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Multiple Calendars and GTD

If you’re reading this then I imagine you have at least a minimal interest in getting things done a little better – who knows maybe a whole lot. I consider myself as someone with more than a passing interest in personal productivity. I use both digital tools and paper for inputting to/maintaining my system of getting things done.
One tool that I have comparatively recently started to use with gusto is multiple calendars – specifically Google calendars but am sure the same applies to Outlook. I have been using digital calendars for a few years now and found that initially I merely ported my paper diary over to Google without really exploring what an online calendar had to offer.

It was a little time after linking up my Remember the Milk (RTM) account to Google that I paid attention to the fact that Google offered the option of having several calendars and also being able to give each a calendar a different colour. I now have several calendars – eg:
• Calendar: linked to my RTM account
• Calendar: for birthdays & anniversaries
• Calendar: for finances
• Calendar: for training sessions / coaching sessions / appointments / meetings
• Calendar: all else (default calendar)

One of the Google features that I love is being able to select one/some/all calendar(s) to view at a particular time. Viewing just one calendar allows me to focus on one particular area of my life. This picks up on David Allen’s GTD idea where he suggests keeping several lists rather than just one list of things to do.
Most of my calendars are pretty obvious but the one I have shared with friends and colleagues that they have expressed an interest in is the finances one. So much of what we do has a financial implication – eg, money to go out or come in. Having a separate calendar that documents this has been highly beneficial to my finances. Like the hopefully ubiquitous GTD list, having a finance calendar has helped to keep financial obligations – like stopping that Lovefilm free subscription after 3 months before I have to start paying – in my direct vision.

What’s the difference between putting things on a list as opposed to a calendar? For me, I find looking at my calendar less ‘stressful’ than looking at my lists – ie, I have more time to think before taking action if things are on my calendar whereas sometimes I just want to get things done and off my lists when I look at my lists. For me GTD is about making the best decisions about Next Actions and not about being busy all the time.
Who knows could multiple calendars do the same for you. I would love to know.

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_{If you’re looking for GTD training, our ‘How to Get Things Done’ workshops offer the basics on how to implement the ideas from David Allen’s GTD book, along with the best theory, tips and tricks from the likes of Peter Drucker, Tim Ferriss and many more! It’s available in-house to your company or also through our public workshops across the UK.

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Tags: getting things done, GTD, Multiple Calendars and GTD, Stuart McKenzie, Think Productive, time management, time management tips
Posted in Getting Things Done, GTD, Time Management, Work ideas | Comments Off

How to change the world with a bag of M&M’s

Guest-blogger and co-author of ‘Meeting Together’ Lois Graessle shares some thoughts on mess, meetings and what we can all do to transform our world. These thoughts were part of the keynote speech she gave for a Bucks New University graduation ceremony at which she received an honorary degree.

When I was growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, we had the chocolates called M&Ms at all of our family celebrations. Little did I know then that M&Ms would take on a whole new meaning in my adult and working life.

Today when I think of M&M’s, they stand for two things I’m on a mission to change: ‘Mess’ and ‘Meetings’.

The challenge
We have made ‘mess’ and ‘meetings’ into monsters, usually groaning at the mention of either. Yet they are what we do as human beings – we make messes and we meet to try to sort them out. We are not bad. That’s what we do.

I want to offer you a simple way to turn mess and meetings – and messy meetings – from monsters into a satisfying challenge. And I want to show you their link to world peace! So I am going to share with you a secret agenda for meetings, tell you a story – and give you a little bit of homework.

These are difficult times. Public services are in a particular mess. There is chaos and confusion and uncertainty in most services and in the policies about services.

In this situation, many of us are overwhelmed – we may feel hopeless, powerless, depressed and cynical.

Yet it is often in the most challenging times that we step up as our best as human beings. ‘Mess’ can be the raw material out of which we create new ways of living and working together. And the instant communities we call ‘meetings’ are where we come together to do this.

If we can transform a meeting, we can change a world.

The secret agenda
At the heart of what I have learned in all these years is the secret agenda, no matter what the official agenda. It is the agenda that will help you develop your own potential and find your distinctive contribution.

It will help you avoid a sense of powerlessness and cynicism in these circumstances – because I think they are waste of your precious life energy.

This agenda will help you with job interviews too: they are another kind of meeting!

This three- part secret agenda is a simple way to tap into your true power:

1 Meet yourself first.
Meetings are opportunities for your own personal and professional growth In preparing for a meeting – no matter what the business, face yourself, honestly. Ask yourself: what one thing can I do to develop my own potential and contribute effectively to this group?

2 Connect with someone.
Meetings are a gathering of people: connect first and only then get on with the business.

Before the meeting starts, connect with someone else. It could be a person you have been avoiding, someone who really irritates you – or simply a colleague you haven’t talked with for a while. Greet them.

3 Keep your promises.
After the meeting, reflect on what you learned about yourself. Keep your promises – to yourself and to the group.

This review is critical – your aim is to make this portable and secret agenda a habit for each and every meeting – no matter what the business.

The story
Let me tell you a story about how a colleague did this.

Tuyen was a refugee from Vietnam, one of the boat people. Her husband and child had died on that journey.

As a community worker for Refugee Action, she supported women and children. She had to go to many meetings with local authorities and health authorities. In one particular meeting, she told me, she always left feeling patronised and ignored and never able to get her point across. She felt intimated by several members of the group and humiliated that she was not doing right by the women and children she worked with.

Tuyen said she realised that these meetings were as new a culture to her as Great Britain had been – and that she needed to learn this other language and culture in order to know how to work more effectively.

This is what she did. She decided that before each meeting, she would go up and greet one of the people who was most intimidating. Doing this, she observed, let her move from fear to the strength of her dignity. This courage to face what intimidated her the most also made her more effective in the meeting.

She found her way.

Remember, this was the agenda she used:

- before the meeting, face yourself truthfully
- at the meeting, start by genuinely connecting with someone else
- afterwards, review what you learned about yourself and keep your promises.

Yesterday I was talking with a team leader and asked her what she found the most difficult thing about managing staff. Instantly she replied: “people who do their job properly – but without heart”.

Teachers and healers, your true agenda is people, their hearts and minds.

I hope this helps you.

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Tags: Lois Graessle, making meetings magic, meeting tips, Meeting Together, meetings, Think Productive
Posted in meetings, Productivity, reducing stress, Time Management | Comments Off

‘Your Sync has failed’

Variants on that error message haunt any of us who work with digital data and the progression towards systems which are truly “in sync” is painfully slow.

There are elements of our lives however that we can get in sync with subtle but tangible benefits to be had when we succeed.

Those elements are the digital and physical places (whether folders, files or whatever) where we keep data. By “data”, I mean information of any kind which is stored away for reference.

And “in sync” means that each of the relevant places use an identical method for organising that data – so the logic flows through seamlessly no matter where you look.

So your digital folder system matches your physical folder system matches your to-do system and when you have an item that needs to be put away for future use your brain does not have to think. It knows exactly where that item fits in your system no matter where your starting point is. This seems logical and a waste of time to bring to your attention – but I can guarantee that anyone I have ever spoken to about this has always had differences across their systems ranging from subtle to enormous. And when you drill down with them they start to realise the friction that causes them day to day.

In a corporate environment it will be slightly different – company wide data needs to comply with the dictated folder structure. Or information architecture as it may be known.

In that case you will have little choice but to make sense of it and use it to hold as much as you can – with little or no personal data items separate from it. As with anything else (calendars for example) you want to avoid having multiple places in which you hold stuff – it is just too confusing and causes fuzziness in your thinking and confusion when trying to search for and retrieve it.

And for those of you who argue that computers are faster and search is better- digital search is not a kop out here unless it allows for very discrete filtering and advanced search phrases. The sheer volume of data being stored and indexed now is overwhelming the capacity of technologists to intelligently utilise it and of designers to make search results usable to normal people.

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Tags: 'Your Sync has failed', getting things done, Keith Bohanna, management, Productivity, stress, Think Productive, tips
Posted in GTD, Productivity, sugar sync | Comments Off

Making Your Meetings Magic

We all spend too many hours in meetings.
The average UK employee spends over 14 hours a week in meetings, and half of these state that their time would have been spent more effectively on other areas of work.

Sadly we don’t always get the return we expect.
In a 2007 study by Bert van der Zwan (of internet company WebEx) 28% of middle managers said that reducing their number of face-to-face meetings would improve overall productivity at work, with a further 21% saying they would feel less stressed and 18% felt they would have a better work-life balance.

Now think how magnificent it would be if every single one of our meetings was powerful, purposeful and helped you make decisions which worked for you and for the common good.
Yes, every meeting is a priceless opportunity to surprise ourselves with just how much we can achieve together.

For Think Productive tips to help you on your way click Here for a PDF of our recent article in Just4SBMs magazine.

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Tags: GTD, gtd tips, lee cottier, making meetings magic, tips on meeting
Posted in Getting Things Done, GTD, meetings, Productivity, Running a business, Time Management | Comments Off

Email etiquette

Multiple studies of our email addiction agree – we’re spending far too much time just managing our inboxes, and not enough getting on with our “real work”.
For some of us that’s hundreds of incoming messages a day, and as much as 2 or 3 hours every working day spent just dealing with them.

All this is a massive drain on our attention, focus and energy, and a major barrier to being productive.
As well handling our own bulging inboxes, how we each write the emails we send out is a major factor in the effectiveness of team communication and productivity.
Making sure we attend to a few basic points of email etiquette is a good place to start.

For Think Productive’s favourite email etiquette tips, click Here for a PDF of our recent article in NAHPA magazine.

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Tags: Email, email etiquette, email tips, email training, email training uk, getting things done, GTD, gtd tips, gtd workshops, gtd workshops uk, lee cottier, Think Productive
Posted in Email, Getting Things Done, Productivity | Comments Off

Monetisation, or Write A Limerick

“Slow down and remember this: most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”

Ah, wise words from Tim Ferriss. And the point he is making is a good one. With our most precious resources – time and attention – we should be obsessively careful about how we spend them. The key is the impact generated versus the time spent.

I think a lot about the impact/time trade-off, and Tim Ferriss provides a useful prism through which we can look at our tasks. For example, if I have to make a series of business development calls that are very unlikely to lead to a sale, why would I bother making them at all? Even if they were very quick (low time impact), my time and attention would be better focussed elsewhere. No impact? Bin it.

Similarly, if I have a mega proposal to write – and it looks like it will take me three days from start to finish – even if I know that it will be well-received, why bother? If I can generate the same amount of “well-received” with a snappy, comprehensive, well-argued one-pager in forty minutes, why would I spend three days on it? Too much time? Bin it.

But there’s a third angle here, and that is monetisation. Say I am working on a task that requires very little time commitment, AND has a good chance of achieving a very high impact. Great, right? Well, only if I have monetised the activity. By which I mean that the vast proportion of the value created by my time and effort goes to me – or, at worst, my employer. If I have done a low-time-commitment, high-impact piece of work and my employer and I are no better off at the end of it, I might as well not have bothered. No monetisation? Bin it.

Don’t get me wrong; there are many activities I indulge in that are low impact and time-consuming and offer no economic pay-off of any kind – drumming along to Led Zep tracks, writing limericks, walking in the cemetery. These are all good, because they don’t come in a bag labelled “work”. My choice.

If you’re doing something that either has no impact or takes up a big chunk of your day, please stop. You’re wasting your time. And if you’re doing something that is low time commitment and high impact but is making someone else money – but not you or those that matter – REALLY please stop.

Go and write a limerick.

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Tags: GTD, how to get things done, Matthew Brown, Monetisation, or Write A Limerick, Think Productive, tips
Posted in Getting Things Done, GTD, Productivity | Comments Off

Next Action Thinking

Get organised. Get productive.

Imagine the scene. On the early morning train to London, still dark, everybody half asleep…….all except one poor woman who had decided that it was a great idea to leave the sorting out of all her receipts and paperwork until the morning she was due to see her accountant to finalise her accounts.

The lady was travelling with a colleague who was trying to help. There were piles of paper set out all over the small table, much to the annoyance of fellow passengers, who were becoming increasingly agitated by the two of them. It was clear from their stressful conversation that the goal of organising the paperwork before reaching Waterloo was never going to be achieved but that didn’t stop them trying. That was until the colleague knocked her flask of coffee over the paperwork.

Although nothing was said, you could feel the “that will teach them” vibes from everyone in the carriage.

I don’t know the final outcome of this story as I left the train whilst the coffee was being mopped up but my best guess is that neither their journey nor the appointment with the accountant was as productive as it could have been.

Although we may not all cause chaos on early morning trains we are probably all guilty of putting things off until we HAVE to do them.

Why do we do this?

Well it has something to do with our relationship with the task. If we don’t like something, we tend to avoid it. Maybe the task seems too big. Maybe we are unclear in our minds about how to get started.
If that is the case, ask yourself one simple question about the task.

“What is the next action?”

Once you have determined how you can make a start on moving a task forward you begin to gain momentum and the motivation to complete it…..ahead of any deadlines.
Follow this simple formula and you’ll be amazed by how much you can achieve.
I’m sure our friend on the train wished she had!

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Tags: getting things done, GTD, Next Action Thinking, Russell Caird, stress, tips
Posted in Getting Things Done, GTD, Productivity, Time Management | Comments Off

September’s productivity tips – Making Meetings Magic!

Have you ever sat in a meeting and wondered a) what on earth you were doing there and b) whether there was any way to escape and find something more useful to do with your time?
We’ve all been there. So what can we do to change this? Well, here are five quick tips to improve your meetings and in turn, improve your productivity!

Skip Meetings!

The truth is, meetings seem to the organiser like a “free” activity, whereas in reality, meetings are one of the costliest business activities there are. They not only cost our organisations money, but they rob us of our attention. Tim Ferriss has a great take on this in his book “The 4- Hour Work Week” where he suggests a range of cheeky tactics to avoid meetings. He suggests doing everything possible to skip those two hour update meetings and simply read the minutes or catch a quick update from a colleague. Cheating is OK! Tim’s general approach to productivity is pretty ruthless and not for everyone, but here he is talking about the book.

Purpose

Think about the last few meetings you attended. At each of those meetings, do you remember the chair reminding people of the purpose of the meeting at the very beginning and revisiting that purpose at the end? Probably not! Purpose is critical, and meetings (usually) need leadership, so don’t be afraid to be the one clarifying the purpose beforehand or drawing people back to it as the meeting goes on.

Huddle

2 hour update meetings are long, boring and inefficient, whereas if you break that same update communication into a structured 15 minutes a day, you’ll actually start to see amazing results from relentless alignment to the key numbers and key questions in your team or in your company. At Think Productive, we developed a daily huddle based on the principles from Verne Harnish’s excellent book “Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits”. Here’s me explaining more.

Being prepared

If you’re the one running a meeting, you need to ensure you’ve covered all the bases. Our meetings magician, Martin Farrell, runs meetings with the UN Climate Change Secretariat, the Cabinet Office and a range of international organisations. Here he is talking about his 5P’s+1 framework, which helps keep everything on track.

Follow through!

If you’re running a meeting, try to focus your time and energy using the 40-20-40 approach: spend 40% of your focus on the preparation, 20% on the session itself and 40% on productive follow-through, holding people to account and ensuring that agreements are kept-to. We usually focus most of our energy on the meeting itself, and miss the two most important stages. The 40-20-40 approach is from the excellent book, Meeting together.

Hope these tips help you make your Meetings Magic!

Free- Productive! Magazine

Our friend Michael at Nozbe is also the head honcho over at Productive! Magazine, for which I’m a guest contributor. You can download the magazine for free here and there’s also a rather beautiful iPad app as well – check it out!

Bring a Productivity Ninja to sort out your office!

We’d love to talk to you about our in-house workshops: Getting Your Inbox to Zero, Email Etiquette, How to Get Things Done, Making Meetings Magic, Smells Like Team Spirit & How to be a Productivity Ninja.

Or come along to one of our public workshops…

Click on the relevant date below to book your place now – with our new 3 tiered pricing system. Fair, transparent and a fantastic return on investment.

The South West

Bristol:
Friday, 18th November

The South East

London:
Tuesday, 27th September
Friday, 11th November
2012 London dates

The Midlands and the North

Birmingham:
Friday, 2nd December

Have a playful, productive month and we’ll see you in October!

Tags: getting things done, Graham Allcott, GTD, gtd tips, meeting tips, meeting workshops, meetings, Productivity, productivity tips, September's productivity tips - Making Meetings Magic!, Think Productive, time management tips
Posted in Email, Getting Things Done, GTD, Productivity, Time Management, Workflow | Comments Off

Wanted: iPhone app developer

We want an iPhone app developer to help us change the face of iPhone and iPad productivity!
Could you help us?
Here at Think Productive we’ve got what we think is a great idea to build an influential app that could revolutionise the productivity app space, as well as have wider uses (and no, it’s NOT just another list manager, as we feel there are enough decent ones out there already).

We’re looking for a partner who can help us build it. We don’t have a budget to pay you, but we envisage a 50-50 partnership on an app that will most likely have a paid version as well as a lite version and we’ll then promote it via our workshops, website and social media. We don’t know much about developing apps, but the functionality should be very straightforward (certainly closer to building a countdown timer than trying to build the next Evernote!).

Are you interested in collaborating with us? Email lisa@thinkproductive.co.uk with a bit about your background (track record preferred, but we’re equally willing to work with intelligent newbies who can demonstrate they know what they’re doing!). We’d prefer to work with someone who we can meet face to face through the process – there’s also desk space in our office in Brighton if needed!

Tags: apps, brighton, Graham Allcott, iPad, iPhone app developer, IPhone apps, Productivity, Think Productive, time managment, Wanted: iPhone app developer
Posted in Getting Things Done, GTD, Productivity, Time Management, Work ideas | Comments Off

GTD vs. Inbox Zero

In our “Beyond GTD” series, Think Productive’s Productivity Ninjas go beyond the basics and discuss some of the more advanced-level tips and tricks in implementing productivity systems such as David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD).

Here, our South West Ninja, Lee Cottier talks with Graham Allcott about the relationship between GTD and one of the other commonly discussed productivity approaches, Inbox Zero.

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Tags: getting things done, Graham Allcott, GTD, Inbox Zero, lee cottier, Productivity, Think Productive
Posted in GTD, Productivity, Work ideas | Comments Off

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