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 feel overwhelmed by information in the workplace.
• 2 in 5 say  they are headed for a data “breaking point,”
• 62 percent of professionals report that they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need;
• 68 percent wish they could spend less time organizing information and more time using the information that comes their way.
• Workers admit that not being able to lay their hands on the right information at the right time impedes their ability to work efficiently; 85 percent agree that not being able to access the right information at the right time is a huge time-waster.
• More than 40 percent of the survey participants indicate an inability to handle future increases in information flow.
• While an average workday for white-collar workers is 8.89 hours, the survey finds that on average, 7.89 working hours are used conducting research, attending meetings, and searching for previously created documents.
• White-collar professionals spend an average of 2.3 hours daily conducting online research, with one in 10 spending four hours or more on an average day.

This strikes me as a bunch of data moaning with the covert message actually being…Hey MOM, look at how important I am with all the information I have to monitor, consume, and shuffle.

Too many people have a self-induced sense of over-importance with all the information they consume. I suggest we stop whining and complaining about this. If you don’t like the data, dump it.

Or change your approach: You can’t stop the waves of information but you can learn to surf.

If you don’t enjoy the waves stop surfing, close the book, turn off your PDA, set you e-mail inbox to stun, and spend time contemplating your belly button.

But if you enjoy information, like I do, stop whining and pretending to be so important — get back on your keyboard and surf the awesome waves in your sea of endless information.

SURF’S UP!

Photo Credit: Pile of papers by http://flickr.com/photos/jepoirrier/376900808/

David Zinger

Post from: EveryJoe

Zinger’s Secret Surfing Solution to Mastering Information Overload

Section A: Here is a management knowledge quiz:

1. How many management courses have you taken this year?
2. How many management blog post have you read?
3. How many management books have your read?
4. How many ideas or suggestions have your heard from others?
5. How many good management ideas have you generated?

Section B: Here is a management implementation quiz.

1. 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. Don’t lose any more time for implementation by gathering more knowledge.

You don’t need to know more — you need to do more with what you know.

Reminder: It is NOvember not KNOWvember. Give yourself time and space for learning by saying No to knowing and Yes action.

I think you know what I mean, stop reading and start taking action, now!

Photo Credit: November 07 Calendar by http://flickr.com/photos/passingobsessions/1959338106/

Created by

David Zinger

Post from: EveryJoe

KNOW-NO: A learning know no.

Of course Scott goes into much more depth than I’ll share here, so check out his great tip on How to Customize GTD to Fit Your Life.

Question to ponder: Do you use GTD to be more productive, do you have another system, or do you even worry about being productive?

Post from: EveryJoe

Slim and Trim GTD Just For You

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 be very helpful to GEMO with partners to avoid becoming bogged down in a task or engaging in discussions that produce no results.

GEMO is not used to avoid work but to recognize there is always something more that could be done in this age of constant and never ending improvement. Yet, sometimes good, is good enough…at least for now.

I first practiced this principle in the writing process 25 years ago under the term satisfice:

To obtain an outcome that is good enough. Satisficing action can be contrasted with maximizing action, which seeks the biggest, or with optimizing action, which seeks the best. In recent decades doubts have arisen about the view that in all rational decision-making the agent seeks the best result. Instead, it is argued, it is often rational to seek to satisfice i.e. to get a good result that is good enough although not necessarily the best.

Satisficing was a good approach for writers to avoid perfectionism and to finish the first draft. It was very helpful for writers who experienced writing blocks or writing reluctance to get the first vision out and realize they can return for multiple re-visions. 

You must be cautious with GEMO - you are not avoiding something rather you acknowledge it is good enough for now.

GEMO may be just what you need to increase your productivity.

I hope you find GEMO

This article could be better but it is good enough —time to move on.

If you like humor and you want to see the lighter side of leadership I encourge you to read David Zinger’s alter ego Dr. Z. at Dr. Z’s Leaderhsip Institutue. David Zinger loves working with Phil Gerbyshak at Slacker Manger. We make for an synergistic blend of GEMO and the GREAT.

Post from: EveryJoe

Finding GEMO: Good Enough, Move On

Are you a Saturday Slacker? Or a Sunday Slacker?

I encourage you to look at how you spend your weekend.

1. Do you use the weekend to get away from work – rest and recovery?
2. Do you use the weekend to work?
3. Does the nature of your work change on the weekend?
4. 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 unschedule is based on taking a daily calendar and completing it at the end of the day. Write what you did each hour from the time you got up until the time you are completing the calendar. Do this on both Saturday and Sunday night. On Sunday night, after you complete the 2-day unschedule take a look at how you spent your time.

1. When you look at both days, what stands out?
2. Were there any surprises?
3. Were there things you would like to do more of next weekend?
4. Are there things you would like to do less of next weekend?
5. Did your weekend unfold in a way that is most beneficial to you?
6. What have you learned from your unschedule?

Use the information and analysis of your weekend unschedule to ensure that future weekends are experienced in a way most beneficial to you and the people you care about.

Have a mindful weekend and let us know how it went.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Unschedule: Reclaiming Your Weekend

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 my wife. By the way, I need to buy another one, leave me a comment if you know a good source for these.
• In the shower (don’t you have some of your greatest ideas there?) I have a little white board that uses special waterproof crayons. I bought mine from Amazon but I don’t think they sell them anymore.
• For times when I’m in the car or otherwise not able to use both hands I use either jott or a digital recorder.
• At work and at home, I use Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft OneNote 2007, and MindManager (Mindjet MindManager Pro 7 Single License). And of course, I also use the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007).
• When I get up from my desk at work, I pick up my legal pad and a pen. I started this practice years ago, when I was in the men’s room and a VP started giving me details on a project he wanted me to do.
• I also have my Blackberry with my almost all the time.

What about you? Is your system set up so that you can capture every though? What works for you?

Coming up: You Gotta Get It Off Your Mind – Part 3 – A Place For Everything

See also:

• You Gotta Get It Off Your Mind – Part 1

(For more posts like this one, visit my blog Tech Rest – Enjoying Technology and Finding Rest in a Restless World)

Post from: EveryJoe

You Gotta Get It Off Your Mind – Part 2

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 Dating to enter the date, select a Category, and press CTRL+S to Save. I know it sounds complicated but it only takes a few seconds to accomplish.

For more information see Michael Linenbeger’s Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook: The Eight Best Practices of Task and E-Mail Management. Most of these ideas started with him.

If you’re an Outlook user, chances are you don’t use the Tasks. I didn’t before reading Linenberger’s book. Out of the box, the Task List is almost useless. Once you get it set up right, you won’t want to live without it.

I have over 300 Tasks on my list. But . . . on a daily basis, I only look at the ones I want to see for that day. Also, I mark the ones that must be done on a certain day as urgent. I rarely have more than 3 urgent items in a day.

Reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, was life changing for me. Reading Linenberger’s book moved me to an even higher level of productivity.

Try the process and see if it’s not faster for you.

Let me know how it works for you or what you do that works better.

See also:

• Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 1

• Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 3

If you enjoy this post, check out my blog, Tech Rest – Enjoying technology and finding rest in a restless world.

Post from: EveryJoe

Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 2

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 carries about half of their to-dos around in their head. That means that they have about 100 to-dos in their head at any given time. Wow! Each one of those adds stress. Each one of those decreases your ability to focus on the task at hand.

So what can you do? Right now, take out a legal pad and start writing. Get everything out of your head. Each time you change subject, start a new page. If you don’t finish in one sitting, keep revisiting this until you are done.

Did you feel the stress melting away? Your brain was never designed to carry all that weight. You need to put your brain on a diet so that you can have those breakthrough ideas the world is waiting for.

Coming up: You Gotta Get It Off Your Mind – Part 2 – Never Lose A Thought Again

For more posts like this see my blog, Tech Rest – Enjoying technology and finding rest in a restless world

Post from: EveryJoe

You Gotta Get It Off Your Mind – Part 1

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?

1. Sort your message in a way that makes sense to you.
2. If you have more than a couple of screen pages, deal with multiple messages at a time (until you make a significant dent in them). If you only have a few screen pages, start at the top and work to the bottom.
3. Block out as many distractions as possible and set aside time to process your emails (20 – 30 minutes is good).
4. Delete all the ones you possibly can.
5. File the ones you need or may need to look at later but that don’t require action. Don’t hesitate, if you think you might need it later, file it. Don’t waste much time deciding to file or delete, just file it. You can always delete it later.
6. Forward all the ones that belong to someone else. I also BCC myself on these if I need to add them to a Waiting For list. I know that I have a copy in my Sent items but I tend to forget they are in there. BCCing works like magic for me because it ends up as another message in my Inbox.
7. Do all the ones you can do in 2 minutes or less.
8. Now, your stack should be reduced by well over half. But . . . you now have the ones that will require more work.

Ok . . . so what to do with the ones that are left?

• If they are ones that really need to be done now (depending on who they are from or what needs to be done) then do them.
• The rest of the messages need to be moved to the calendar (if they have to be done at a specific time) or to the task list (everything else).
• Also, I like to prefix message that require only one action (Action items) with “A:”. Those that are projects (require more than one action) with “P:”. I take the messages that need Follow Up (a.k.a. Waiting For) and prefix them with “F:”.
• Your Inbox should now be empty!

Hey . . . what about Someday / Maybe items?

I find that Someday / Maybe for me becomes a black hole. I put them in there and I never revisit them. What I do now is decide when I want to revisit them (usually this is 3 – 12 months away). I use Speed Dating to quickly create a task 6 months out to look at the item then. I found that when I was using a “normal” Someday / Maybe list I couldn’t trust that I would visit it when I need to. This way I only have two buckets for action items of all kinds: Calendar and Tasks.

If you are on Outlook user (97 – 2007), download 7 Secrets of Light Speed Email Management, to see short cuts on how to make this happen.

I once used this system to process 2 days worth of email in 10 minutes (Scout’s Honor!).

See also:

• Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 2

• Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 3

For more posts like this one visit my blog, Tech Rest and subscribe.

Post from: EveryJoe

Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 1

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?”

1. Always tell the truth – especially to yourself.
2. Be sure that you have all the facts before making a decision.
3. Keep open and friendly relations with co-workers, family, and neighbors.
4. Invest your self and your time in helping others.
5. Review your goals on a regular basis, work on one step toward their completion each month.
6. Asking for help from others is a strength, not a weakness.
7. Challenge yourself to be better today than you were yesterday.
8. Embrace interdependence, it will be even more important tomorrow.

(Stephen Smith writes about Productivity, Web 2.0, and the Future of Work at his website – HDBizBlog 1.2)

Post from: EveryJoe

Eight Things that Really Matter