Category: productivity

It is autumn, and you should be doing fall cleaning – and oh ! I dont mean your house, I meant your planner. Innowen at diyplanner.com has a wonderful piece on how we tend to forget cleaning our most beloved, trusted planner that we personal productivity lovers live on. We clean our desks at work, we clean our homes, but we forget our planner.

All sorts of scraps of paper fill those little binders or booklets. Receipts for purchases you can’t recall what you purchased, phone numbers quickly scribbled down on post-its and website addresses with unrecognizable names. If this sounds like the way your planner looks like now, it’s time for a good old fashioned Fall cleaning.

Read the full article here.

Chris Wright explains in his blog an cheap, simple, and elegant way for Yahoo ! users to leverage on the suite of tools that Yahoo ! provides to implement GTD. Defenitely a good read. There are two parts to it. Not sure if there is more coming, but it is no doubt a fairly comprehensive document (with screenshots). He goes by David Allen for most of the time – but for some exceptions like ‘keeping the tickler file digital’. He says it is because of his liking to move away from paper.

Read Part 1 here .
Read Part II here .

If you are totally into low tech stuff like the Hipster PDA and printing out planner pages from diyplanner.com etc, consider this. How do you maintain your contacts ?

Kevin Kelly has an exteme-low-tech solution (which I incidentally use too) for maintaining your contacts. Slip that visiting card into a clear sleeved rolodex visiting card holder. You can sort it and slip it in (like me), or just slip it in chronological order (like Kevin does). It is easy to look up and extremo-cheapo. Try this before you get that expensive card reader for your palm.

Read Kevins full entry here.

Keith Anderson Bob Walsh from to-done.com, has a nice piece on self-evaluating yourself at periodic intervals to make sure you are indeed being productive.The activity is fairly simple. He suggests a simple excel sheet printed out or a hand-drawn grid. There are two aspects to this sheet. (1) List about 10 activities that you typically do during your day (2) A grid showing your typical work hours divided into 15 minute intervals. Keith reasons out – why 15 min intervals. 5 mins is too small, but 1 hour is too large for our distraction filled universe. Do this for 3-4 days, and you will know if you are indeed being productive.

Read the original post at : www.to-done.com
Get the excel sheet for your time audit here.
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Rule 7: Do the Work.Interesting piece in lifehack.org. The professor stumbles upon a list of advise for students (but equally applicable for any profession). The list consists of some funny and witty rules. The seventh rule nullifies all rules above it and below.

Rule 7

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

So people, just work. Just do it 🙂

Read more of the article here.