Posts from — January 2009

I spent the day today at the FBR Open (aka Phoenix Open) in Scottsdale.  As witnessed again the FBR Open is unlike any other event on the PGA Tour.  It almost feels more like a college frat party than golf tournament – bottom line is that’s its a great time.  I count myself as one of those few people who actually like to watch golf on television although it may be for a different reason than you think.  For me it is the perfect backdrop for a weekend nap.  I can barely last 15 minutes when you combine the great scenery of a golf course along with David Feherty’s hushed and whispered take on the approach shot at the 12th hole .  If you are finding it hard to get in a good quality nap I urge you to tune in and I can almost guarantee instant REM.  But if that still doesn’t work for you The Boston Globe created the following Guide to Better Napping. For a clearer image please click here

In addition to napping this past year 60 minutes did a two part segment on the science behind sleep which I thought was very interesting.

Part One

Watch CBS Videos Online

Part Two

Watch CBS Videos Online

In my other life as a Certified Financial Planner® I have certainly run into people who face this problem.  On the one hand they look at the hole they have dug themselves into from student loans to credit cards and on the other hand they realize the importance of a long and short-term savings plan for themselves.

Richard Paul Evans, who is releasing a new book entitled, “The Five Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me for Women” wrote about this on glennbeck.com today.  Always an interesting topic to me.  Read his opinion here.

GTD five stages of mastering workflow: COLLECT, process, organize, review and do.

Collection

In order to get things done, first of all things need to be collected into a place that is both accessible and trusted.  One of the most recognizable tools in the GTD system is a common, every day in-basket such as one shown below

It is amazing how the simple idea of one place for everything really helps alleviate the stress of “what did I do with the (fill-in the blank)” problem we have all encountered.    You really come to appreciate the freedom of a “dump and forget” mentality you are allowed to take on when you walk in the door with a full briefcase and a stack of mail after you have created the habit of dropping it all into your in-box to process later.

The end objective in this phase is to gather all the items that need your attention into a physical in-box.  When you do this for the first time I can almost guarantee that one small in-box alone is not going to do the trick.  You are probably going to need a large table or in my case (and to my wife’s great joy) a wing of the house.   Don’t forget as you are doing this that you also have an email account (or two … or three) with an electronic in-box that is waiting for you as well.  Managing an email in-box is a topic of another conversation that I promise to get to but for now the suggestion is to print out any email that requires action on your part and place the piece of paper into the in-box as well.   Of course it is easy to create piles of physical and now electronic things into the middle of a room or desk but the process does not stop there.  Possibly the most important clutter is the stuff in your head.  As we have established before – the mind is a great place to have ideas but a horrible place to store them.  Although there are some great high-tech gadgets that I really like in the mind purging process, the first time you go through this it is better to stick with low-tech.  What I would suggest is a stack of 3 X 5 cards.  One by one go through the various roles and responsibilities you have in life and on a separate 3 X 5 card write down such things as, “call insurance companies to get quotes on life insurance” or “pick up a loaf of bread, container of milk and a stick of butter” and throw them into the in-box along with everything else.

Take note that the collection phase is not the time to make judgments about what to do with the stuff or to get overly sentimental about the birthday card from 12 years ago in your top drawer that you cant seem to part with.  What to do with the stuff comes next in part 2 – process.

Outside of Getting Things Done by David Allen the other great personal productivity book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has helped shape how I play the great game of life.  Since first being published in 1989 the book by Dr. Stephen Covey has sold over 15 million copies and been translated into 38 different languages.  To this very day 20 years later the book still finishes #6 on the NY Times Business Best Sellers List (GTD, by the way, comes in at #2).

In my opinion the book teaches some invaluable lessons about not only how to plan your day but how to design your life.  The 7 Habits are:

1) Be Proactive

2) Begin With the End in Mind

3) Put First Things First

4) Think Win / Win

5) Seek First to Understand and then to be Understood

6) Synergize

7) Sharpen the Saw

It is also my opinion that the 7 Habits, although very good in many areas, lack some of the great practical applications that GTD teaches.  The differences between David Allen and Stephen Covey was recently reviewed by Fortune magazine in September 2008 and was discussed in a previous blog entry.

With all of that said I still feel like there is so much good to be gained from reading it.  Today I stumbled across an offer from audible.com to download the audio book of 7 Habits for free.  I am not sure how long this offer will last but If you already have an account with audible you can follow the link below and directly download the audio file.  If you do not have an account with audible all you have to do is sign up which from all I can tell is free after providing some personal information.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Free Audio Download / Audible.com

I think one of the first things that attracted me to GTD was my memory of how funny and true I thought George Carlins’ stand up routine about “stuff” was when I heard it many years ago.  If you haven’t seen it I have embedded the ‘clean’ version below:

It is true that we have way to much stuff.  We have stuff coming at us from every angle all day long.  We have unrecognizable scribbles on Post-It notes on the fridge, bills that come in the mail, loose notes that we need to file away, messages that need to be returned, emails to be read and our kids latest art projects that we cant dream of parting with.

One of the main ideas of GTD is that in order to really get things done you need to have a repeatable process in place of dealing with all the information (and stuff) you receive on a daily basis.  Unless you have a system in place to capture, plan and do these things you mind will be in constant worry about all the open-loops and commitments you have outstanding.  David Allen uses the analogy of RAM on a personal computer, with the idea that too much “stuff” stored in a person’s short-term memory can blow a fuse. His idea is that the conscious mind is a focusing tool, not a storage place. He teaches five stages of mastering workflow.  The idea behind it all can be applied in any setting: home or office.  Like most things in GTD they are very simple:

1) Collect

2) Process

3) Organize

4) Review

5) Do

In my upcoming posts I will deal with each individually

I am a big fan of all things google.  Daily I use gmail, google docs, google calendar, google analytics, google finance, google reader, google maps and of course just the plain old google search feature.  As a company they truly impress me as I read about how they function as an organization, so it is no surprise to me that they invited David Allen to present and train their organization on the principles of GTD.  Although he doesn’t go deep into the process in full it is a very good glimpse into more of what “Getting Things Done”  is all about.

Do you set New Years Resolutions?  I have seen plenty of articles online over the past few days that argue the resons for and against the idea.  Regardless, I don’t think anyone can argue with the fact that people who not only set goals but also track them are much more productive than those who do not.

Yesterday lifehacker.com posted some links to sites that provide free online goal tracking apps.  Of all those listed my favorite is a site I have been using called JoesGoals.com .  As you can see from the screenshots the idea behind this site is very simple: list your goals, assign them a weighting with a point system and most importantly don’t break the chain.  One of the reasons why I think this site offers one of the best free apps online is that it is very customizable to be what you want it to be.  So once again check it out whether you’ve just put pen to paper or if you are looking for a better way to hold yourself accountable.