ordered my coffee.

Don’t forget

…to bring along a capture device. I have some of my most insightful thoughts while I’m ‘off’ and walking is one of those situations where I need to capture a thought quickly and without any friction.

Always carry an appropriate capture device. For me this is a small notebook or a voice recorder on my phone. Here are a few alternative capture devices:

  • notebook and pen
  • index cards and pen
  • voice recorder app on your phone
  • phone app such as toodledo or OmniFocus
  • dictaphone (old school!)
  • voicemail – you can call your own answer service

Your memory is NOT a capture device

Conclusion

  • give your feet and your brain a chance to play their part in your work day
  • timetable enough time around your meetings to allow you to consider walking all or some of the way
  • encourage your reports to do the same

For additional credit why not walk home from time to time? I live four miles from my office but three or four times per month I will choose to walk home. It is a great way to get some serious thinking time – but make sure you have a notebook and pen with you because you will come up with some really useful stuff!

Web finds, Wednesday 09 May 2012

Here we go again with another dive into the things on the internet that I have found interesting….

  • Mac service AppleScript for word count Mac OS X Hints has published a guide to adding a character, word and paragraph counts service in OS X. This works on any block of selected text in any application (except MS Word for some reason!)
  • Learn to Listen Art of Manliness has a post on how to listening. This is a personal hobby-horse of mine. Far too often we are forced to attend meetings where some of those present are inattentive or just plain rude. If you are in the company of someone then give them your attention. Even the dullest of meetings are an opportunity to learn something, strengthen relationships and leave the room with a different perspective. All you have to do is listen!
  • Memories of the Tandy WP–2 The always excellent David Sparks. I love old tech and David clearly thinks the same. It’s just a nice read
  • The Productivityist Manifesto Mike Vary has an interesting take on what it means to be productive and how best to achieve it
  • The rolling to-do list Lifehack have an alternative to the traditional to-do list. Take a read and see if it’s something you can use
  • Mark Forster’s Final Version Despite sounding like a thinly veiled totalitarian global take-over bid this is actually a variation on the rolling to-do theme and well worth a look. You do need to subscribe to Mark’s newsletter to receive the instructions but in my experience he does not spam or bombard you with email. You can always unsubscribe later
  • Why I look at OmniFocus Give that this is about Omnifocus you might think that this is a Mac only post. Well, oO=n the face of it this is a discussion about OmniFocus – but really it is about developing the habit of looking at your lists and acting upon them
  • The Weekly Review: How one hour can save you a week’s with of hassle and headache Lifehacker is not as good as it used to be but there is still some good content mixed in with the ‘make your own toothpaste from bacon rind’ posts. And this is one of them. A really concise, clear set of instructions to either introduce you to the weekly review or get you back on track if you skipped a week (or 2, or 3)
  • Why I write about bathroom fans and pillowcasing strategies Not about productivity, just an entertaining read from Marco Arment, creator of instapaper

Pomodoro technique

A great way to crank through a lot of work in concerted and intense way is to use the Pomodoro Technique. It is especially useful if the thing you need to crank through is something you just cannot bring yourself to do! You have those too, don’t you?

The system is named after the tomato shaped kitchen timers (pomodoro is Italian for tomato) and a timer of some sort is essential in allowing you to adopt the system.

The theory is that you have a 25 minute sprint on a given task, a five minute break and then repeat. After you complete a given number of pomodoros (usually 4) you give yourself a 15 minute break. Rinse and repeat.

The reason the technique works for me is that I can fool my brain into reducing resistance on a task because ‘I’m only going to spend 25 minuets on it’. Before I know it I’ve cycled through 4 pomodoros and I’m sitting back with a cup of tea and patting myself on the back because the task is all done.

Not everyone is a fan – see this great article by Mike Vardy on the problem with the pomodoro technique. All I can say is that it works for me, it might work for you and why not give it a try – the cost of entry is almost nothing. In fact you may already have a suitable device in your kitchen cupboard.

You can also download software timers for Mac or Windows. There are smartphone and tablet apps to be had as well. My favourite is this one for the iPhone. It has the uninspired name of ‘Pomodoro – the best Pomodoro Technique App’ but it works well. It has a customisable timer function, keeps stats of your completed cycles and a basic to do list. I use the todo list to plan a series of runs for the morning ahead of time so I can just get my head down and get the work done.

If you want to learn more about the technique the I suggest you take a look at this video or just goole it and have a poke around.

Web finds, Tuesday 01 May 2012

Web finds, Tuesday 01 May 2012

This week’s deep dive into the internet has revealed some interesting posts….

  • Simplify seasonal activities with checklists A primer on what activities can be made into checklists and how to do it. I find Evernote to be a really good place to keep these
  • Looking at your todo list Mike Vardy offers up some good advice on how to beat todo list paralysis
  • How to start and keep a journal If, like me, you thought that journaling is only for people of a Pepysian persuasion, think again. This is a good read and has prompted me to start keeping a paper journal
  • Filofax address book software updated Again on the theme of analogue productivity this is a link to the official Filofax address book software. If you have lots of contacts in your electronic address book then this will be a huge help
  • Fantasy GTD offices Have you ever planned-out your ideal ‘GTD compliant’ office space? Then this might give you a few ideas
  • Your ideas and how to move them forward Brett Kelly ruminates on the process of getting from gonna do to done. You might want to check out his Evernote ebook while you are there
  • Why men should read more fiction This is very timely for me. I have a goal to read 36 books during the course of this calendar year. I also decided that 24 of these should not be self help books, technical guides or biographies. I just finished 11/22/63 by Stephen King and went straight into Daemon by Daniel Suarez. It must be over 20 years since I read two fiction book ‘on the bounce’ but I’m really enjoying this. Maybe those guys at Art on Manliness are on to something

Personal kanban – an introduction


kanbanflow.com

First things first, what is a kanban and what is a personal kanban?

Wikipedia can help us out here. In short kanban was developed to feed the ‘just in time’ manufacturing method, but has been adapted and adopted by knowledge workers and software developers using the agile method in particular

This is where the notion of the personal kanban comes along. The best resource I have found for this is over at the excellent personalkanban site. Jim Benson defines a personal kanban as “a simple way to visualise and control your work.”

There are just 2 basic rules:

  1. Visualise your work – usually with post-its on a whiteboard
  2. Limit your work-in-progress – don’t work on more than you can cope with. It is not unusual to limit yourself to just one WIP when that is the best way to get from here to there.

Visualisation

A basic personal kanban board has 3 columns:

  1. to do (sometimes rather pessimistically called ‘backlog’)
  2. work in progress (or ‘doing’)
  3. done

You store up work in column 1, move it to column 2 when the time comes to work on it and then move it to column 3 to get a nice warm feeling once it is done

Limit work-in-progress

This is, for me, the major strength in the personal kanban. You only move work to column 2 when you are really, really working on it. And you do not break your chosen limit of how many items you can have in your WIP column.

Now – advice on what limit you should have on your WIP varies but there is pretty consistent advice that it should never exceed 5. I think this is pretty sound advice and for me it seldom moves above 3.

When to use a personal kanban

I don’t use a personal kanban all the time. But I do use it when I know I need a sustained period of ‘heads down, full throttle’ on one or two projects.

When I have a whole bunch of work that I must get through in a relatively short period then I turn to my kanban, say 1 week.

I spend some time listing all my to do items in column 1 – a mixture of small projects or sub-projects or even down to the level of Next Actions. These must, when aggregated, get me to where I need to be at the end of my sprint.

Then select a number to move to the doing/WIP column, the number will depend on the limit you set yourself. Typically I chose 2 or 3 items.

Digital personal kanban

A physical personal kanban can be set up on a whiteboard, in a note book, or in a digital format.

Chose the one which suits you and meets the requirement of best allowing you to visualise your work.

I have found several digital options:

  • kanbanflow Is a great option, it’s free, allows collaboration and includes a pomodoro timer to help you focus
  • kanbanery Has a free plan but with some limits
  • onlinekanban Is a very simple kanban

Getting Things Done: Part 2 – Inboxes, Processing and Next Actions

This is the second part of an old post I wrote some years back, but it still holds up today (the reference to Palm Desktop has not dated well though!)…

So many In-boxes!

For me the single most enjoyable part of setting up my GTD system was identifying all my inboxes and collecting all my ‘stuff’ – what David Allen calls your ‘RAM Dump’

Like most people I finally threw up my hands and said “I cannot do this anymore – I have too much to do and it is not going to get done unless something changes” – so after my first ‘dump’ it was with some satisfaction that I looked at all my overflowing in-boxes and thought “Told you so!”

Under the GTD methodology you must free your conscious and unconscious mind from having to worry about just how much stuff you have to do.

So here is how to do it:

Identify your inboxes

What you need to do is realise just how many inboxes you have. To fully account for them all you need to remember that these do not simply refer to the wire tray on your office desk! These things can be found all over the place! Here is a far from exhaustive list of where your inboxes (real and virtual) might be:

Office Desk

Den / Study

Personal email

Work email

RSS Feeds

Phone text messages

Voice mail

Faxes

Pile of correspondence accumulation on the hall stand

‘Honey do’ notes

Kitchen whiteboard

Your head!

Dump their content into one place. If these are physical items – letters, faxes, reports etc pile them up in one place. If they are emails print them out and add these to the pile. Write down the other items on a single sheet of paper per item and add these to the pile. Keep going like this until you think you are finished – then go have a cup of tea/coffee and come back 30 minutes later and add all those other items you forgot half an hour ago when you thought you had finished!

One note of caution – in this initial ‘dump’ do not attempt to action ANYTHING! Just add them all to the pile and do not make any kind of value judgement. You will find that an action to ‘close out the £1m property deal for work’ will sit next to ‘fix lock on kids play house’ – but that is fine – we are just collection stuff at this stage.

Now – take a deep breath and then launch into the next Phase of GTD – processing!

Process your inboxes

This does not mean ‘doing’ all your stuff – it means processing their contents and making a firm judgement on what you need to do with each thing.

Starting at the top of the pile process each item in the order the pile presents them – don’t be tempted to cherry pick the easy ones or put of the more complex – just sit and crank through it.

In processing each item consider the following:

-          Is this item actionable? Do I need to do anything with this at all? If there is no action required you have 3 options: trash it (there is nothing to do or you never intend to do anything with it); incubate it (you might need to do something with it one day); file it (you might want to refer to it one day). I was surprised how much stuff I had on my desk that just needed throwing out!

-          Is there more than 1 single action required to complete ‘thing’. If the answer is yes they you have just found yourself a Project. This is a fundamental of GTD that you need to understand – anything that requires more than one action is a Project. When you find a Project you first add it to your project list and then identify the very next action you need to take and add that to your Next Action List.

Next Action Lists

The core of your GTD system is the discovery, recording and doing of you Next Actions. A Next Action should be thought of as the very next thing you need to do to push forward a desired outcome or Project.

An example from my own inbox is an item to phone my mum because I have not done so for a week and it has been prying on my mind. If you came across this scribbled on a sheet of paper in you inbox pile what should you do?

First consider what this is – is it a Project? For me the answer is no – my mum in my mum not a Project (though she does generate Projects for me!).

So it’s not a project – it’s a simple single action item. Next I must consider if it is a next action that I have to do or is it an item I can delegate to another? Well clearly my mum would not appreciate a call from one of my work team to see how she is and catch up on the latest family news – so this is an item for me and me alone!

Whilst cranking through your inboxes the first time you need to be aware of the 2 minute rule – if an item from the inbox can be processed in less than 2 minutes then just do it! The rationale is that recording the Next Action within you GTD system will take a minute or so anyhow so why waste the time recording what you could be doing. Now – will my phone call to my mum take less than 2 minutes? What do you think! No – it has to go on to a Next Action List.

So – go through you inboxes and list out each and every Next Action and record them either on paper or in your preferred electronic format (Outlook, Palm Desktop, GTD TiddlyWiki etc). Where an item from your inbox represents a Project – and under the GTD definition almost every item will be a Project – take a few minutes to consider what the next action(s) are and write them down. More complex Projects will have to be planned in more detail to tease out the Next Actions. In theory you should do this on the fly during this first pass of your inboxes. Personally I have no problems with the idea of taking a complex Project ‘off-line’ and planning it in more detail later on – just don’t tell the GTD purists!

Once you have a full list of all your Next Actions you need to consider what Contexts each item belongs to and this will be the subject of Part 3 of this series of articles.

Finally . .

. . . an apology – last time I promised to provide a nice flowchart to help you Get Things Done. Unfortunately I have not found one that I feel comfortable in reproducing here – I don’t want to violate anyone’s copyrights – so please follow this link for a great example of a GTD flowchart.

Web finds, Saturday 21 April 2012

paper and pencilThis is the first of my regular round-ups of the best stuff I have found on the web. Usually things published during the proceeding week but also older items when they are  of particular interest or arerelevant to the general theme.

This week’s deep dive into the internet has revealed some interesting posts….

Getting Things Done: Part 1

gtdThis is an old post from a few years ago but it still holds true today:

The Getting Things Done (GTD) system of, well of, getting things done is extremely simple in concept but do not be mistaken – there is a real need to work at your system to get it to a state where you can trust it and know that you are getting everything done, when it need to be done by and freeing up time to do even more.

There are 4 basic tenants to the GTD system, these are as follows:

1. Capture all the things you need to do and record them in a trusted system. These are referred to as ‘In Boxes’, discard all things that do not require an action.

2. Decide which of the above are projects (things that require more than 1 action).

3. Decide on your Next Actions for all items in you inboxes and record them in your system based upon the context in which you can action them (very important!).

4. Carry out regular reviews of varying depth of insight – short, medium and long term goals.

This first instalment will take a quick overview of the above. Clearing Your In Boxes

The first question you have to ask yourself is ‘what are my in boxes’. It sounds simple at first doesn’t it? You have the physical post that drops through the door and you’re electronic in boxes on your pcs. But is that all? What about phone calls requiring you to do something? How about all those ‘honey-do’ notes? And the favours you promised to carry out for friends and neighbours? All the stuff just buzzing around in your brain that you are sure you will not forget? I’m also sure you have a pile of stuff in a junk draw somewhere in the kitchen that hides a number of actions you need to do?

It was a real eye opener for me to list all my In Boxes. It is also a good idea to try to reduce your total number of boxes to reduce the risk of item falling through the net. To this end I have asked my wife to email me all her ‘honey-dos’ – she was sceptical at first but now she sees that they actually get done so she sees the power of the system.

The GTD book calls the collation and recording of the contents of all your Inboxes as mental RAM dump. This is a great way to describe the process. The book goes on to explain that once you dump all the stuff that nags away at you as an internal dialogue you can achieve a clearer way of thinking and be freed from all those little pulls on you mental powers. This is slightly esoteric for my liking but I do see some truth in the idea.

At this point you will be like I was – terrified by the sheer volume of what you need to get done. In the words of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – DON’T PANIC!

This is a good bit – throw away everything that you either do not NEED to action along with everything you DO NOT INTEND to action. I was amazed by how many things fitted into this last category – I took the view that if it had been on a to do list or in an In Box for more than 3 month I was not going to get it done and so in the bin it went – most satisfying!

Is It An Action or Is It A Project?

Under the GTD system this classification will most likely differ from your current thinking. GTD classifies a Project as any item captured in an In Box that requires more than a single ‘thing’ to be done to it for it to be complete. As a result a couple of examples from my Project List demonstrate the huge difference in scale of ‘Projects’ as defined under the GTD system: Procure Manufacturing Building for ********* Ltd; Clear out garage ready for summer.

The first item is obviously a project – I have A LOT of work to do before the facility is up and running to my client’s satisfaction. However most people would consider clearing out the garage as a single ‘to do’. But this is why clearing out the garage is too difficult for most of us to tackle it. The reason I never get around to this job is that in the back of my mind I know it is not a single action – I need to take a load of junk to the local tip, the I need to fix the up-and-over door, then paint the floor, then see what shelving I need to install, buy the materials, fix them, stock take all my screws, nail etc. . . . . . . . . . .

I hope you now see the logic that even the most mundane Project deserves a level of project planning to get you over the hurdle of just getting on with it. I was much more willing to action the requirement to take all my junk to the tip this weekend than tackle the large but un-planned task of just ‘sorting out the garage’

On the flip side of this is my weekly ‘to do’ of putting the bin on the boundary of my property every Friday morning before I go to work for collection by the bin men – this is an action and not a Project.

You need to compile a full list of ALL your Project to use in you weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews – more of which later.

Next Action and Context

GTD works on the premise of Next Actions – what is the very next thing you need to do to move a project forward (or simply do something that needs doing). So in my example of clearing out the garage my next action is to go in there and put all the stuff for the tip to one side ready to fill the car and take it there.

You will quickly compile a very long list of Next Actions. This can be daunting – but GTD has another neat trick to teach us: Contexts. What is the use of seeing everything you need to do in your life when you circumstances at the time preclude you form action on the majority of them?

Everyone’s list of Contexts will vary but the following is a list of my contexts (the figures in brackets show how many live actions I have in each context)

@Calls (12) @Computer (27 – down to 26 once this article is published!) @Errands (28) @Home (47) @Office (67) @Waiting for (17)

Buy maintaining you lists by Context it means you can review only those next action that you can currently action. For example items in my @Calls list can be done anytime as I always have at least one phone available to me, where as I can only action items on my @Errands list when out and about in the car with no pressing appointment to attend. @Computer items can be worked on either at work or at home.

Reviews

This is a huge topic and one that I cannot cover in this first article. All I will say here is that you need to make a full review of your In Boxes, Projects and Next Actions at least once a week to be sure you are capturing everything and making progress on all your projects.

Next time . . .

I hope this has provided a useful introduction to GTD and I expect you are all thinking how you can PDA-ise the process of setting up your trusted system of running GTD? Next week I will look at In Boxes and creating Next Action lists in more detail along with a nice flow chart to help you Get Things Done.gtd

All ideas, terminology and the system described above are the brain child of David Allen. The words above are mine but the ideas behind them are all David’s