Jennifer and I sat down yesterday to have our end-of-year review and start-of-year planning discussions, which we do every year. Sometimes these are two separate conversations, but this time we had them both in one sitting. We typically have these discussions over dinner at a nice restaurant to create a sense of occasion. In light of the pandemic, though, we just sat in the living room with a fire in the fireplace. . . .
Category: Productivity
Your Email Inbox Makes a Terrible To-Do List
One little-noted fact about email is that no one teaches you how to use it. Email started out as a speedy and convenient way of exchanging written messages without all the fuss of printing and mailing them. For many people, in their personal lives, that’s still what email is — albeit with a lot more unwanted messages to sort through than we used to get. But at the office, email has morphed into a mammoth, all-purpose system for coordinating virtually all knowledge work. Dealing with email consumes what seems to be an ever-increasing portion of our workday. And yet over the course of this transformation, almost no thought has been given to how this increasingly pervasive system should be used, and what the best practices are for managing the flood of emails that contemporary knowledge workers receive every day. . . .
The Evening Checklist
For years now, before going to bed at night, I’ve put water in the electric kettle and gotten out a teabag and a mug so that everything’s ready when I make tea for Jennifer in the morning. This past fall I added a second item to my nighttime ritual. I had come down one morning and discovered that it was freezing on the ground floor. We’d opened a window the day before and forgotten to close it before going to bed, and the outdoor temperature had dropped precipitously overnight. So in addition to preparing the morning tea, I starting making sure the house was closed up each evening. . . .
Take Notes
I’m once again venturing into the dangerous territory of offering unsolicited advice, as Kevin Kelly did in his blog post, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” intended for young people and based on almost 70 decades of life-lessons learned. The advice I’m offering today is, take notes. Take notes about the places you go, the people you meet, and the things you learn. Take notes about what happens in important meetings — the commitments you make and the commitments other people make to you. Keep a record of all the books you read, and the important things you learned from reading them. Write down the name of the guy who fixed your electric garage door opener and what he charged for doing so. . . .
Unsubscribe!
I’ve been surprised recently to hear from a couple of friends that they are inundated with email. I found this puzzling because these are not people who work full-time and thus need to deal with a flood of work-related emails. They are retired. When I inquired further, I learned that most of the troublesome mail is from companies these people have done business with and non-profit or political organizations they support. When I asked my friends why they don’t unsubscribe from those senders’ mailing lists, I heard a couple of answers. . . .
Small Productivity Improvements Can Make an Outsize Difference
One thing many people don’t realize as they try to improve their productivity is just how big a difference a small improvement can make.
When I was working full time as a manager in the R&D division of a large pharmaceutical company, it was not uncommon for me and my peers to spend three-fourths of a typical workday in various meetings. Much of the remaining time could easily be taken up dealing with email. That left almost no time for our “real” work — the skilled, generative efforts that the company presumably paid us to do. . . .
Food for Thought: Complexity vs. Simplicity
During my last few years working full time, I was responsible for overseeing a range of various initiatives my company was doing in its R&D division to improve the efficiency of various business processes. . . . During that time I came across a quote that I found hugely insightful and also highly relevant to the work I was doing. . . .
Experimenting With Time-Blocking – Part 2
Yesterday I wrote about how Cal Newport diverges from David Allen’s GTD orthodoxy regarding how to make the best use of your workday. Even though I’m mostly retired, I decided to experiment with the approach Newport recommends, which he calls “time-blocking.”
For the last few days I’ve been sitting down after breakfast and planning my day by allocating blocks of time to the various activities and projects I want to work on. To be clear, Newport does not suggest that we time-block every waking hour; he recommends time-blocking only the workday. But since I don’t have a “workday” in the usual sense of the word, and since this was an experiment, I decided to time-block my entire day. . . .
Experimenting With Time-Blocking – Part 1
As anyone who knows me is aware, I’m a fan of David Allen, the personal productivity guru and author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I’ve been a practitioner and proponent of Allen’s “GTD” methodology for more than 20 years, have had dinner with him twice, and attended his big “GTD Summit” in Amsterdam last year.
Recently I’ve been listening to a podcast called Deep Questions hosted by Cal Newport, another productivity expert and author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Like me, Newport is an admirer of David Allen and endorses much of his GTD approach, but believes there’s one important thing Allen got wrong. . . .