Info, info, info, info, info, info, info, info….everywhere but not a drop to think?
Are you bobbing, almost drowning, in a sea of information?
Take this article, why are you reading it? Don’t go away just yet, I have my own simple answer at the end.
We have reached the point where the productivity experts are just adding to that sea of information with their habits, tips, and endless suggestions about how to cope with our terrible information plight.

According to a recent article in msnbc a majority of workers feel overwhelmed by a deluge of data:

7 out of 10 office workers in the United States …read more

Make sure this month is November not KNOWvember!

Section A: Here is a management knowledge quiz:

How many management courses have you taken this year?
How many management blog post have you read?
How many management books have your read?
How many ideas or suggestions have your heard from others?
How many good management ideas have you generated?

Section B: Here is a management implementation quiz.

How many of the above ideas have you seized and actually put into an ongoing practice?

Results: Add your total for Section A and subtract your total from Section B.  The number you derive is what is left over for action and implementation. …read more

Scott H Young is one of the best productivy bloggers out there, and recently he shared a great lifehack about the popular “getting things done” system that many of we Slacker Managers frequently use. Scott actually hacked this hack, with a great 5 step system called How to Customize GTD to Fit Your Life. Scott’s 5 steps are:
Step One – Identify Information to Track
Step Two – Create the Fewest Containers Possible
Step Three – Add a Notepad
Step Four – Digital or Not?
Step Five – Tweak the System
Of course Scott goes into much more depth than I’ll share …read more

Are you ready to grab GEMO and go with it?
This September, I have accelerated my accomplishments on a lot of projects and new initatives because I found GEMO.
 
GEMO is an acronym for Good Enough, Move On. It helps avoid perfectionism, dithering, delays, and other productivity traps and snarls.
Here is how you practice it. You work at something, you begin to run out of steam or you know more needs to be done but there are other projects and things that need to be done so you say, GEMO. You move on and you know you can come back to it and improve it later.
It can also …read more

Where does your weekend go?
Are you a Saturday Slacker? Or a Sunday Slacker?
I encourage you to look at how you spend your weekend.

Do you use the weekend to get away from work – rest and recovery?
Do you use the weekend to work?
Does the nature of your work change on the weekend?
Is your weekend planned or is it mostly spontaneous?

This weekend, don’t change how you spend your time but simply notice how you spend your time. Many of us operate with schedules all week and use the weekend to be more unscheduled. Take stock of your weekend with an unschedule.
The unschedule:
The …read more

Never Lose A Thought Again
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.
Here are the tools I use (including backups, see Never Rely On a Single Point of Failure )

By my bed I keep a notebook and two pens. One of these pens has a light on it so a can see without waking …read more

Tasks For GTD Titans!
From Part 1, you’ll remember that I end up with only two buckets (Calendar and Tasks) for all my action items:. If it doesn’t have to be at a specific time it ends up on the Task List for me.
To move an email to the Task list (using Outlook), I right-click and drag it, and drop it on the Task icon. Next, I choose the last option which moves the whole email intact (including attachments) and converts it to a Task. Then I enter a prefix (A:, F:, or P:), press tab and use Speed …read more

Write It Down Right Now
What is the most important skill in business today? The ability to rapidly get things off your mind and into a system you can trust.
Why? Because the amount of information you have to deal with is so overwhelming. You have to develop this skill. Otherwise you condemn yourself to a life of continual near burnout or worse.
Can you remember a time when you were really stressed and you finally took time to make a list? Remember the feeling of relief when you finished the list? You need to do that all the time.
The average person …read more

If you leave messages in your Inbox, you are insane. Okay, there I’ve said it.
Every message left in your Inbox adds psychic weight to you. And this weight can be awfully heavy over time. On average, information workers (that’s you) get over 20,000 messages in a year (see Scary Email Math ). If you leave even a small percentage of your messages in your Inbox, you can easily accumulate thousands of them. I have personally seen one with over 12,000 messages. That’s a lot of weight!
So . . . what can you do?

Sort your message in a way that …read more

Before I started my Getting Things Done practice I had some vague ideas about what I wanted to do with my life and where I wanted to go with it. I had not done any serious thinking about priorities or how to get where I wanted to be in the future.
The process of creating a Someday/Maybe list and mind-mapping my 3-5 Year goals has brought to the forefront some concepts that are much more important to me then they were previously. I share them with you now, and ask, “What things really matter to you?”

Always tell the truth – …read more