Good Article on GTD
Drizzt’s Take:
I have been a fan of using Microsoft Tasks to manage daily tasks.But somehow i always find it lacking. Later on, i realise that the problem might not be entirely of Outlook but also of the way i use outlook to manage my tasks. We have always depended on such gadgets to help us with our daily lives, but not many has seek to read a tutorial on how to use it effectively and how to leverage on today’s tech to make productivity more effective. This is one such article i found. What i like is that it is based on PDAs and Smartphone, which many of us do have. Read on and tell me what you think about it.
How to Use Your Smartphone, Pocket PC, or Palm to Manage Your Tasks
Here’s what we discuss on this page:
* Introductory Material
* Key Principles
* Doing a Mindsweep
* Keeping it bite-sized
* Managing Categories
* Prioritizing * Using the Two-Minute Rule
* Little Tips and Tricks
* Closing Thoughts
Note that I previously discussed Managing Projects on this page, but my sense is that this put an overwhelming amount of material on this page … hence, I have moved the Managing Projects material to a new page so that we can focus on TASKS on this page.
(The topics are related, but I think separate pages are more clarifying.)
Also, while I have aimed this material at Smartphone, Pocket PC, and Palm users, the principles can be applied to desktop/laptop architectures and to paper-based planning systems.
Introductory Material Prior to 2001, I used the Franklin Covey (FC) time management methods for years.
I started with a paper-based implementation, blending in the use of a Palm device around 1999. I studied Covey’s books and went to a couple of his seminars, and was pleased with the life-management improvements I was able to make using his system.
Then, in early 2001, I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) book and immediately began implementing GTD on my Palm.
I liked its fresh approach as the FC approach had begun to feel stale to me. Then, in September 2001 my wife passed away, and GTD became a major tool for helping me deal with all the stuff in my life. It let me do this without requiring great concentration, which is good, because my mind was in an absolute fog for months.
I could no longer implement the FC approach if I wanted to, because my Roles were now confused and my mission statement was shattered. So I just switched to using GTD exclusively. I have since merged some of the FC and GTD methodologies.
GTD helps me get a lot done, and FC helps my effectiveness. Key Principles 1. A key learning from GTD: go through all of your projects and determine next actions for them and Organize Them By Context (such as @Computer, @Home, @Desk), so that when your mental energy is too low for you to be an effective thinker, you have a list of actions you can perform anyway.
This simple principle can dramatically improve your efficiency and your impact. Organizing by context takes advantage of the age-old wisdom of "Be Where You Are." 2. Plan for each day what you Must Get Done.
The importance of doing this cannot be overemphasized. I have worked closely with dozens of senior and mid level managers over the years, and know that they plan their days and their weeks. Yes, many of them suffer the huge inflow of emails, new work, and too many meetings that a typical mobile worker suffers.
But they do not let that deter them from their plans (with the exception, of course, of some rare emergent activities). 3. Use the Pareto Principle. As leadership guru John Maxwell notes in his The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, "If you focus your attention on the activities that rank in the top 20 percent in terms of importance, you will have an 80 percent return on your effort. … If your to-do list has ten items on it, the two most important ones will give you an 80 percent return on your time."
Related posts:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment