Productivity tips

21 Feb 2015

For a long time (read: up until very recently), I was very defensive about my way of doing things. Not intentionally defensive, but I wasn’t interested in looking at my behavior and challenging it with new ways of getting things done. It’s easier to continue on a set path than to mess around with your routines without a guarantee of gain at the end.

This is a bad way to be. There are people who have spent a lifetime and made a career thinking about how to be more efficient and productive. There are people who are wildly successful and attribute that success to easy to implement behavior patterns. It seems foolish not to at least critically examine their methods and try to glean something useful from their technique.

In fact, I’m realizing that the mark of a good technique is that it is easy. If it doesn’t make life better in aggregate, it’s probably not worth it.

Here are a couple things that I’ve been working on lately:

The Seinfeld Method for forming habits

I talk about this in my former post examining deliberate practice and habits. Briefly, set a daily goal, and track its simple execution with a calendar. So far, this has been very effective in my life.

Getting Things Done - David Allen

Before I tried the Seinfeld method, I don’t think I would’ve read a book on productivity. But the Seinfeld method seemed to work for me so when I saw this book on my roommates shelf I decided to rein in my hubris and give it a whirl.

I’m glad I did. The main take away from this was

1. Don’t let anything that you have to do sit in your head: Write it down
2. Once you’ve written everything down, come up with the next physical action 2a. If it’ll take less than 2 minutes… Just do it
3. Do those things in whatever order you think appropriate

The book (naturally) goes into much greater detail about execution and philosophy, but these are my major take aways. I’ve been using Trello to organize my life into these lists and so far it’s been working pretty well. I don’t spend any time or headspace trying to remember what it is that I wanted to do since I’ve written it down, and I always have a list of simple physical actions that I can execute.

Inbox Zero

About a day or two ago, I got sick of looking at the mess of emails in my inbox and decided to archive everything. In line with Getting Things Done I try to

• read/archive the informational material
• respond immediately/archive stuff that takes less than two minutes
• tag/archive things that take longer than 2 minutes and need a response

I’ll let you know how it goes.