Posted August 2, 2005 — 18 Comments
Throughout my professional life I think meetings have been one of the biggest sources of frustration. I’m one of those people who really likes to work at work and while I do find some meetings very useful, and the occasional meeting totally necessary, I think the majority of meetings I’ve attended over the years could be done away with.
Or at least done better.
I wanted to take a stab at offering up some tips to get more out of meetings in general. These come from years of being frustrated by useless meetings and a true desire to help people get the most out of their work day. If you’ve got more tips, please add them in the comments.
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Popularity: 10%
Posted in Miscellaneous, Methodologies — 18 Comments
Posted June 29, 2005 — 17 Comments
I just wanted to take a moment to announce the new redesigned To-Done.
When I launched this site, about two months ago now, I launched it with a nice, clean, yet somewhat hurried design. In the spirit of “getting real” I just wanted to get to what matters most to me—the content. It’s actually a great GTD story. I took this site from idea to launch in less than a day, and on about five hours of work! Not to shabby.
In any case, I felt I needed a redesign, but I also knew I had too much going on to get it finished as quickly as I’d have liked, let alone do it any sort of justice. So, I turned to my 9rules buddies, Mike Rundle and Colin Devroe to see if they could help.
They were most helpful! And did a wonderful job. Mike with his design skills and Colin with his Ninja WordPress hacking talents. Many thanks fellas.
So, enjoy the new look and while your at it, check out my fancy new About page!
Popularity: 3%
Posted in Miscellaneous — 17 Comments
Posted June 17, 2005 — 7 Comments
How about a little fun on this Friday?
A friend of mine and I were talking a few nights ago about productivity and all the little gadgets and “things” that people get to help stay organized and be more productive. The funny thing is that, in general, I seem to do better with less. Stuff, in my world, doesn’t usually equal productivity. However there are a few things it seems everyone who’s into GTD wants to have.
So I decided, for fun, to create a shopping list of personal productivity items. Don’t take this to mean you, by any stretch, need any of this stuff to be more productive at all. It’s just a little Friday fun.
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Popularity: 5%
Posted in Miscellaneous — 7 Comments
Posted June 14, 2005 — 9 Comments
Today I was pointed in the direction of an article in Fast Company by Alan Deutschman called “Change or Die.”
It stuck a chord with me right away because I’ve been working on a piece about doing something great and one of the biggest barriers to getting something great done is fear of change. In my line of work I’m forced to change constantly and yet still I’m fearful and uncomfortable at times with change. At other times I feel I’m one of the lucky people who can embrace it and even force it.
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Popularity: 4%
Posted in Miscellaneous — 9 Comments
I’ve never been a big user of chat, but I know many people who are and recently I was cajoled into trying to make myself more available to others via iChat. For the most part I find chat applications to be very useful and I see them as potential time savers if used in the right way. However, as I’m coming to learn, they’re also one of the worst things you can do to yourself if your trying to be productive.
I find that as soon as I make myself “available” I’m flooded with requests to chat. Now, I’m a decent multi-tasker and can handle several conversations at once, but I’d be kidding myself (and lying to y’all) if I said I actually made any headway on other things while chatting.
It’s funny because when I’m at conferences I see all sorts of people with their chat windows up during presentations. I have to wonder why they bother attending, I mean, you can’t get the most out of a presentation while your attention is sucked in by a screen and iChat. I’ve taken to leaving my computer in the bag during presentations I actually want to get something out of, but that’s a different post.
No, chat is a serious threat to your productivity and I think the only way around it is to not use it when you need to focus on the task at hand. Don’t even tempt yourself. I tried putting a clever away message (“Working, I may ignore you”) up, thinking that I’d only have people contact me if it was important. Didn’t work, and even if it was important, as soon as I hear that little “ding” my concentration is shot. Nope, better off not even going there.
The moral? If you are a frequent user of chat, and you are having trouble getting things done, you might try turning it off for extended periods of time. I know it helps me.
Popularity: 2%
Posted in Miscellaneous — 17 Comments
Posted May 31, 2005 — 2 Comments
The following is a quick story highlighting one time when a tool, in this case Backpack, did exactly what I wanted it to—help me remember my ideas so I can relax more, enjoy my weekend and be more productive.
As I was heading out last Friday this post from 43 Folders came through via RSS. I gave it a quick scan and knew it was something I wanted to read, but I had to get out the door and on with my weekend. I also thought it’d be something worth posting about over at Lifehacker where I’m a substitute writer for the next week or so.
So I pulled up Backpack, in which I’d created a Lifehacker page for this very thing. I added the link, a quick note that it might be worth a post, and a item to my list to review it and check if it had already been posted. In a minute or so I’d collected the link, subsequent idea and I’d put it out of my mind in a place where I could get it when I got back. Thus freeing myself up for fun times over the weekend.
There were many times in the past I’d have either spent some serious time with it right then, thus extending my week, or somehow brought it with me, thus compromising my weekend. That is, unless I just decided to forget about it entirely. Any of these would have been less than ideal and counterproductive.
This is how tools like Backpack should work, IMHO. To help you, among other things, get the most out of your weekend while keeping important things where you can easily come back to them!
Popularity: 3%
Posted in Miscellaneous — 2 Comments
To-done is the newest member of the 9rules network. I’m happy, excited and proud to be connected in with so many quality sites and think To-Done is a great fit. I feel the topics I’m going to cover here are something that could of interest to just about anyone and I’m sure that being part of a content network of quality sites will help bring the discussion to some new audiences.
Here’s to the future and I hope y’all find lots to learn, share and discuss here at To-Done.
Popularity: 3%
Posted in Miscellaneous — No Comments
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