Download Monday: Which Planner is Right for Me?

For the next few Mondays I'll be posting some resources around the issue of planning and time management.  As the week gets rolling, sometimes it helps to have a few extra arrows in the quiver.

I've been asked many times as to which planner I feel is "best" in light of all of the options out there.  Day Timer, Day Runner, Filofax, etc.  Too many options for an organized guy to look at all at once.  Like many others in the GTD Network, I've opted for a hybrid system, integrating both paper and digital tools.

Here is my handout, Which Planner is Right for Me?   Feel free to share it with friends or someone who is in the market for a decent approach to planning.

Download which_planner_is_right_for_me_tds.pdf

One Simple Question About Productivity

One workshop participant asked me recently the following question,

"I've been taught that there are two approaches to plotting out your day: the priority (A1, B2, etc.) system or the process of matching up tasks with certain blocks of time.  Which system is right?"

My response tried to match the best of a FranklinCovey (top down approach, starting with goals and mission) approach and a GTD (bottom's up approach, starting with cleaning up the open loops and stuff that's on our plate) approach.  The fact is, there isn't one method of planning out the day that is superior- what helps me to get important things done is in itself good.

The Problem with A1, B2 Priority Planning
I explained to my participant that this system ignores the fact that some tasks change in their importance as the day goes on.  An A1, B2, C3 method can also get awfully confusing.  After a while, you just get tired of assigning letters and numbers to things!

The Problem with Matching Time Blocks With Tasks
This isn't the silver bullet either as a big block of time could be filled with a meaningless task that simple requires a lot of time.  I would love to prune the trees in my side yard (requiring several hours of labor) but if something else is more important, my pruning would be something of a waste of that particular time.

Here's a much simpler approach to planning out the day: ask yourself at the start of things, "By 5pm, what would I be upset about if I didn't tackle it during the day?"  It's one simple question that works for me and provides a more intuitive method to planning. 

I'd love to hear reader feedback as to other methodologies for planning out a day. 

One Thing to Blog About GTD, Another to Present On It

Emerson once said, "Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee."  As an educator, one of my primary aims is to plant seeds and open doors that might not be passed through for years to come.  While some teachers get frustrated that the fruit of their labor isn't realized for 5 or 10 or 15 years after graduation, I've come to accept that it just is the reality of education. 

Yesterday I had the opportunity to present a workshop to about 50 participants at the NCEA annual convention here in Baltimore.  I had submitted three proposals for workshops, ranging from faith and sports to my "day job" in campus ministry but the one that was accepted was about GTD. 

My presentation was slated in perhaps the absolute worst slot of all- the final block at 3pm on a Thursday and so my expectations for numbers was very modest.  When the room nearly filled just minutes before starting, my juices were flowing and I was ready to roll.

My presentation: Stress Less and Achieve More Through Time Management and Workplace Productivity.   It reminded me that it's one thing to talk about something (or blog about something- an elaborate way of talking) and another to teach it in public.  I walked the audience through the following issues:

• A definition of stress and its sources



• Some data from the Cal Berkeley study on information overload



• A working premise that work can be spiritual and transformative on many levels



• An outline of the GTD 5 phases of work-flow



• A sample step-by-step tutorial of the weekly review

After the hour-long presentation, I answered questions about work-flow management, preparing for each day and issues of procrastination.  One participant told me afterward, "I've been to ten workshops this week and yours was the best."  Not a bad way to end the day and just another reminder that the best way to learn something on a deep level is to teach it to others.

Mini Review: The Likeability Factor

When I read Tim Sanders' (former Yahoo! executive) first book, Love is the Killer App, I was blown away by Sanders' writing style and truly unique ideas about the business world.  It changed the way I see human interaction.  I was unfortunately not as taken with his second book, The Likeability Factor.

Now, I have to come clean here and admit something: I prefer audio books as they capture accents, humor and subtleties in a way that words on a page cannot and I read (listened) to Sanders' first book while driving to and from Baltimore each day.  For his second work, I chose the old fashioned paper approach.  I only mention this because it impacted my overall experience of his book, probably not to its benefit.

The Likeability Factor has one central premise which I completely agree with: much of life is a popularity contest so why not maximize the degree to which folks like you?  Pretty simple but oh so true!  Unfortunately, much of the book takes on a style that left me waiting for something more substantial that what it had to offer.  I was anxious for real life business-world examples but Tim preferred to keep much of the content on the "soft" side and shared but a few examples of personal change in the lives of folks he knew.  One gets a sense that Tim has gone away from his concrete exepriences at Yahoo! and Broadcast.com and swerved heavily into the self-help lane where content is created, not so much discovered.

While Tim Sanders is in my mind a true innovator, a gifted speaker and makes a needed contribution to biz life, The Likeability Factor came up a bit short.  Now I'm moving on to Malcolm Caldwell's The Tipping Point with a review coming in the next month or so.

Audio follow up:  you can listen to an audio sample of Tim's book here.

Spring Clean Your Job

Spring is the ideal time for rethinking, evaluating the past year and projecting into the future.  I generally do the following each Spring:

Submit to my bosses a list of objectives for the following year.  This gets their input and demonstrates that I'm engaging in forward-thinking activities.

Final purchasing.  As the budget year winds down, it's a good idea to see what I'd still like to purchase and how I used my budget during the previous year.

Ask for a raise.  No, you can't do this every year but start priming the pump in December then enter into an honest and true dialogue with the decision makers in your organization. Be smart, be humble and remember that those that produce are in a better position to be rewarded.

Clean the office.  Few things connect on an emotional level than manual labor so apply that to your workspace.  Throw away, disinfect, go through the files.  Always ask yourself, "How does this space help me to do my best each day?"  If something isn't working for you, do something about it.

I recommend Yahoo's article today about some effective and fun ways to use Spring to your benefit.

For Reflection: What would be on your list of 3 important things you could do this Spring at work?

Quote for the road: “Spring is nature's way of saying, 'Let's party!'"  Robin Williams