The new year always fills me with some kind of excitement. Planning (sometimes for the first time, really, in months), being creative, being filled with energy - nearly overwhelming. The new year is always a fun time.
This week, I managed to do some planning last weekend, including goal setting and cleaning up. I was coming off two weeks of vacation. When I got to the office on Monday, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it wasn't a gong show. I cleaned up, I did some organizing, and having done a mini weekly review on Sunday, I hoped to do another Wednesday.
The week flew by. I got stuff done. I didn't do a WR on Wednesday, like I hoped. But I got some minor projects completed, lots of tasks done, and was even in training for a full day on Thursday. Never did I get overwhelmed (maybe because so much of my staff was in training throughout the week), never did I get overworked. I had relaxed control.
I did do a Weekly Review, Friday afternoon. I did a thorough one. Sometime last year I put a VBScript into Outlook 2000 that lets me make a tast from an e-mail, and I had lots of those there that were stale, outdated or done, but poorly named. Weeded 'em all out. I weeded out old stale phone calls. If they need me, they will call back, but I know I had returned many of those. I got a lot of stuff out of there that had started to rot. I worked through two e-mail folders - on for Next Actions, one for Waiting Fors - that was holding stuff that may or may not be on the lists, and put it on the list, or deleted what was done.
It took a long time on Friday, but I did it. Then, I started to plow through them. My calls list was too long, as was my follow ups and waiting fors. Oh my, I felt so good knocking them off. And I did get more creative. And when I got home, I felt like it was ok to be home, that nothing needed to be done this weekend from the office end of things.
Just like the post below, it is true - cleaning up does create new directions.
By the way - I heard a little suggestion about using Baroque music as a way to shut out the background noise during the weekly review. I loaded some onto a CD (you kids should look up what those are), along with several other instrumental albums including the iconic Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, and it was remarkably calming and useful during the weekly review. I recommend it!
Jan 10, 2009
Jan 4, 2009
Ready for Anything!
I have always tried to make a chapter of "Ready for Anything" a part of my weekly review. There are 52 chapters. Huh, there are 52 weeks. Maybe this goes together?
As a reinvention of my GTD Self, I lead the charge to read a chapter a week on the Ready for Anything Yahoo! Group, and I will be posting my posts to the group here.
Cleaning up Creates New Directions
Here I go and get everyone hyped up, and what happens? No post from me! I've been doing my weekly review and my build up, so here's what I got from this chapter.
Really, this is about the importance of the weekly review. I will spare everyone the too-oft repeated "if you aren't doing the weekly review..." admonishment. Most of us aren't doing it every week. Doing one once in a while deserves a pat on the back. I'm not "black belt" and am fine with that.
I weeded out my list tonight, even killing some categories that I had, which were frankly stupid. I didn't need separate projects lists, I just needed one. I definitely only needed one Someday/Maybe list! (Don't even ask.) So I managed to get current - sort of.
Tomorrow I go back to my office for the first time since December 19th. It will be busy - catching up, sorting through my physical inbox, as my e-mail box is clean as of tonight. Fortunately I have some staff development going on with many of my staff members, and
that will occupy most of them for the day, so I will get some ability to get things caught up and into my system.
I'm going to peg Wednesday afternoon to do another weekly review, once I've got all the new work stuff in. I hope I stick to that. What I did really take from this, and the most powerful part I have found, is something I already do - when I have no idea what to do or where to
turn, when I'm feeling totally ineffective, I pick up the first thing in front of my nose and I deal with it. I concentrate on dealing with it, and it gets done. Then the next. After a few, I'm productive as anything.
As to the "By the Way" questions, it was good to pull back a touch and think about the areas where I do need to do some cleaning up - areas where I have outstanding projects that I haven't recorded, that sort of thing. (I don't intend to treat this as a book report, so I'm not
telling where these are!.) It also helped me to clarify which the next one to tackle is.
As to "what can I forgive" - a little bit hokey, I always figured, but then again, there is always something I can forgive too.
Have a great week!
As a reinvention of my GTD Self, I lead the charge to read a chapter a week on the Ready for Anything Yahoo! Group, and I will be posting my posts to the group here.
Cleaning up Creates New Directions
Here I go and get everyone hyped up, and what happens? No post from me! I've been doing my weekly review and my build up, so here's what I got from this chapter.
Really, this is about the importance of the weekly review. I will spare everyone the too-oft repeated "if you aren't doing the weekly review..." admonishment. Most of us aren't doing it every week. Doing one once in a while deserves a pat on the back. I'm not "black belt" and am fine with that.
I weeded out my list tonight, even killing some categories that I had, which were frankly stupid. I didn't need separate projects lists, I just needed one. I definitely only needed one Someday/Maybe list! (Don't even ask.) So I managed to get current - sort of.
Tomorrow I go back to my office for the first time since December 19th. It will be busy - catching up, sorting through my physical inbox, as my e-mail box is clean as of tonight. Fortunately I have some staff development going on with many of my staff members, and
that will occupy most of them for the day, so I will get some ability to get things caught up and into my system.
I'm going to peg Wednesday afternoon to do another weekly review, once I've got all the new work stuff in. I hope I stick to that. What I did really take from this, and the most powerful part I have found, is something I already do - when I have no idea what to do or where to
turn, when I'm feeling totally ineffective, I pick up the first thing in front of my nose and I deal with it. I concentrate on dealing with it, and it gets done. Then the next. After a few, I'm productive as anything.
As to the "By the Way" questions, it was good to pull back a touch and think about the areas where I do need to do some cleaning up - areas where I have outstanding projects that I haven't recorded, that sort of thing. (I don't intend to treat this as a book report, so I'm not
telling where these are!
As to "what can I forgive" - a little bit hokey, I always figured, but then again, there is always something I can forgive too.
Have a great week!
Nov 23, 2008
People who dump drive me crazy.
I am fairly certain that many of the people that I deal with on a day to day basis from outside my company are "dumpers". They are people who may themselves be working from lists, but all they are doing (in GTD context) is calling to leave a voicemail or an e-mail, and then move it to their @Waiting for lists.
And it isn't all of them, some of them have good intentions. But really, many a
re just calling or e-mailing to then foist something back at you. Perhaps I'm tainted right now by reading Scott Adam's funny "The Dilbert Principle", which discusses this sort of "weasel" behaviour and how you can use it to your advantage. However, I'm trying to actually accomplish something, not just dump, and it seems that more and more people are trying to push things off of their own plates and onto the plates of other.
If that wasn't enough, I am noticing that this is becoming a pretty major pre-occupation for most business interactions. It seems ridiculous to me. Just my $0.02, but I'm very tired of it happening all the time.
And it isn't all of them, some of them have good intentions. But really, many a
re just calling or e-mailing to then foist something back at you. Perhaps I'm tainted right now by reading Scott Adam's funny "The Dilbert Principle", which discusses this sort of "weasel" behaviour and how you can use it to your advantage. However, I'm trying to actually accomplish something, not just dump, and it seems that more and more people are trying to push things off of their own plates and onto the plates of other.If that wasn't enough, I am noticing that this is becoming a pretty major pre-occupation for most business interactions. It seems ridiculous to me. Just my $0.02, but I'm very tired of it happening all the time.
Nov 3, 2008
Myndology Notebook - Hacking Update
About two weeks ago, I posted about how I found a Myndology Junior Notebook and Myndology Index Notebook in my remote part of the earth. I was very happy to have found these, as I was wistful of the shipping cost, and now exchange rate, for the Levenger Circa notebooks. I gave a favourable initial impression of these notebooks, and to date that hasn't changed.
I did mention that I was going to do some hacking on these notebooks, and after a productive 10 minutes with my labeller, I'm happy to say that I've had terrific results for someone as un-crafty as I am. SWMBO, now she's crafty - and I will leave that to you as to how you want to interpret that.
I stayed up very late the first night I had this notebook, essentially reading a novel and doing a brain dump. Any thought and I jotted it down. I enjoyed the feeling of writing in it, and really enjoyed the quality of the paper.
Tabbed Dividers
So then, the next morning, I set out to tab the pages as I had outlined in my initial post. Very simply, I used 3M Post-It Rigid Index Tabs, and added the following "sections":
rmatted, I set my label maker to the smallest sized font, and printed them out in a single tape with three spaces between each word. I then printed a second copy, to have one for each side, in case the notebook happened to be upside down. Not so dumb, me.
These tabs have worked famously. Unfortunately, due to operator error, I was often turning to a tab and then writing on
the page for the next one, so in the principle of KISS, I slapped a label from my label maker on the front of each page. Works like a charm as a divider now, and it was cheap. This was probably $0.50 that will last for a very long time, if I keep with this notebook system. No hours on the internet searching, no finding the perfect, no spending another $15 at the Levenger store for no reason... this just plain works for me. Yay me for keeping it so simple!
The Advantage over spiral-bound and three-ring
Let me go no further before I say this: yep, I get it, it's just a friggin' notebook. The funny thing about all this is that it showed me how ineffectively I was using my current notebook. Which itself
was just a friggin' notebook. However, the non-linearity of this one led me to change the way I looked at things. I don't know why it is different than, say, a 3-ring binder, or my old paper planner, but it just is. When I had one of the Franklin Covey planners, it was such wonderful paper that aside from writing appointments in it I was afraid to mark it up. I never used it very well, and certainly not for any note keeping. It was almost an affectation more than it was a planner. All the grand designs I had about keeping notes in the thing all went to pot.
The Myndology products are happy to have you store them in a file folder. Just pull them out. You can write on them and toss them if you need to. There is a feeling of both flexibility and non-permanence about using it that makes my old spiral-bound notebook seem so dated. By the time I stopped using it I was basically using the spiral-bound as a voicemail log - very very inefficient. If I'm going to write, I want it to be efficient and practical for the way I want to work.
The amazing thing is that I fell into a trap with the old Blueline A9. They came with great labels that allowed you to tab the pages, record them in the index, and even archive the notebook itself. However, they are very linear, and even though the pages were perforated, I felt like I was somehow defiling it. Again, I know, it was JUST a friggin' notebook. It was the weirdest feeling, like I wanted to archive all this stuff. In fact, most of it I can just toss, but there the old, used ones sit, on my shelf - the information in them useless and outdated. Somehow, because the pages can be moved, sectioned, more easily removed for filing - somehow this notebook seems better, in every way.
Oh, and it is very comfortable to use if you are a left-hander like me.
Customer Service
I have been speaking with Myndology directly, mostly to let them know about the good success I've had with their products, and to make some suggstions about what I might like to see. They are really quite open and friendly folks, and responded fairly quickly. Because I am a nerd, I did send them to other sites to show what I was suggesting for their product, which they seemed to appreciate. Their products are really quite good, and you owe it to yourself to pick one up and give it a try!
I did mention that I was going to do some hacking on these notebooks, and after a productive 10 minutes with my labeller, I'm happy to say that I've had terrific results for someone as un-crafty as I am. SWMBO, now she's crafty - and I will leave that to you as to how you want to interpret that.I stayed up very late the first night I had this notebook, essentially reading a novel and doing a brain dump. Any thought and I jotted it down. I enjoyed the feeling of writing in it, and really enjoyed the quality of the paper.
Tabbed Dividers
So then, the next morning, I set out to tab the pages as I had outlined in my initial post. Very simply, I used 3M Post-It Rigid Index Tabs, and added the following "sections":
Calls - for voicemails to be returned or put into my system when I'm on the road
- Tasks - for capture from meetings, or random thoughts where the notebook is handy.
- File Notes - for notes on my "defined work" from meetings, etc.
- Projects - mind mapping and thinking on paper.
- B.G. - separate tasks for an organization I am involved with.
- WR Ch - my handwritten weekly review checklist (frankly, easier to use than my Splashshopper Checklist).
rmatted, I set my label maker to the smallest sized font, and printed them out in a single tape with three spaces between each word. I then printed a second copy, to have one for each side, in case the notebook happened to be upside down. Not so dumb, me.These tabs have worked famously. Unfortunately, due to operator error, I was often turning to a tab and then writing on
the page for the next one, so in the principle of KISS, I slapped a label from my label maker on the front of each page. Works like a charm as a divider now, and it was cheap. This was probably $0.50 that will last for a very long time, if I keep with this notebook system. No hours on the internet searching, no finding the perfect, no spending another $15 at the Levenger store for no reason... this just plain works for me. Yay me for keeping it so simple!The Advantage over spiral-bound and three-ring
Let me go no further before I say this: yep, I get it, it's just a friggin' notebook. The funny thing about all this is that it showed me how ineffectively I was using my current notebook. Which itself
was just a friggin' notebook. However, the non-linearity of this one led me to change the way I looked at things. I don't know why it is different than, say, a 3-ring binder, or my old paper planner, but it just is. When I had one of the Franklin Covey planners, it was such wonderful paper that aside from writing appointments in it I was afraid to mark it up. I never used it very well, and certainly not for any note keeping. It was almost an affectation more than it was a planner. All the grand designs I had about keeping notes in the thing all went to pot.The Myndology products are happy to have you store them in a file folder. Just pull them out. You can write on them and toss them if you need to. There is a feeling of both flexibility and non-permanence about using it that makes my old spiral-bound notebook seem so dated. By the time I stopped using it I was basically using the spiral-bound as a voicemail log - very very inefficient. If I'm going to write, I want it to be efficient and practical for the way I want to work.
The amazing thing is that I fell into a trap with the old Blueline A9. They came with great labels that allowed you to tab the pages, record them in the index, and even archive the notebook itself. However, they are very linear, and even though the pages were perforated, I felt like I was somehow defiling it. Again, I know, it was JUST a friggin' notebook. It was the weirdest feeling, like I wanted to archive all this stuff. In fact, most of it I can just toss, but there the old, used ones sit, on my shelf - the information in them useless and outdated. Somehow, because the pages can be moved, sectioned, more easily removed for filing - somehow this notebook seems better, in every way.
Oh, and it is very comfortable to use if you are a left-hander like me.
Customer Service
I have been speaking with Myndology directly, mostly to let them know about the good success I've had with their products, and to make some suggstions about what I might like to see. They are really quite open and friendly folks, and responded fairly quickly. Because I am a nerd, I did send them to other sites to show what I was suggesting for their product, which they seemed to appreciate. Their products are really quite good, and you owe it to yourself to pick one up and give it a try!
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