Archives for December 31, 2008

There are a lot of reasons people don’t keep their new year’s resolutions, but I’m going to mention two that I haven’t heard many people think about.

Two of the biggest reasons people don’t keep their new year’s resolutions are:

They don’t know where to write them down.

They don’t know how they integrate with their other goals.

It is not sufficient to simply say “write down your resolutions.” If you don’t know where to write them down, that’s not helpful because you’ll write them down and then forget about them.

If you write your goals down in a Word document, for example, how are you going to remember to look at it? Or if you write them down on a piece of paper, where do you put that paper so you can review it regularly?

The other problem is: So you have these 3 new resolutions for the year. But what about the 30 other things you have going on in your life? How do you keep those 3 resolutions in mind so that they aren’t crowded out by everything else you have going on? And what about the 5 other goals you have which aren’t new year’s resolutions, but are just as important (or more so)?

In other words, your new year’s resolutions need to fit clearly within the wider context of your whole life. If you don’t see where they fit in relation to all of your other priorities, it is easy for them to simply turn into vague intentions.

This relates to the problem of where to write them down. The reason people don’t know where to write them down is that they don’t know how they fit into the wider context of their whole life.

Which takes us to the importance of a productivity system.

Your new year’s resolutions are really goals. Don’t let the term “resolution” throw you off. These are goals. Therefore, they need to be kept with any other goals you might have and they are accomplished in the same way: by reviewing them regularly, and breaking them down into “next actions” and/or “projects” to keep the ball rolling.

In other words, you need to put your new year’s resolutions (goals) into a trusted system that you review regularly. By making them a part of a “system,” your goals aren’t just a random document filed some where. Rather, it is kept along with all the other outcomes you are seeking to obtain and actions you need to take. This integrates it with everything else that you have going on, and makes it easy to review them.

I thought about going into detail on how to do this, but that risks too much detail at this point. If you are using Outlook or OmniFocus or something like that to manage your projects and next actions, then it’s simple: Just create another level called “Goals,” and put your goals (which includes new year’s resolutions) in there. Then review your goals regularly along with your projects and next actions.

If you use a paper planner, then just make sure that you have a “Goals” section in there, put your resolutions in there along with any other goals, and make sure to review it regularly (in the GTD system, that’s the weekly review).

If you don’t use any software or a planner to manage your life, then you could start simple by just creating a Word document. List your goals, projects, and next actions (creating a separate heading for each) and then maybe put it on your desktop so you can easily open it every day. (Usually I don’t recommend putting things on your desktop, but when starting out here this would be the main exception.)

There is so much more that could be said: how to organize goals, how to word them, how to break them down appropriately into projects. But takes us beyond the point of the post right now.

In sum, if you want to accomplish your new year’s resolutions, you need to not simply “write them down,” but write them down in a place that you review regularly and which reflects the wider context of your whole life.

In the last post we talked about why productivity routines are necessary and then discussed the daily routines that I recommend. But daily routines are not the only type of routines you need to have. There are also weekly, monthly, quarter, and yearly routines. In this post we will cover weekly routines.

One quick aside before diving in: Again, I’m only talking about productivity routines here. There are other types of routines you can also use this system to build into your life. There are lots of possibilities that are opened up by creating a system for managing your recurring actions and routines.

Daily Routines Pertain to Your Job, Weekly Routines Pertain to Your Personal Work

To begin, a quick word on the nature of weekly routines versus the nature of daily routines.

My weekly routines pertain almost exclusively to my ordinary life as opposed to work life. Most of my daily routines, on the other hand, pertain to my work life. I have found that balance to be very helpful.

It is not that I don’t do any household stuff or personal work during the week (far, far from it actually), but I have segmented my repeating tasks into a once a week routine that I do every Saturday morning. This allows me to be more free during the rest of the week to do other actions and projects, or just relax and play with my kids.

Also note that when I talk about routines here, I’m not counting here things like “do the dishes,” “set the table,” “snow blow the driveway” because those are the types of things that don’t need to go on a list. They are event-triggered (“we need to have supper, let’s set the table”), so a list isn’t needed. There are lots of things like that every day that I also do (and thank you, Heidi, for the far longer list of things that you do every day to keep things running well!). I’m talking here about non-event-triggered stuff: the stuff which if you don’t remember to do, won’t get done.

Note also, and very significantly, if you are a stay-at-home mom (or stay-at-home dad), you may have many personal and household routines that are indeed daily. It would not be possible to segment all of your routines into a Saturday morning. In that case, those things would be built into your daily routines because managing the household is your job.

The Weekly Routines You Should Have (Or, One Example of Weekly Routines)

Everyone is going to have different routines here. Here is what I do to make sure I “cover all my bases” each week and make sure things aren’t slipping through the cracks:

1. Process personal inbox (i.e., the one at home — yes, you should have an inbox at home, not just work).
2. Process personal email. I actually do this every day as part of my daily routines. But if you prefer to think about your personal email less than your work email, you can build a different routine: every other day, or every week.
3. Process notes I’ve jotted down to myself and put into my inbox at home.
4. Process voice notes.
5. Process OmniFocus in.
6. Enter receipts into Quicken (OK, you may not use Quicken, but however you keep track of your checking account and other balances, I recommend doing it in your weekly routines).
7. Reconcile bank statements (if any) and process other financial stuff.
8. Write check for offering.
9. Give allowance to kids.
10. Distribute out-box.

Some of this is self-explanatory: For example, have an inbox at home as well as work, and process that home inbox at least once a week. More if you prefer.

I talked about voice notes in the previous post on daily routines, as well as jotting notes to yourself on paper when you have an idea you can’t act on right away. The notes that you jot on paper go into your inbox. Then, when processing your inbox, it’s useful to group those into a pile and create the next actions from them all together. For voice notes I use a program on my iPhone to collect action items I think of when I’m away from my computer or paper.

Entering receipts into Quicken is the way we keep track of our account balances. You can also just have that all downloaded into Quicken, but I’ve never been able to get that working. It’s not hard, anyway, just to type in what we’ve spent and keep our account balances current.

When I receive a bank or credit card statement, I put it in a pending file called “financial to enter.” Then on Saturday mornings when I get to that task, I go to that folder and, if I received a bank or credit card statement that week, I take it out and reconcile it in Quicken. If I receive a check in the mail I also put it into this file. I usually can’t just go to the bank right when I open the mail, but I don’t want to leave it to memory to cash the check, either. So I put it in my “financial to enter” file and take care of it with my routines on Saturday.

I give my kids their allowance because I have kids. If you don’t have kids, or they are grown up, then obviously you can skip that one! What’s noteworthy here, perhaps, is that I actually put this into my routine. This might seem like something to “just remember.” But again, I don’t like just  having to remember stuff because (1) I won’t remember it and (2) I don’t like having to sort through my mind to recall what I have to do that day. I write it down, get through it, and then I’m done and can focus on other things.

Same with writing the check for our offering at church. I don’t want to just leave it to chance to remember to do that Sunday morning. So I build it into this weekly routine along with the other financial stuff. (If you do direct withdrawal, you don’t need to worry about this.)

In regard to distributing your out-box: As you go through your inbox, there is often stuff that needs to go somewhere else in your house. Or you need to give it to your wife or husband or a roommate. It’s not efficient to get up and take it where it needs to go right away. So I start a pile for this stuff. Then, when I’m done with everything, I take that stuff where it needs to go.

I also handle stuff that needs to be filed in that way. I group it together with my other “out” stuff, and then file it all in a batch after distributing the other out-box stuff. I find it inefficient to file each document needing filing as I come across it in my inbox.

Bi-Weekly Routines

There are some tasks that don’t need to be done every week. Some of those are monthly, quarterly, and yearly tasks — which I’ll also be posting on. But some of them are in between weekly and monthly. The key with those is to make them hit on Saturdays as well.

This is important, so I’ll say it again: You want these other routines to hit on the same day that you do your weekly routines so that you only have one day on which you have to think “I have to do some routine tasks today.” Make everything hit the same day. (This applies to monthly, quarterly and yearly tasks as well as the bi-weekly routines — make them hit on Saturday also, so that you just do them right along with your weekly routines.)

Here are some bi-weekly and every-three-week routines I have:

1. Pay bills (anything that is not automatic; this comes up in my action calendar every two weeks).
2. Pay mortgage (I single this out because the consequences of missing a payment would be so dire).
3. Check softener salt (for our water softener).
4. Review digital pictures. Heidi takes them off the camera, and if I don’t have this task months might go by before I remember to look at our latest pictures.
5. Review notes on this or that. (If I take notes on a book that I want to remember very well, I’ll create a repeating task to review them every few weeks for a while.)

The Broader Principle Here

Everyone will have different tasks here, but the key principle to see is that you don’t have to leave things to chance. When there is something that needs to be done regularly, build it into your routine. And the way to do that is by having a task list that is designated specifically to hold all of your repeating tasks. Anything that needs to be done on a schedule goes in here, and the result is that it is easy to find and it will actually get done.

The usefulness of this is very large. Take my water softener. It needs to be filled with salt about every 3-4 weeks. I’m not going to remember to do that. But I don’t want to wait until the salt is all gone and the water becomes hard to realize it needs to be filled. So I just created “check softener salt” as an every-three-week task in my action calendar. It comes up on Saturday, when I’m doing my other routines, so it doesn’t get in the way but does get easily done.

Speaking of household appliances, this concept of an action calendar is far more effective (to me, at least) than the other way I’ve seen. For example, on the furnace filter that I just bought it came with a sticker that you can put on the furnace telling you when you changed the filter last.

That is not helpful. Am I just going to happen to be walking around in my furnace room, at just the right time, to realize that my furnace filter is due for being changed? That is not going to work.

Even things that aren’t repeating, but are time-based, can go into the action calendar. For example, our mortgage was just sold to some other company. The actual effective date of the change is January 1. But I wanted to send my payment in during December so that I get the interest tax deduction for that payment this year rather than next. Yet I wasn’t going to send it to the old company when they are only holding the mortgage for another few days, risking that a big mix-up is created. But the new company could also be confused by receiving the payment before the change in ownership.

Maybe I just shouldn’t think to that level of detail! But here’s what I did: I sent the payment to the new company to arrive the last week of December, but then created an action to come up the first Saturday in January to follow-up and make sure the company processed it, even though they received it before the actual change. Without my action calendar, it would have been hard (or, at least annoying) to remember to check up on that.

And again, I group these all onto  Saturday morning because I find that when I get home in the evening, the last thing that I want to do is look at my action calendar and see three things that I need to do. By grouping them onto Saturday mornings, they actually get done.

Future Posts

Now we’ve covered daily routines and weekly routines. Coming up we’ll cover monthly routines, quarterly routines, and yearly routines.

With the new year, it is a good time to establish new routines and create new goals. This next series of posts is going to focus on routines. Specifically, it is going to focus on productivity routines. (So these are not going to be all of the routines I recommend, just the ones pertaining to productivity.)

The Importance of Routines

To begin, a word on the importance of routines. In a nutshell, routines are necessary to keep the decks clear. If you don’t have them, you will be overwhelmed by all of the tasks that build up. Further, you will be handling many tasks in a less efficient, piecemeal fashion.

I started to notice early on that certain patterns would emerge in my next actions. There were certain things that just kept coming back again and again. These are the tasks that benefit from routines.

It wasn’t efficient to handle each of these kinds of tasks individually as they came up. That felt like taking the garbage out each time you put a new piece of trash in it. Instead, what you do with the trash is let it build up and then take it out once a week. That’s a very basic and simple concept when it comes to taking out the garbage, and the same concept applies to many of our next actions. The ones that keep coming back should be done according to a routine, rather than simply when it strikes you.

The concept of routines is not foreign to GTD. The weekly review is an example of a routine that is fundamental to the system. What I’m doing is taking the concept of routines and applying it more specifically at the next action level so that we can get a better handle on all these things that keep coming back at us.

The Daily Routines You Need to Have

OK, that sounds pretty direct. “The daily routines you need to have.” I’m sure that you will take these and tweak them as needed. What I really mean is: “The daily productivity routines I have, which have been working very well for me, and which I recommend for your consideration.”

Here they are:

Process your email

Process your other inboxes. This includes your physical inbox, voice mail, physical notes, and voice notes (if you do them, which I recommend).

Review your RSS feeds and the web.

Blog.

Plan your day.

How You Should Order Your Routines

Technically, “plan your day” should be first because it is most important. And it helps ensure that you come at your day proactively rather than reactively.

But I find it hard to plan my day when there are a bunch of unknowns in my email and other inboxes that could affect how I want to shape the day. So it is most practical for me at this point to plan my day last. However, I recognize that planning your day first is the true “ideal state.”

Planning your day last, however, is not a big risk as long as you haven’t let a zillion things build up in the previous routines. If you have, it’s going to take you forever to get through them and your day will be gone before you can plan it intentionally. This goes to the importance of doing these routines every day.

Do Them Every Week Day

If you do these routines every week day, they will be manageable. It will take you probably, on average, about an hour a day to get through them. (I’ve heard David Allen also state that the average knowledge worker should expect to have to take about an hour a day processing new input, which is what most of these routines concern).

If you get really on top of things, some days it will take only about 20 minutes. That’s another ideal, but it’s great to shoot for. The more consistently you do them, the less you will have to do for them each day, and you will gain momentum.

A word on exceptions: There are seasons in which you simply will not be able to do these every day. I’ve been in one of those seasons for the last couple of months because we’ve had some huge, huge projects going on that eat up a lot of time (selling a house, buying a house, moving, getting moved in, etc.). I don’t find that super fun, but sometimes it’s necessary. In those cases, still try for at least 3 times a week, and then get back to normal as soon as possible.

What is Involved in These Routines

Here is what each of these routines consists of.

Process Your Email

Get your email inbox to zero. Then, keep checking it and getting it back to zero every hour throughout the day if you can (or every four hours), but at least zero it out once a day.

A recent book on productivity was called Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work. The concept was that the morning is most people’s best time, so use it for project work and not email.

I’ve tried that, but I just find it more efficient to do all my routines at once. I like to start the day with my decks clear, including email. I don’t like to do 4 out of 5 routines right away, and then save the 5th for some later time. I like getting everything out of the way. But I don’t like spending my whole morning on email. My aim is to get it cleared in about 30 minutes (or less, which is possible if I kept up with it every hour or four the day before).

Process Your Other Inboxes

Your email inbox is not your only inbox. There are at least three others:

1. Physical inbox
2. Voice mail
3. Voice notes

You may have additional inboxes beyond that. Anything that “collects” unprocessed stuff is an inbox and needs to be emptied regularly. Build it into your routines so that it isn’t nagging at you to do “when I get to it.”

Your physical inbox is where you put stuff that you receive physically and need to figure out what to do with. The mail is a big item here.

But don’t think that your inbox is just a place for other people to give you stuff. I find that I am the one who puts the most stuff into my inbox. I’m often jotting down notes and obtaining all sorts of other stuff that I need to handle, and I just put it all into my inbox to process. Collect the items throughout the day so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing every time something new comes up, and process them each morning so that stuff doesn’t “expire” as it waits on your desk.

Process any new voice mails in the morning, and then keep going with this throughout the day as new voice mails come.

When I’m away from my computer or the ability to easily write things down, I have an app on my iPhone (QuickVoice, which maybe I’ll blog on later) that allows you to easily create voice recordings. So, for example, if I’m driving and have an idea of something I need to do, I’ll record a voice note. Again, you don’t want to just let these sit there. So I build it into my routine to empty these out every morning and process them into actions.

In listing the routines above, I also listed processing physical notes as something done here. These are ideas I have which I write down on paper when I’m at my desk (because I want to get them off my mind and then get back to what I was doing), and then toss in my inbox. Technically, these are processed as a part of processing the inbox. But if I get a lot of them, I usually separate them out when doing my inbox so that I can handle them all as a group.

Review Your RSS and the Web

It’s good to make reviewing your RSS reader something you intentionally do right at the start of the day (and then continue reviewing throughout the day as needeed). I suppose this routine is not strictly necessary if it works very well for you to just review your reader as it strikes. I just like getting the lay of the land in a systematic, concentrated way right along with my other routines for the day.

Blog

I don’t want to have it on my mind as some vague notion that I “have to write a blog post today.” That isn’t really in line with the GTD principle of getting everything off your mind. But creating a new action afresh each day called “write blog post” is not the most efficient thing to do. So I wrote it into my routine so that I didn’t have to keep writing it down.

So my aim is to write a post each morning at least (which clearly doesn’t always happen yet if I’m really busy). Then, throughout the day I’ll write other posts that spontaneously come to mind. So this combines both the planned and spontaneous side of things.

Plan Your Day

There is actually a whole process here that deserves a post of its own. I’ll be brief here: Basically, review your current projects list and calendar and identify anything you absolutely have to do that day. Write those down on your next action list for the day (more on the idea of a “next action list for the day” later).

Then consult with your mind and ask “what would be the three most important things I could do today?” This is the most important part. You don’t just want to do what you “have to” do that day (prior paragraph), but also should do three things that aren’t necessarily urgent, but are important and will advance your goals and the lives of others. These are your three “most important tasks” for the day. Define these and put them on your list for the day as well. And get them done.

If this sounds like a daily to-do list, which the GTD approach does not advocate, it is. I do believe in daily to-do lists. Just not the way we traditionally think of them. That’s something else I’ll also need to write more on later.

Where to Keep These

To close, the last question is: “Where do you keep this list of routines?” They need to be written down — don’t just keep them in your head. You have a couple of options here.

First, you could just write them down on a checklist that you keep in a “checklists” section of your planning program (if you use Outlook, the “Notes” section is your checklists section; if you use OmniFocus, you can create a folder called “Checklists” and keep this and other checklists there). Or, if you are paper-based, create this as a sheet in your planner, and put it in a section called “checklists” or somewhere that works for you.

Second, you could create them as a repeating task list. I actually have a whole category of tasks just for my routines (since there are more than just daily routines). I call it the “action calendar” and I keep it separate from my other next actions list. All of my repeating tasks go into my action calendar. And each time one is checked off, of course, it automatically recreates at the interval specified.

The concept of repeating tasks in a productivity application is nothing new and you’ve probably been doing it for a long time. What is new, perhaps, is that I would recommend keeping all of your repeating tasks together in one category (called “action calendar”). Then you have just one place to go to in order to see what routines are active for the day. I find that I really, really don’t like having time-based actions mixed in with my “as soon as you can” next actions (which I call “free actions”).

Coming up I’ll be talking about weekly routines, monthly routines, and yearly routines.