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.

We all know that the purpose of any holiday is to celebrate or acknowledge that which the holiday is about. Thanksgiving is a time to express our thankfulness, Christmas is about celebrating Christ’s birth, and so forth.

So in one sense, the idea of “how to use a holiday” sounds a bit wrong. But here’s the twist: By “holiday” here I mean not only the actual day of a holiday, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, but also the day after and day before, along with any accompanying weekends.

There is a great opportunity here when you think more broadly. If you think strategically about the time around a holiday as well as the holiday itself, you can make these times quite interesting.

In fact, using the time around holidays well is one of the great secrets to productivity. It is a secret to productivity both in that it is a time that can be leveraged for “bonus” productivity and in that it is a time to more fully recharge, with the result that being more rested will make you more effective when things are back to normal.

Productivity, of course, isn’t the main aim. But it’s easy, for me at least, to look at days off as an opportunity to get more stuff done. And around the holidays, you have more days off than normal. So that has forced me to give thought to how to use this extra time not simply as a way to get more things done, but as a way to recharge in a broader sense — and figure out how to make the things that I do get done in this time uniquely productive.

In this broader sense, there are four purposes to holidays and the time around them:

1. Develop relationships (new and existing)
2. Rest
3. Re productive in ways that you otherwise wouldn’t be
4. Do something really interesting

These four purposes reveal four ways to make the most of the time around a holiday so that you truly can recharge, have develop relationships, serve others, and get some unique and/or truly creative things done. The key is that, for each day around and including the holiday, you need to define in advance at most two of the above purposes for the day and stick to that agenda exclusively.

1. Spend the day with family and friends

This is what you do with the holiday itself, or the day that you’ve designated to get together to celebrate. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and so forth are best spent getting together with family and friends.

However, this usually doesn’t take up the whole day. How do you think about the rest of your time on these days?

If you don’t think about that question, you risk failing to make the most of the day. For when your work is just a laptop computer away, it can be very tempting to mix working in with the rest of the day in an ad hoc, spontaneous way. This is fatal. Avoid this at all costs. I mention below that work is my second favorite thing to do on a day off, but this is not the type of thing that I mean. On a holiday, you have to unplug completely from your standard work (unless, of course, you really are required to work on the holiday — which is the one exception to mixing regular work with these four strategies).

So in addition to spending time with family and friends, you need to pick an additional purpose to govern your day and the time when you are not at any get together. Usually the best one here is to do nothing or do something interesting (which also work very well in themselves on the days surrounding the holiday).

2. Do literally nothing

This is what I’ve done on New Year’s Day for the last few years: absolutely nothing. That means no work, or anything like it — not even fun work. Only things that are purely discretionary. This is especially difficult for me because of the fact that work is actually my second favorite thing to do on a day off. That’s actually why I started doing this: I realized I need to be extra-intentional to take a complete break from things. New Year’s Day isn’t the only complete day off I take of course, but on that day I try to take things to an extreme.

So on New Year’s Day, often we will watch movies (and football) all day long, play games, and things like that. Usually I really dislike watching movies or TV in the afternoon, but this day is an exception. In our old house we used to have a fireplace that made this even more fun. Just doing nothing is a great way to relax from time to time. “Nothing” doesn’t mean just sitting around; it really just means: no work, even work that you really want to do and enjoy doing.

When combining this strategy with a holiday where you are getting together with people, such as for Christmas, that means not catching up on email or anything like that when you get home. You can only do things like play with your kids, play a game as a family, watch a movie, or something like that.

3. Work, and do something you would never have time for otherwise

The reason work is my second favorite thing to do on a day off (the first is spend time with my wife and kids) is because it is an opportunity to get to some of the tasks that are really interesting, but which you wouldn’t otherwise have time for.

For example, sometimes I’ll take a day off and update my goals for the year or tweak my filing system. I admit, that probably sounds pretty boring to many people (a whole day on filing? — though now that I know how to do it, and I don’t do that anymore). But it makes the rest of my “regular work” much more effective.

Or take last night. We drove down to my wife’s family and got there about 8:30. I wasn’t tired when everyone else went to bed, so I stayed up figuring out some new ways to organize my iTunes library better. I not only came up with some good improvements but also learned some tricks I didn’t know before. Since I have a lot more in my iTunes than just music (I also have a ton of sermons, courses, lectures, business book summaries, etc.), this will make me more effective at keeping up my learning and skills. And I’ll probably blog on how to organize iTunes in the most effective ways possible in the future.

Getting your systems running well saves you a lot of time in the day-to-day. Many of these things are essential to do; they aren’t optional in the sense of “only do them if you can — oh, here’s a holiday, so try to make some progress.” They are essential, but hard to get to. The days around a holiday provide time to do them. Nobody else is working, so you aren’t “falling behind” by taking time away from your normal work. And by getting them done, you make your ordinary work days more efficient and effective.

4. Do something very interesting

The days around a holiday are also an excellent opportunity to do something unique. Think of something fun and unusual, and do it.

Or, do something usual but still fun. So this doesn’t even have to be something you wouldn’t do on an ordinary day. For example, we take the kids to the Mall of America every so often, and doing this the day after Christmas, for example, is a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Putting this all together

So in the days around a holiday, focus the days on the above purposes. Here are some examples of how this all comes together.

Thanksgiving and the surrounding days

Thanksgiving always gives you a four day weekend (assuming you don’t have to work the Friday or weekend). So on Thanksgiving you might get together with family, and then do nothing before that and after it (for those who have to prepare the meal: that is a lot of work, but you can classify that as fun because it pertains exclusively to the holiday, rather than ongoing stuff you have to do). After everyone leaves, watch a movie, or play a game, or something like that.

Then on the day after Thanksgiving, go to the mall and do your shopping if you like being in the mix of things when they are so busy. If you don’t like that, then that day could be another candidate for doing nothing.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, that could be a good opportunity for doing projects around the house you wouldn’t otherwise do, or doing a bunch of interesting things. You could plan a whole day of unique activities: take the kids to the science center, then to the Mall of America, or whatever. If you’re single, fly to San Diego or somewhere for the weekend (be radical; leave on Friday, actually) or do something in your own city that you’d do if you were a tourist there, but haven’t done yet yourself.

Christmas and the surrounding days

On Christmas Eve Day, if you have to work, make it a day at work where you do things you wouldn’t otherwise take the time to do, but which will make you more effective in your job. Make it a reading day if you can, or finally get your files organized, or so forth. Maybe add to this doing something interesting: If you can, take off after lunch and go to a movie.

On Christmas, get together with family, and for the other parts of the day, do nothing or only do fun things.

This year, the day after Christmas is a Friday, which is a great opportunity to do interesting things all day, or just do nothing (which really means, if you can’t tell, do interesting things at home), or designate it as a day to tackle things you’ve been planning to get to but haven’t been able to. If you really need a break, designate Friday through Sunday as “do nothing” days.

New Year’s and the surrounding days

New Year’s Day is on a Thursday this year. If you do things right, you can make it feel like you have a four-day weekend and get really rested. Start on Monday: Get all your loose ends tied up Mon and Tue if you can so that you can go into the new year with all the decks cleared. Usually this is a slow week, so there is time to do that.

Then on Wed do things at work that will increase your productive capacity (a variation on point 3) and make it a fun day. Get together with people Wednesday night. Then, use Thursday (New Year’s Day) through Sunday to do nothing. That can include getting together with people and doing interesting things, the point is just to do no work at all. Get all rested up, recharged, and totally unplug. Then hit the ground running on Monday the 5th, the first real working day of the year.

The underlying principle here is: keep ordinary work away from you during the days around the holidays. That’s the way to make sure you recharge and make the most of your time with others, while creating some good memories and maybe getting some very useful stuff done.

For you PC users out there, some good news: looks like Microsoft is going to be releasing its next operating system in 2009, and it sounds like a big improvement over Vista. Right now it’s called Windows 7; I don’t know if that will change.

Let’s hope it lives up to the hype. Here’s a helpful overview.

It’s tempting when you’re 95% done with a project to just move on and leave the remaining 5% to sort of take care of itself.

Avoid this temptation.

That remaining 5% is going to come back to get in your way and make your life more complicated. If, for example, you do this with 8 different projects over the course of a few months, you now have 8 projects continuing to clog up your system or mind in some fashion, on top of whatever “real” projects you are truly working on.

Instead, take the little bit of time to complete your projects completely. Then you’ll be keeping the decks a lot more clear for a more effective, more streamlined execution of your next projects.

Update: When there are things about a project that you genuinely do want to put off until later, write those down and put them as a someday/maybe or upcoming project to deal with later.

That way, the current project really is complete, but if you want to come back and revise some things later, you can still keep track of those ideas.

Here’s one example: I just organized my garage, since we just moved in. There are a few things I’d like to change about it down the road a bit, but don’t want to take the time to change around now. So I wrote those down and I’m going to create a someday/maybe item to “update garage organization,” with those items in the note field.