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Resources on Productivity

Screenshot of My OmniFocus Setup

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I will at some point (soon, though defined somewhat loosely) blog somewhat comprehensively and in detail about how I have my planning system setup.

In the meantime, I was talking about OmniFocus with a friend today and out of that conversation came a screen shot that captures the “big picture” of how I have it set up. I thought that some of you who use OmniFocus (or are considering it) might be interested.

In fact, this this is relevant beyond OmniFocus as well. I recommend setting up any planning system in this way, no matter what tool you use. This is how I did things in Outlook previously and, before that, did a variation of this with my paper planner.

Here is the screen shot:

of-screenshot

Why to Define the "Why" on Your Projects

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As we mentioned the other day, the first step in the natural planning model is to “define purpose and principles.” Defining your purpose is basically asking the “why?” question. “Why are we doing this? What are we seeking to bring about through this?”

Why is it so important to ask the “why” question on your projects? Getting Things Done discusses six benefits:

  1. It defines success
  2. It creates decision-making criteria
  3. It aligns resources
  4. It motivates
  5. It clarifies focus
  6. It expands options

As Allen writes, “almost anything you’re currently doing can be enhanced and even galvanized by more scrutiny at the top level of focus.” That probably seems pretty evident to most of us.

The problem is that, although this is common sense, it is not commonly practiced:

I admit it: this is nothing but advanced common sense. To know and be clear about the purpose of any activity are prime directives for clarity, creative development, and cooperation. But it’s common sense that’s not commonly practiced, simply because it’s so easy for us to create things, get caught up in the form of what we’ve created, and let our connection with our real primary intentions slip.

The challenge, then, is to practice what we know. Don’t let solid common sense about managing your projects just sit on the shelf. Make it your common practice.

How to Hang Art Effectively

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We’ve been dealing with hanging art at our house because of having just moved.

This is a corollary of productivity because it pertains to designing your wider environment effectively. You want your computer working effectively for you, your workspace working effectively, and then moving out from that, it makes sense to continue applying good principles to the rest of your work area and home.

Here are some helpful tips that came my way from art.com:

  1. Map your art first
  2. Hang art at eye level
  3. Group art to create unity
  4. Keep art in harmony with furniture
  5. Formal or casual?

You can read more details in the full article.

Natural Planning, Unnatural Planning, and Reactive Planning

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In addition to the 5 stages of workflow and 5 horizons of workflow, another critical insight in Getting Things Done is the natural planning model.

The Natural Planning Model

The natural planning model can be summarized in five steps:

  1. Defining purpose and principles
  2. Outcome visioning
  3. Brainstorming
  4. Organizing
  5. Identifying next actions

The purpose is the “why.” Principles are the standards and boundaries of your plan. Outcome visioning clarifies the “what.” Brainstorming generates the “how.” Organizing puts it all together in a manageable form. And identifying next actions gets you going.

As David Allen writes, “these five phases of project planning occur naturally for everything you accomplish during the day” (Getting Things Done, 58). However, when most people go about formally planning something, they end up doing the opposite — what Allen calls the unnatural planning model.

The Unnatural Planning Model

In the unnatural planning model, you try to come up with a “good idea” on this or that issue before defining purpose and vision. This almost always creates more ambiguity and increased stress because it is artificial and unnatural. And since this is most people’s typical experience with planning, they prefer not to plan at all.

(Or, as Allen discusses, they create the plan “after the fact” just to please those who want to see a plan — like in elementary school when you’d create the outline to your paper after writing the paper.)

The Reactive Planning Model

But Allen points out that the result of not planning is often crises. When this happens, urgency takes over and people decide to plan after all. But in this case, they reverse the natural planning model and slide into the reactive planning model. So instead of defining purpose and principles first, you hear a “call to action” first — to work harder, get more people on things, get busier.

Instead of resolving things, that usually just creates a mess. So someone says “hey, let’s get organized.” When this doesn’t solve the problem, someone then says “let’s brainstorm.” So everyone gets gathered into a room and the leader says “who has a good idea here?” When not much happens, finally someone asks “so, what are we trying to do here again?” — which gets to vision and purpose.

“The reactive style is the reverse of the natural planning model. It will always come back to top-down focus. It’s not a matter of whether the natural planning model will be done — just when, and at what cost” (p. 62).

Save yourself and your organization time and frustration. Start with the natural planning model!

One of the Least Known, But Most Helpful, Books on Productivity

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Along with Getting Things Done, one of the most helpful books I’ve read on productivity is a book called To Do, Doing, Done: A Creative Approach to Managing Projects and Effectively Finishing What Matters Most. I actually read both of them at about the same time back when I was first getting into GTD, and To Do, Doing, Done helped created a more complete picture for me.

The book was written in 1997 and, when it gets into the logistics of things, reflects paper-based practices. However, the principles behind those practices are easily transferable to electronic systems, so it remains insightful.

The most helpful take away for me from the book was how to tie your project plans to your day-to-day actions. Getting Things Done also talks about this, of course, but didn’t go into as much detail. This book provided a complementary perspective that yielded some additional useful insights.

The authors of the book are also coming from the 7 Habits perspective which emphasizes keeping our projects tied to higher level goals and values. This emphasis on the higher levels, along with discussion of how to use your priorities at those levels to choose the right projects, helped to provide an integrated picture.

Last of all, the book simply has some good advice on managing projects in general — something that is relevant to most of us, no matter what we are doing. What they wrote in the introduction is still true today:

In our increasingly demanding world, the people who succeed will be the ones who can initiate, manage, and complete challenging projects. They will be the ones who know how to create a vision that engages everyone involved in the project. They will be able to define expected results; delegate responsibility; break the project down into bite-sized tasks; develop achievable schedules; communicate concisely, clearly, and rapidly; adjust quickly to changes; monitor progress; and accept nothing short of project success.

While I’m not recommending adoption of their approach wholesale, it is a very helpful read for those who are looking for additional insight and tools to pick up and then integrate into their own approach.

Why You Should Have a Physical Inbox

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I once heard David Allen say, “Sometimes people tell me that they don’t have a physical inbox. To which my response is: ‘Yes you do — that just means your whole house is your inbox.'”

It might be tempting these days to conclude that you don’t need to have any physical-based processing tools, since so much comes through digital channels. But inboxes are not just for email.

In spite of all the digital input we receive, there is still a steady stream of real physical input that also comes our way. For example, there is the regular mail, things your kids bring home from school, notes you jot down to yourself when it isn’t convenient to enter them into your electronic system right away, and so forth.

So it is a fact of reality that we have a bunch of incoming physical “stuff” that can be just as constant (although perhaps less in volume) as electronic input. This stuff, therefore, needs to be gathered and collected into a single spot — that is, an inbox — on a regular basis. If you don’t do this, it’s not as though you will be able to brag that you “don’t have a physical inbox.” Instead, what will happen is that your whole desk, your whole office, your whole house will become your inbox.

And the problem with that is this: It makes it hard to distinguish what is unprocessed from what is already where it should be. The result is that you will never have a sense of closure about what needs to be dealt with and what doesn’t, and things can easily fall through the cracks. You will start to drown in a sea of unprocessed stuff.

You need to gather all open loops into one spot, rather than letting them hang around all over. Which is the definition of an inbox.

Here’s an easy example of what this looks like in practice: When you get the mail, don’t just toss it on a counter somewhere, or your desk somewhere, to deal with “when you get to it.” Have an inbox, and put it in there.

Here’s a more advanced example: The other day we finally got a new digital camera (our old one broke after 5 excellent years of service). When I got home with all the packages (the actual camera, plus memory, camera bag etc.) but couldn’t deal with them right away, I didn’t just set them down somewhere to deal with when I get the chance. Rather, I put them into my inbox, then hung out with my kids.

Here’s one more example: Let’s say I need a new hammer, and my wife buys me one when she’s at the store. When she gets home, she doesn’t just put it on some shelf in the garage, trusting me to “notice” at some point that there is something new and out of place in there. Instead, she puts it in my inbox. That way I don’t need to notice or remember that there’s a new hammer out there in the garage that I need to put away at some point. Instead, I can just process it right along with everything else when doing my inbox.

It would be easy to say, “well, just setting a few camera boxes or a hammer down anywhere is no big deal.” Well, right. But if you do that every time, pretty soon you end up with a house (or desk) littered with “stuff to figure out what to do with.” Be diligent. Put stuff in your inbox and it won’t build up all over your desk (or house). The lack of an inbox — or an understanding of how to use them — is the single biggest reason desks get messy and rooms (like offices, garages, and so forth) get disorganized.

So now we’ve talked about why you should have a physical inbox. For details on how to process your inbox, see these posts:

  1. How to Get the Mail
  2. Going Through My Inbox

Last of all, here’s a useful point worth emphasizing: As you can see from the examples above, your inbox is not just something for other people to put stuff in. I put far more things in my own inbox than anyone else, which is as it should be.

What if the Post Office Delivered Mail the Way Most of Us Check Email?

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I know it can be iffy to compare ordinary mail to email. But, here goes.

Before delivering the mail on any given day, one of the first thing the Post Office does is sort it. Each address’s mail gets grouped together so that it can be delivered in order.

But imagine what would happen if, when the postal worker was out the door and half way to your house, they called him back and said “Oh, new mail just arrived for Fred Smith! Come back and get it so you can add it to your pile!” Since new mail is always arriving, the poor postal worker would never get to actually delivering any of the mail.

There is much wisdom in batching things. Things that make it into the batch get done with the batch. Things that arrive during or after, get done in the next batch — not added into the current batch right away.

Here’s the interesting thing: In the scenario above where the postal worker continually goes back to get the new mail, it’s not as though the mail volume is any higher. He’s not prevented from actually delivering the mail by the fact that there is “so much.” He’s prevented by his process; by his approach. In the batched approach, there is just as much mail. It just happens to actually get delivered.

I realize that there are limitations to this. But the general principle is very useful. If you check your email continually, you’ll never make progress on the other work that you have to do — or on the tasks that your email has generated which have to be done outside of email.

Is “never” an overstatement? Well, a bit. But you get the point.

Piper and Grudem on the Use of Time

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CJ Mahaney has recently interviewed John Piper and Wayne Grudem. One of the questions in each of the interviews was “What single bit of counsel has made the most significant difference in your effective use of time?”

Here is John Piper’s answer:

A great tree will fall with many small chops. Pray for daily grace to keep chopping.

Here is Wayne Grudem’s answer:

What single bit of counsel has made the most significant difference in your effective use of time?

I find the most helpful thing I do regarding use of time is to spend time in prayer each morning bringing my plans and my “to do” list before the Lord and seeking his direction.

As far as human advice and counsel, I have found the system described in Getting Things Done by David Allen to be very helpful—I am just now rereading that to try to get all of my “in box” items back under control again and listed in one place, and then processed. I should add that I find effective use of time to be a continual challenge and I keep making small modifications here and there.

I would also like to say this to you, C.J.: You probably remember that I have talked with you numerous times about how to decide on what things to schedule, how to set priorities, and other questions about wisdom in time management, and your suggestions have always been very helpful!

Several verses of Scripture also have influenced me in this regard. Paul said, “It is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy (or “faithful,” Greek pistos)” (1 Corinthians 4:2) and that has made me seek to be faithful to God in the way I use all of my time.