As part of the Ready for Anything Yahoo! Group, I'm leading the charge to read a chapter a week of Ready for Anything. I will be posting my submissions to the group here.
I admit that this chapter makes me a skeptic. This one clearly shows that the 52 chapters of the book were drawn from the GTD Connections newsletter, or the rough equivalent from the time, and were likely before the book. They are, truly, a 60 second rehash of GTD.
However, one of the by-the-ways got me. Have a got a checklist of my job description? No.
Have I ever had one? No.
Do I have one for each of my life's area of focus? No.
Hmmm... good finish to a snoozer article. I think I have some work to do.
Jan 25, 2009
Chapter 4 - Getting to Where You're Going Requires Knowing Where You Are.
As part of the Ready for Anything Yahoo! Group, I'm leading the charge to read a chapter a week of Ready for Anything. I will be posting my submissions to the group here.
Reading this chapter gives me a clarification of the purpose of the weekly review, and the idea of the levels (ie: runway, 10,000 feet, etc.). If you read into that that this chapter is somewhat repetitive - yeah, I kind of think it is, but in a good way.
I have it in my weekly review checklist that, on the first weekly review of the month, I am to review my goals. Really, anything above runway (tasks) and 10,000 (projects) is a long-term goal. So it is nice to have this one coming up a week before I will be doing that
review.
There are so many things that I need to look at, hard, both personally and professionally. And I need to do it all the time, not just more often. I need to nudge and push them along. I think that is the point - if we don't know what we are doing at the most basic level, how do we expect to push things along to achieve what we want in the long run.
Reading this chapter gives me a clarification of the purpose of the weekly review, and the idea of the levels (ie: runway, 10,000 feet, etc.). If you read into that that this chapter is somewhat repetitive - yeah, I kind of think it is, but in a good way.
I have it in my weekly review checklist that, on the first weekly review of the month, I am to review my goals. Really, anything above runway (tasks) and 10,000 (projects) is a long-term goal. So it is nice to have this one coming up a week before I will be doing that
review.
There are so many things that I need to look at, hard, both personally and professionally. And I need to do it all the time, not just more often. I need to nudge and push them along. I think that is the point - if we don't know what we are doing at the most basic level, how do we expect to push things along to achieve what we want in the long run.
Jan 18, 2009
Chapter 3 - Knowing your committments creates better choices of new ones.
As part of the Ready for Anything Yahoo! Group, I'm leading the charge to read a chapter a week of Ready for Anything. I will be posting my submissions to the group here.
Reading this chapter really helped crystalize how things have been going for me. I've done weekly reviews the last three weeks, and another one is to be done tomorrow morning. I do have a sense of anxiety about the fact that my e-mail wasn't clear on Friday, and neither was my inbox.
It was amazing though - Friday I spend clearing some old junk out of our offices, to make room for folks who need the space. It was really satisfying, but took most of the workday. It is as satisfying as cleaning a garage. And the whole time, I knew it was the RIGHT thing to be doing. I knew my other committments, and this was one of my projects and it was the right time to undertake it. It allowed me to clearly think through some of the things.
I have most of my committments, if not all of them, tracked in my trusted system - for work anyway. One of the "by the way" questions was where do I need more structure. I need it in my home. I need to really set GTD up in my house somehow, and stick to it the way I stick
to it at work.
Reading this chapter really helped crystalize how things have been going for me. I've done weekly reviews the last three weeks, and another one is to be done tomorrow morning. I do have a sense of anxiety about the fact that my e-mail wasn't clear on Friday, and neither was my inbox.
It was amazing though - Friday I spend clearing some old junk out of our offices, to make room for folks who need the space. It was really satisfying, but took most of the workday. It is as satisfying as cleaning a garage. And the whole time, I knew it was the RIGHT thing to be doing. I knew my other committments, and this was one of my projects and it was the right time to undertake it. It allowed me to clearly think through some of the things.
I have most of my committments, if not all of them, tracked in my trusted system - for work anyway. One of the "by the way" questions was where do I need more structure. I need it in my home. I need to really set GTD up in my house somehow, and stick to it the way I stick
to it at work.
Jan 14, 2009
Chapter 2 - You can only feel good about...
Unlike what is discussed in this chapter - the brain dump - I've done my brain dump in little chunks over the past month. Even that has helped to get my mind clear.
I find the discussion about checking which one you want to do next the most interesting part of this chapter. This week I am working on my second-largest challenge after the weekly review, which is actually WORKING from my lists. It is a terrible problem for me, as I often
write it down and still work from my head. Very rarely do I "review all of [my] options of what to do and make the best choices" - I'm working intuitively on work I know I have to do, but not often from my lists.
I try and do a minor brain dump during my weekly reviews, but it doesn't always work that way. I'm going to shortly be pasting the trigger word list from the book (it's on one of my lists) into my notebook so that I can get at it right beside my Weekly Review Checklist.
As to the by-the-ways, I'm using Outlook 2000. Sometime in the spring, I put in a vb script that creates a task from an e-mail. It gives the task the name "Follow up on:" and then tacks on the subject from the e-mail. All very slick. Except I was just clicking and saving, and the tasks were unweildy because a) there were many, and b) I wasn't giving them names that meant ANYTHING to me. I weeded a TON of those out this week, and will have a nice tidy to-do list by the end of this week.
You know, when I'm hoping to do another Weekly Review.
I find the discussion about checking which one you want to do next the most interesting part of this chapter. This week I am working on my second-largest challenge after the weekly review, which is actually WORKING from my lists. It is a terrible problem for me, as I often
write it down and still work from my head. Very rarely do I "review all of [my] options of what to do and make the best choices" - I'm working intuitively on work I know I have to do, but not often from my lists.
I try and do a minor brain dump during my weekly reviews, but it doesn't always work that way. I'm going to shortly be pasting the trigger word list from the book (it's on one of my lists) into my notebook so that I can get at it right beside my Weekly Review Checklist.
As to the by-the-ways, I'm using Outlook 2000. Sometime in the spring, I put in a vb script that creates a task from an e-mail. It gives the task the name "Follow up on:" and then tacks on the subject from the e-mail. All very slick. Except I was just clicking and saving, and the tasks were unweildy because a) there were many, and b) I wasn't giving them names that meant ANYTHING to me. I weeded a TON of those out this week, and will have a nice tidy to-do list by the end of this week.
You know, when I'm hoping to do another Weekly Review.
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