Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Whip your office into shape

Hot off the presses: My friend Ariane Benefit of the Neat & Simple Living blog has just published the Neat & Simple Guide to Organizing Your Office. I bought and downloaded it last week (she's offering a special introductory price of $12.95 through February 1) and read it on the plane the other day.

If you're struggling with clutter and organizational challenges in your office, this guide was meant for you. You'll be led through some background about chronic disorganization, motivations for getting more organized, and why you may be "stuck" in a messy situation.

Organize to fit your style

Ariane takes you through an analysis of various working, thinking, and organizing "styles" and discusses how to tailor your organizational scheme to better support your own style. She provides a step-by-step guide to analyzing and dealing with the clutter in your workspace. Another useful section of the guide provides examples of various kinds of organizing tools (bins, shelves, stands, etc.) and discusses the merits and potential pitfalls of each tool. I found this section to be valuable and thought-provoking.

She also offers quite a collection of tips for filing, electronic organization, reinforcing and maintaining you systems, and other hints to help you achieve and maintain success in your quest for organization.

And if you still feel overwhelmed after reading the book, you may need professional (organizational) help. If so, Ariane has a brief discussion on selecting a professional organizer to get you on track.

One last comment on this guide: it just feels organized. It's loaded with useful pictures -- and the layout, graphics, and flow of the book are awesome.

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New tools for resolutions

Well, we all know that this is the time of year for New Year's Resolutions, and we also know that a lot of people's resolutions don't get very far. With that in mind, some friends of mine have come up with some tools to help with this. I'd like to share them with you.

Remarkable Resolutions

The first tool is from Kevin Eikenberry, and it's a free guide to creating Remarkable Resolutions. This is a a kind of "workshop in a box" approach, guiding you through 26 thought-provoking questions designed to help you achieve greate clarity and depth in your resolutions.

I say it's like a workshop, because the document is actually a workbook designed so that you can print it out and write our your thoughts and answers in the book. You can then use the workbook throughout the year to remind you what you identified as important, which things you want to achieve, etc. It's generally known that writing things down helps make ideas more "real" in your brain, and I found that writing my answers down also felt good - like I was taking concrete steps to plan for 2008.

Kevin's also sharing his answers and thoughts on these questions at his blog. Incidentally, Kevin is the author of "Remarkable Leadership" which I'm reading right now. It is an excellent book - I'll be reviewing it soon.

Aim for the Goal Post

Keith Ferrazzi (author of "Never Eat Alone") is also adding to the toolbox. He suggests getting some skin in the game by making your commitment public, and choosing three friends to serve as your accountability buddies. Knowing they are watching you will help you to stick to and reach your goals - he calls it "peer-to-peer pressure". Your friends can cheer you on and send you inspirational songs and helpful website links.

To help keep you moving toward your goals, Keith and his team have developed a Facebook application called "Goal Post." It is an easy and visual way to set your goals, choose your accountability buddies and keep track of your progress.

To get started, login to Facebook (or register if you aren't Facing already) and then search for the "Goal Post" application.

Some of you may know that I turned off my Facebook account a while back because I found it to be a little needy in terms of how much attention it expected me to pay to it. This Goal Post application is tempting me to reactivate... If you try out Keith's tool, let me know how it goes.

Both of these approaches will be useful in getting you to go beyond thinking about what you want to do, and into writing things down and developing a plan - and I've heard stats that most people don't have written goals. If you're in that club, maybe these tools will help you take that important step toward success.

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Hit the GTD mother lode

I was just checking out a tremendous list of GTD resources at Bootstrapper: "The GTD Resource Motherload: 100+ Links." There are 103 links there - I haven't been through them all yet, but have found a few gems already so I wanted to share this resource with you.


A few of my favorites:


99. A Roadmap to Spectacular GTD Failure: This article tells readers what NOT to do if you want to implement a successful GTD system.
This includes such gems as the following (which would be funnier if it didn't hit so close to home:


"Do your weekly review when you're damn good and ready - Make sure to never even attempt to schedule a regular time for your weekly review. Friday afternoon, Saturday night, Wednesday during lunch. You're a busy person with a dynamic life - you clearly can't be expected to block out 1-2 hours per week!"

67. GTD-Tools.com: GTD-Tools.com publishes articles and reviews of the "best GTD tools and productivity software tips." Readers can also catch up on the latest GTD-related news.
Visually, this is a bit busy but it contains some awesome info!


52. Time Management, Simplified: This post teaches readers "how to be productive with no worries" by simplifying the GTD system so that it works for your life.
I really like this "in a nutshell" summary of the essence of GTD.


These three samples are just barely scratching the surface - go check out the other 100 GTD resources!



Backup a-plenty

I was chatting with a friend of mine about data backup this week and he mentioned he'd seen my previous write-up about Mozy, which I use (and love) for data backup at home. What he didn't realize was that Mozy is only $4.95 per month for UNLIMITED data backup (he thought you had to pay based on the data volume). It's a good deal and very reliable.

By the way - I got a notification from Mozy the other day with two pieces of good news:

  • they are now part of megacorp EMC so they will not be going anywhere soon; and
  • they have some coupon codes that will get you a discount in December (I just signed up my wife's new computer using the discount).

To get the 10% discount, click this link, then use the codes for December on the signup page: DECEMBER gets you 10% off of an annual subscription to Mozy, and DECEMBERY gets you 10% off of a 2-year Mozy subscription (which is already cheaper on a per-year cost basis).

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Learn a 5-Step Weekly Review: You’ll love it.

I mentioned time auditing in my last post and in the past I've written about unplanned work's dastardly effects on productivity, and the power of time auditing (see "Related items" at the end of this post for links) . As I do from time to time, I have recently caught myself wondering, "Where does the time go?" The time is upon me again, so I'm starting another "time audit" using a traditional approach to time auditing described in Neil Fiore's classic "The Now Habit," (reviewed here).

If you're interested in time auditing, here are some thoughts that may help.

Time Auditing basics

Time auditing is a very simple thing to do, but it requires some discipline. Here are some tips:

  • Plan to stick with the time audit for at least a week. Two weeks is ideal.
  • Decide whether you want to track your time only at work, or all the time (i.e. work and personal). The "whole life" time audit is very powerful, but is a lot more work.
  • Decide how you will record your time - you can keep a written list, or record your activities electronically.
    • For best results, pick a method that allows you to record your activities all the time. The more complicated your method, the less likely you are to do it - so make it fast and simple.
      • I suggest paper for the "whole life" audit, since you can carry a small notebook around with you all the time and record your whole day's activities. Obviously, the paper approach is also good for "work only" audits.
      • You can record things on your computer, if that enables you to track everything you do.
        • If you spend all your time at your computer, you might try this free, web-based time tracking tool. Or, just keep a Word doc open and create a running list of activities in a document.
      • A PDA can work, if you find an easy way to track your time. I tried this method once and abandoned it - I found it to be difficult due to the time required to note times, write out.
  • Find a way to remind yourself to record your tasks, particularly in the beginning. I sometimes use the countdown timer on my watch by setting it to go off every 20 minutes to I can write down what I've been doing since the last time it beeped. After a couple of days, I don't really need the timer any more.
  • Be fairly detailed in recording your activities, particularly about recording when you change tasks - the amount of time you spend on a particular task will be important when you review the log, as will tracking how often you change from one activity to another. Track things like email, reading blogs and feeds, web surfing, making phone calls, daydreaming, goofing off, eating, going to the bathroom, getting coffee, etc.

For businesses, auditing is easy if they have merchant accounts set up to accept credit cards as a form of payment from their customers. Our credit card services keep a log of all your transactions and make auditing easier than ever!

Analyze your logs

  • At the end of a week, go through and tally up how much time you spent on specific categories of activities. When you review your logs, the categories will "suggest" themselves, but try to lump activities into as few buckets as possible. For example, you might have categories like:
    • AccountingbookProcrastinating / goofing off
    • Phone calls
    • Eating
    • Project work
    • Meetings
    • Commuting
    • etc.
  • Figure out which categories take up the largest percentage of your time, then do more detailed analysis of those categories. This is particularly useful for categories that are "time wasters" or unproductive for you.

Learn stuff

  • How does what you actually did compare to what you intended to do (or what you thought you did)?
  • What bad habits are wasting your time?
  • What interruptions are making you unproductive?
  • What habits are working well?
  • What changes can you make to get rid of your unproductive aspects, while increasing or nurturing your productive activities?
  • What negative-energy activities can you eliminate?
  • Are you spending enough time on important activities like:
    • important tasks & projects
    • managing up
    • managing down
    • time with your family
    • time with your boss
    • time learning and developing your skills
    • exercising

You may learn some very useful things during a personal time audit - I highly recommend it. By the way - if you have personal time audit tips of your own, please share them!

Related links:

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