This blog post is based on David Allen’s hit on time management “Getting things done”. Explains how you can achieve meaning full life and manage tasks efficiently,
The blog is meant for:
• Anyone trying to get rid of procrastinations and start being more productive.
• Anyone trying to move towards their life goals faster.
• Professionals trying to achieve work and life balance.
1. Be Productive and not just busy.
With humans adopting highly technical and perpetually overloaded with distraction life style, it is a miracle if we can go five minutes with out being poked by an email notification, a social media notification or a WhatsApp ping. In this mercilessly distracting and a fast paced set up of our life style it is important than ever to focus properly on whats important
If you find yourself working on point less little tasks leaving your feel distracted this blog can help you regain focus and re align your daily actions, with tasks intended on the bigger picture of life, your over all goals and dreams.
By the end of this post, you will discover why humans drop everything important at the small ping of smart phones. Also, the reason why just being busy doesn’t mean you are productive. And finally, you find a great piece of advice from book “getting things done” applicable in every sphere of life.
2. Distractions push us loose the track of our priorities.
How often you find your self-running to check the latest notification as soon as it pops up, leaving all your important work aside.
The main reason behind is that our mind is fickle. Information now days is available in fantastic quantities, from tweets, emails, text messages. When this information arrives we have no way of knowing the relevance of that pieced of information without diverting our attention towards it. So as soon as there is a ping on your smart devices, we don’t know if it’s a work email or a waste WhatsApp chain message. As a result, you are constantly distracted and take much longer to finish a simple task.
What else, with this constant increase in new information and new tasks the quantity of work done is a new metric for productivity. Like sales targets, production targets etc.But this metric of the quantity of task done is not a good metric to be focused on. Although sending and receiving a lot of information or attending a lot of meetings make you feel busy and productive but it says nothing about the quality of work done. How ever much better method to measure productivity is to check how much progress has been made in predefined life goals. Moreover, this metric of quantity often gets us tangled up in the day to day tasks and you lose track of larger life goals.
3. Be creative and organized to reach your full potential.
“To reach our full potential we need to have traits of both a dreamer and doer.” Which means we need Both perspectives – the ability to see bigger picture and control- which is the ability to actually organize and manage your obligations aligned to the bigger picture.
Most of the people can manage only one of these aspects or some of the people even lack both perspective and control, often such people are anxious and helpless, and can be seen found constantly panicking and in emergency mode.
Then there are people who have a greater hold on control but no perspective. Traits like imagination and creativity are far-far away from their suits. They prefer to stick to existing ideas rather than coming up with new ones.And some of us who completely lack control but excel at aspects of imagination and creativity such people have tons of ideas, but they always fail to convert ideas to valuable collateral because they are constantly distracted by their next big idea.
The most optimal situation is to have a balance between control and perspective, between being organized and imaginative at the same time. This combination leads to people who have creative ideas and control to implement these ideas.
4. Outsource your memory: Start writing down your ideas and tasks.
So many times we find our self with an amazing idea which we believe is going to Make a revolution in the world but as the time pass, we forget the whole gist of the idea. So many times we go to the super store with a list of thing to buy in back of our head and forget as soon as we start shopping and usually end up missing a thing or two.
In fact, all of our ideas and todos are a verge of being forgotten unless we capture them using some kind of rugged mechanism and the only way to do is outsource your memory. That is by making use of paper, or any application on your smart gizmos to jolt thing down things, where you record every idea, every to do tasks, important tasks.
If you are a type of guy who has to hold lots of meetings as a part of his career, just make sure to put up a white board to and scribble down any idea that comes up, make mind maps and take a picture of them to store permanently.
5. Organize your ideas.
So now if you know the importance of taking down the notes. So hope fully you have a long list of notes, next step in this process is to decide which one is to be prioritized in a certain order. Best practice is to categorize them into 3 categories.
A: these are the tasks and ideas which are going to push you or your business forward.
B: these are the supporting tasks or productivity tasks which will help your support your A level tasks.
C: these are low categories tasks which are not going to push you or your business forward.
So while going through each task decide categories and divide each task in to set of physical action/ actions required to complete given task. More specific you get here easier will be to visualize and complete the task.
6. Maintaining your list.
So now you have your list how do you maintain it? Best practice is to review it regularly, ruthlessly and chop out all old, and no longer relevant tasks from the list. You can set up a weekend routine to figure out manage the list, reschedule and reshuffle thing from coming week.
Just think of this as a house keeping of your to do list to remove no longer relevant clutter from the place.
7. Ensure your daily tasks are meaning full and aligned with the bigger picture.
This is one of the most important steps need to be followed in order to stay true to your life goals, there are two things which you can do to make sure you stay aligned with what you have planned ass your life goal.
Identify your responsibilities in your life and live up to them. Map out all your duties and duties of others in context to an organizational map. Such as your health, Map out your regular dental check ups or annual medical meet up etc.
Second is to make sure your daily actions make up a meaning full out come when you group them up they should move your to some higher goal and should be attainable in a limited time, best practice is to make use of SMART goals which stands for Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic and time bound.
8. Define your own path.
Imagine you are taking a walk in a strange city, where have just moved in. every time you come along a crossing you have to choose a path carefully. Now imagine you some how can see your position from a higher point of view say you can tap your location on a GPS enabled device where you can see your path and all other paths perfectly. Now your way of choosing which crossing to take will dramatically change. Just by having a view of where you want to go from a whole some or gestalt point of view you can make much better decisions.
About author:
David Allen is a specialized time management consultant his high productivity method in getting things done is attracts disciples from many walks of life not just work and business. His provides coaching to Individuals as well as organizational clients and empowers them to make most of their time.