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Posts Tagged ‘to-do list’
Productivity Follows Process
Several months ago I wrote an article about productivity and time management tools (also called PIMs for “personal information managers”), and I ended that by writing, “the process is the missing piece to using any tool successfully.” 
The most important element of using productivity tools successfully is the “how,” or what I call the process. In my prior article, I referred to this in an analogy, which is that having a great set of clubs does not automatically make you a great golfer. Think of adopting a good process in terms of having a good golf swing: it’s how you use the clubs that makes the difference. The better your process, the farther your tools will take you in a given work day, and the more productive you will be.
In my 17 years in the productivity industry, I have created and refined what I call the Empowered Productivity SystemTM. I chose the word “empowered” because I have come to realize that the secret to peak productivity, really to living the life you want, is regaining and maintaining control, specifically over your attention. Controlling your attention means that you decide what gets done in your day, rather than just being swept away by all the external forces constantly demanding your attention. Control is the difference between being proactive and being constantly reactive. Time management is no longer relevant. What matters now is attention management.
As you may recall from my earlier article, there are five components that a good PIM should manage well. These can be all in one tool, such as Microsoft Outlook, or in several tools, as long as they work well together. Following are those five components, and some tips on using them inside the framework of a workflow management process.
Contacts
The Contact section of any tool is primarily a storage place for contact details. Some tasks relate directly to Contacts, such as phone calls or emails, and these should be captured in your Task list. Certain professions, such as sales, may require a more complicated tool, such as a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager), however many people underestimate the Contacts features available in the PIM that they choose.
Notes
The important thing to remember about Notes is that they are for reference material. Reference materials are things that do not currently require action. Notes give you a place to capture ideas, instructions, lists, even project details. But if an item requires action, it belongs on your Task list.
Email
Email is one of the primary culprits of lost productivity among entrepreneurs and professionals. My advice is to set aside one or two times in your day to dispatch your messages. Clear them from your inbox by deleting, filing, or creating a Task rather than letting them accumulate. Hundreds or thousands of messages piled up in your inbox results in unproductive clutter. It’s more efficient to process email in batches a couple of times per day, than to stop what you’re doing to respond to every message when it arrives in your inbox.
Calendar
There is a distinct difference between calendar items and task (to-do list) items. A Calendar is a time-based organization tool. Anything that has a strong relationship to time goes on your Calendar. An example of a strong relationship to time is something that is absolutely happening on a certain day (like a birthday), or happening on a certain day and at a certain time (like a customer meeting). It makes perfect sense to organize these items on a Calendar.
Tasks
You may, however, have many things to do that have a weak relationship to time, meaning that you have some discretion as to when they get done. They may have a due date at some point in the future, or may have no due date at all, but are still important to complete. I find it useful to treat these items as Tasks and put them on a list. Your Task list tells you how to spend your time in between your calendar appointments, and is the driving force that enables you to be proactive instead of always reactive. I suggest that you prioritize your task list by due date, instead of by “A B C” or “High Medium Low.” You can read more about that here.
In order to be your most productive, you need a set of tools that matches the complexity of your life, but you also need a good workflow management process for using those tools effectively. The ideas here are enough to get you started. To learn more about the Empowered Productivity SystemTM for yourself or your team, call me at 424-226-2872 or email questions at regainyourtime dot com. Also connect on Facebook and Twitter.
Thanks for reading!
Thoughts on Checking Email First Thing in the Morning
I don’t claim to be a professional organizer, but I can’t deny that there is a close relationship between organization and productivity. Recently my dear friend and nationally renowned professional organizing expert Lorie Marrero of ClutterDiet wrote on her blog about some prevalent productivity advice. I began to write in her comments and then realized I had way too much to say on the topic. So Lorie, thank you for inspiring my blog post this morning! I definitely recommend that you head over to Lorie’s excellent blog and read her post for yourself. My thoughts follow…
The premise of her post is that contrary to popular advice, it’s ok to check email first thing in the morning. For me, the real question is whether or not you are supporting your own focused attention, or sabotaging it. Thank you for reminding me, Lorie, that there is always “sound-bite” advice and then there is the whole story. In this fast-paced media-rich, short-attention span environment we live in, perhaps I’m guilty of too often giving “sound-bite advice.” But I frequently tell people that when it comes to professional advice, the answer to pretty much any question you ask will often be: “it depends.” The same is true here: should you check email first thing in the morning? It depends.
It depends on if you have a handheld device. Believe it or not, there are still many people who don’t, and their only option for email is their computer. But I talk a lot about how technology is making old “time management” advice outdated, and this is a good example – the “old advice” is that you shouldn’t check messages first thing in the morning, because handheld devices first didn’t exist for email, and then weren’t that prevalent. That’s certainly not the case anymore, however I don’t think we’re quite at the point yet, where we can assume that everybody has one.
It depends on if you are an independent professional/self-employed, or if you work in an office. I think this is an important distinction with regard to your email schedule. You are less likely to miss something by foregoing email if you are sitting at your desk in a large office and you decide to tackle your task list instead of checking email. Someone will pop their head in, you’ll overhear something, or they’ll call you.
It depends on if you have time to be proactive that morning, or if you are rushing off to a meeting. The whole point, as Lorie mentioned, of not checking email first thing, is to have some *pro*active time. Don’t go to email first thing, so you can spend some time being proactive, knocking off items on your task list. If you were rushing off to a meeting that morning, you wouldn’t have proactive time anyway, nor would you be able to get sucked in to your email, so checking to see if that meeting has been delayed or canceled is certainly prudent.
It depends on how you’ve trained those with whom you have a relationship. Regarding “digging in our heels and insisting people should behave differently”…I actually don’t think this is what happens most of the time. For the people you don’t interact with often, like the random press request, Lorie is absolutely right. I’d go out on a limb and say the vast majority of actual communication most people get via email (not spam or robomails or newsletters, but actual communication) is from people with whom they have a relationship. And if you have a relationship with them, you’ve probably “trained” them in how to communicate with you, whether you realize it or not. Real estate agents ask me, “how do I get my clients to stop calling me at 9 o’clock at night?” My response: “stop answering.” People who need to communicate with you will do what works. If you have “trained” them that you will respond to an email within 5 minutes, then they will feel comfortable using email for emergencies. If however, they email you about something important and you don’t respond, they will typically try reaching you some other way and the way that works, is probably the way they will use next time. So it’s not about wishing and hoping that everyone else will do things differently, but rather about setting up the circumstances so that your own productivity is supported rather than sabotaged.
But for the record, if you have a handheld advice, AND you have the self-discipline not to get sucked in, I think skimming your messages on your handheld device several times a day, including first thing in the morning, is certainly a valid option (I do it myself). Just be careful, because there might be nothing to stop you from scanning on your phone, and then rushing off to your computer to “just respond to this one…” And then it’s all downhill from there!
Thanks so much to Lorie, for her great advice, and for providing the opportunity for a nuanced discussion of a common productivity technique! She knows I’m a fan. =)
To-Do List Post on genConnect
I’ve been invited to be a monthly contributor to genConnect, an online place to connect with the best of life’s experts across generations. genConnect provides an opportunity to learn, share and engage with experts through articles, Q&A, groups, genConnect TV, and genConnect Radio, to enrich your career, health, relationships and lifestyle.
This month’s article is about time management advice that has persisted throughout the years, despite the fact that changing times and technology have made it somewhat irrelevant. I discuss in detail one piece of advice in particular that seems to be hanging on with “time management experts,” why I think it might be hindering your productivity, and what to do instead.
Please visit genConnect to read my article, “The To-Do Lists That Don’t Work.”
Thanks for visiting!
How to Sync Outlook Tasks with your iPhone
UPDATE: 7/28/11: This post refers to syncing Outlook for WINDOWS (all versions, as far as I can tell) with your iPhone. It covers using ToodleDo (the free way) and using ToDo by Appigo ($4.99 as of today). Since this post, I can recommend another way to sync tasks to iPhone either from iCal for Mac or Outlook for Windows, and that is 2Do by Guided Ways Technologies. It works well and there are instructions on their website. I have not yet found a solution for syncing Outlook 2011 for MAC tasks directly with iPhone. I did find this article about syncing to iCal and if that works successfully, you can then sync tasks from iCal to iPhone via 2Do or ToDo. I can not speak to how well it works. These difficulties, to me, are sufficient reason to recommend AGAINST Outlook for Mac as a productivity solution. For other suggestions of productivity tools for Mac users, see this post and this post.
I used Outlook to run my life for almost a decade, and the majority of the training I do is still using Outlook as the support tool. I am a fan and think it is a very powerful PIM (personal information manager) that can easily handle the complexity of your life. The one shortcoming is if you need to share calendars or other information, you need to be running an Exchange server and this doesn’t make sense for everyone (however you can sync your Outlook calendar with Google and share it that way).
A question I get a lot is how to sync Tasks in Outlook with an iPhone. I found an article online with detailed instructions for doing this and got permission to repost it here. It comes from Daniel B. Curran’s excellent how-to blog. Below are his instructions. I hope this helps. If you try this and run into any snags, I’d love to hear about it. And incidentally, I’m using To-Do (the app he mentions) to sync Tasks with iCal and I am VERY happy with it – well worth the $10 in my opinion. You can read about my experience with that here.)
Here is Daniel’s Post:
Let’s start with how you can sync your Microsoft Outlook Tasks to your iPhone for free.
I have read several articles about how to do this but I found the process to be convoluted. Let me make it very simple.
Step 1. Set up a free account at Toodledo.com The direct link for a new account is right here.
That should have taken you about 15 seconds. Let’s move on to step 2.
Step 2. Close Outlook, download Chromatic Dragon’s Toodledo Sync Application and install it.
Almost done! The sync application will want your Toodledo ID number. Leave it open on the tab that wants the ID number.
Step 3. Log into Toodledo and from the menu on the left select Account Settings. On that page you will see your Unique ID, simply copy and paste it into the sync program that you left open.
On the Synchronization tab you can change your Automatic Synchronization to whatever works for you. I don’t add tasks very often so once every 60 minutes is fine for me. To close the Options window select File -> Close. You will see a green checkmark icon in your tool tray. Right click it and hit Manual Sync.
Outlook is now synchronized to ToodleDo.
Ready for the iPhone part?
On Your iPhone, go to the App Store and Download ToodleDo for $3.99.
<end Daniel’s post>
Open ToodleDo on your iPhone and select “Settings” and log in to your account.
You should now see all of your tasks on your iPhone in the ToodleDo app.
Further instructions if you have been through Empowered Productivity Training from RegainYourTime.com:
In the Chromatic Dragon ToodleDo Sync Application on your desktop, open “Options.” (You may have to find ToodleDo in your System Tray in the bottom right corner of your screen, right click on that, and select “Options.”
Select the tab that reads “Mappings.” Select the following options:
Then select the “Folders” tab and click “refresh folders and enable.”
Now select “File – Manual Sync”
Your Outlook tasks should now be grouped by categories on your iPhone app by selecting “folders” from the Home Screen.
I hope you have found this helpful. Good luck!