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GTD SOP #1: My Little Red Pad

[This is the first of a series covering the Getting Things Done Standard Operating Procedures I use to manage my goals, priorities and workload. I thought I’d share these because they’ve made and continue to make a huge difference in my productivity, and I hope they will for you too!]

The Little Red Pad.

What: A small, distinctive pad with 3 x 5 card inserts.
Use: Every single task not immediately done (tasks needing less than about 2 minutes) gets written here first.
Source: http://levenger.com
How?:

My Little Red Pad is a USB Key for my brain – everything, and I mean everything, I need to do in the future workwise gets written here first. Doing so means I can not worry about whether I remember something to do or not.

Why?:

As I get closer to my 50th birthday, my memory is simply not as good as it was 20 years ago. More importantly, I have about five times more to do, read, process, code and write than I did then.

Paradoxically, I remember more things since I started using this pad which I attribute to a)the act of writing down each task, not simply trying to remember it. b)being less stressed about remembering tasks.

Notes:

• At the end of a day, I reenter and elaborate tasks from my red pad into the Windows application I use (and wrote and sell, by the way), MasterList Professional. So each day starts with a new card in my red pad.
• During the day, my red pad goes with me – between pc’s, to the club, at my side while eating lunch etc.
• I no longer carry it 24/7: Not having my pad is one of the major ways I know I’m not at work, and that is a larger concern to me than capturing non-work things I need to do around the house (my partner Tina makes sure that’s covered! )

So do you have a Standard Operating Procedure for capturing 100% of your work tasks? If so, what? If not, how do you survive? 

 

 

Tags: SOP

SOP beats CYA every time

Remember the last time you were asked by your boss, spouse, friend or coworker to do X, only to have that to do vanish from your brain until the split second you’re confronted? Maybe you maturely admitted your mistake – and looked like an idiot. Or maybe you did some sort of song and dance, chuck and jive CYA routine that fooled no one. Whatever – it was not your shining moment.

That task took a wrong turn going in one ear, got stuck in some part of your brain that doesn’t work unless you are under Extreme Emotional Pressure, and right out the other ear, didn’t it?

There’s a simple – shockingly simple – solution, and Susan Sabo at her latest post on LifeHack.org nailed it: have a Standard Operating Procedure for every routine task.

The concept that makes SOPs most powerful is that you ‘automate’ things that you can so that you have energy and focus for that which you cannot automate – planning, decision making, and communicating.

You already have dozens of SOPs, otherwise you’d be helpless. Don’t think so? How about how you bathe, how you get to work, how get dressed? You learned all those things, created a SOP for each of them and internalized that SOP years ago.

Now, in this increasingly online, globalized, future-shocked world, it’s high time you set out to create SOPs that weren't covered back in grade school. Like how you deal with email. With Voicemail. With faxes. With computer files. With web sites you want to find again. With making sure you don’t forget a task.

Consciously creating a SOP is easy:

1. What Hurts most? What did you last forget? An voicemail, a email, a task – start with what springs to mind.
2. Write down what you are going to do to never do that again. Maybe it’s always having a paper pad by every phone. Or printing each and every email’s first page that is a non-trivial task. Or having a bookmark folder in FireFox that you religiously clear as your pre-Weekly Review. Whatever works foy you, in whatever detail you need. Imagine you are writing up the instructions for a robot you want to program – you are.
3. Rinse, lather and repeat. Keep that written SOP where you need it and follow the instructions until you know it by heart. Then file it – Congratulations! You’ve just converted your next CYA into an SOP.

Shift happens

This is something anyone who wants to understand Web 2.0 - and the seismic change it is going to have on what we do, who we know and what we want -  needs to see:

Now the question is, how do we in a Web 2.0 world get anything done?

All GTD, all the time, in one place

There's a great new meta resource for people interested in GTD: The Ultimate GTD Index. It's an automatically generated index of GTD bloggers posts, news and software. If you want (or need) a quick shot of productivity, browse this page. Here's a few of the gems I found there today:

• How to do a Weekly Review in under an Hour, from Zen Habits.
• The Monday Hack - an Excellent GTD App, from Smart Pastor.
• Interviews with GTD Masters, at The Cranking Widgets Blog.

The person doing The Ultimate GTD Index (He/she won't reveal their name, I asked) also has another cool index: The Ultimate Personal Development Index worth bookmarking.

Flash card productivity for Power Users

For me, the breaking point was how to quickly move from one tab to another in IE7. I learned early on how to do this in FireFox, the first major browser to support tabs: Control-Page Up, Control-Page Down. Easy. My fingers automatically jumped to those keys while in IE7 – no luck.

That was the straw – the dismaying shock, the turning in my stomach, the feeling that bad things had developed while my attention was elsewhere – came later. When I realized my fingers no longer knew the easiest, quickest way to operate all the programs I spend all my days in. Somewhere between this major upgrade and that new feature I'd become, gasp!, a newbie.

In my misguided obsession find ever new ways of being productive, I'd forgotten the cornerstone and wellspring of all computer productivity: the keyboard shortcuts. Knowing dozens and dozens of keystroke shortcuts has always separated the Power User Men from the timid newbie girly boys since the days WordStar was cutting edge office productivity software. Now, I needed to play catch up, bigtime, if I wanted to regain my former computing proficiency. But How?

After pondering this over several portions of adult beverage, my thoughts meandered back to my high school days when I aced four advanced placement classes in two years by using up boxes and boxes of flashcards. You remember flashcards – On one side, Capital of Kansas? On the other, Topeka. Why not apply the same proven technology to all those beckoning keyboard shortcuts? Yes!

So here's what I did:

Step 1: Roundup the usual suspects. A few minutes in Google yield good keyboard shortcut .pdfs for Microsoft's Word, Internet Explorer7, Visual Basic/Visual Studio 2005; Firefox and yes, Google. Why .pdfs? Because I wanted to save and print these collections of shortcuts off so I could cherry pick the commands I use most often, but don't know.

Step 2: Check High School locker for old flashcards. Well, I do remember leaving a box of them there. Finding flashcards today turned out to be surprisingly difficult – I finally found this vendor via Amazon and ordered two boxes. Why paper? Writing facts helps get them into your brain. Also, I wanted a technology delivery system robust enough to use in all the odd free moments of my life and holding a laptop in your lap while in the restroom is too weird even for me.

Step 3: Start Writing and working the Cards. I found a good post on this at this blog; here are the points that applied to my use:

• One simple question, one unambiguous answer. Not "How do I adjust type size up or down in Firefox?" but "Firefox: increase type size?" (Ctrl + <mouse wheel).
• Keep your cards with you. You can't review them if you don't have them.
• Review your cards at least 3 times a day. Repetition pays.
• Don't think you've learned a card until you can get the answer after you've had a night's sleep (You want to make sure that new fact gets from short term memory to long term memory).

So that's it: I now have a starter stack of flash card commands I'm squeezing into my middle age brain. I'll report back here in a few weeks on how this experiment to bootstrap myself back into the ranks of power users is going.

I want I do I get

[I originally wrote this for Lifehack.org, but I think it's one of my best, so here it is.]

There’s a great song out there by Jimmy Cliff, one of reggae’s top artists, that in six words summarizes just how you succeed in life: I want I do I get. These six words are a very powerful way of connecting what you want with what you will achieve.

First comes wanting something – a better life for yourself, your family, more money, a better job, whatever it is you dream about and long for. You desire it, you dream about it, you daydream about it, you yearn for it. But that’s not enough.
Next – and this the part too many people forget about – comes the doing. All of the wanting in the world is not going to move you one inch closer to what you want: you have to do. You have to find a better job, change jobs, take risks, write software, try new things, stop doing old things, go to college, work, act, do. The doing is the absolutely indispensable connection between what you want and what you get.

Finally, if you keep doing what needs to be done, if you keep adjusting what you do to move you closer to what you want, you get. Maybe not easily, maybe not as quickly as movies and television portray, but it will come.

If these six words connect with you, maybe it’s time to do your “I want I do I get” audit:

• I want. Find a quiet place you can be alone and ask and answer this deceptively simple question: What do you want? Not what your boss, parents, relatives, friends or significant other want. What do you want? What matters to you that you’re prepared to spend your days, weeks maybe years getting? Be honest with yourself – the stakes are high. More than a few people have wasted their lives because they never really asked themselves what they really wanted.
• I do. After you’ve gotten clear on what you want, what are you prepared to do about it? And you thought the step above was hard! When you start looking at what it’s going to cost to get what you want, you may decide that cost is too high. That’s fine. The more you understand the cost, the better you will appreciate the value. Don’t be surprised if you go back and forth between clarifying your wants and calculating the costs of what you want – and that’s a good thing.
• I get. This is where you get your just desserts, right? Maybe. Way too many people find they get what they worked long and hard for only to find there’s a rather nasty catch. The man who climbs the corporate ladder, only to become estranged from his family. The women who forsakes a career to be a mother, but never gets over knowing what she could have achieved in the business world. It’s up to you to define what you want to get, so take the time to think through what you want to get really looks like.

One final philosophical note about these six words: notice that “I” is three of them? Not what others want, not what others say you are “supposed” or “should” do. What’s more, no one is going to do it for you. You are the key to making these six words work.

Clear Blogging out - free chapter.

My new book, Clear Blogging, started selling at Amazon yesterday and Apress has just made available Chapter 9 ("Successful Blogging") as a .pdf. Just look on the books Apress page under Extras (direct link here).

One of the main themes I built into this book are ways of being more productive and more time efficient as a blogger. Chapter 9 is basically a mini blogging course on:

• Ways of finding things to post on (creating "beats", using Google as your Blog Radar).
• Structuring your blog (theming your blog, maintaining a story list, accessorizing longer posts, 22 ideas that will make or break your blog).
• Tools and methods for improving your writing (handy bookmarklets, WhiteSmoke, How to write a compelling post by B.L. Ochman, How to write a blog post, by Seth Godin).
• The ins and outs of Technorati tagging (covered elsewhere in Clear Blogging in much, much more detail, including an interview with Technorati CEO David Sifry).
• Socializing your blog (Digg, Reddit and Sociable).

If you're a blogger, I hope you'll find this free chapter (and the book :) ) useful, informative and above all else information you can take action with. Enjoy!

Productivity tips for Skype

I admit it - I really like Skype. When I was writing my last book, I used Skype to interview people in New York, Iowa and Melbourne, Australia to name three and Skype calls had better quality overall than landline calls. Since then, I've used it to call back to the States from the U.K., conduct and record interviews and more.

Now there's a great article out at VOIP-News: 25 Tips to Improve Your Skype Experience. There's lots of good info in this post: how to filter and block, using Skype as a DIY home security system, Skype hacks and addins that range from awesome productivity enhancers to pure fun.

It's a must read if you're on Skype and if you're not, what are you waiting for?

FYI: Technical difficulties - IdeaMatt temporarily off OfficeZealot's GTD Zone

This has been a bad day for the Internet: "Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic" and my friend Matt Cornell blog has been the victim of technical difficulties over at the Getting Things Done Zone on OfficeZealot.com. Since more than a few readers here read Matt's blog, he's asked me to pass along the following:

Matt says: A few kind readers told me that posts from Matt's Idea Blog have recently not been picked up at the Getting Things Done Zone on OfficeZealot.com. Bob was kind enough to post this message on my behalf. I'm working with the nice OZ folks to get this fixed (yes, I'm apparently the only blogger still using Blogger.com). In the meantime, here are some recent posts you might have missed:

• Matt's Idea Blog: Notes from a conversation with writer and journalist Jaclyn Stevenson
• Matt's Idea Blog: Playing with LinkedIn's Answers feature - A brief analysis, plus community advice on starting consulting (part 2/2)
• Matt's Idea Blog: Notes on using a digital voice recorder for taking reading notes
• Matt's Idea Blog: Commitment Time! (Taking the big leap)
• Matt's Idea Blog: My Collective Genius! article is up, FYI
• Matt's Idea Blog: Some thoughts from tracking "lessons learned" for a year

Clear Blogging is now out!

Just a quick note that my second book, Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them, is now out. If you’re wondering what this whole blogging thing is, or how to do a blog for your micro-ISV successfully, or how to connect to and tap into the power of the Blogosphere, I think this book is for you.

You’ll find more info on Clear Blogging at my blog, http://clearblogging.com.

Tags: ClearBlogging