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42 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily...!!!
- Most Important Tasks (MITs): At the start of each
day (or the night before) highlight the three or four most important
things you have to do in the coming day. Do them first. If you get
nothing else accomplished aside from your MITs, you’ve still had a
pretty productive day.
- Big Rocks: The big projects you’re working on at any given moment. Set aside time every day or week to move your big rocks forward.
- Inbox Zero:
Decide what to do with every email you get, the moment you read it. If
there’s something you need to do, either do it or add it to your todo
list and delete or file the email. If it’s something you need for
reference, file it. Empty your email inbox every day.
- Wake up earlier: Add a productive hour to your day by getting up an hour earlier — before everyone else starts imposing on your time.
- One In, One Out:
Avoid clutter by adopting a replacement-only standard. Every time you
but something new, you throw out or donate something old. For example,
you buy a new shirt, you get rid of an old one. (Variation: One in, Two
Out — useful when you begin to feel overwhelmed by your possessions.)
- Brainstorming:
The act of generating dozens of ideas without editing or censoring
yourself. Lots of people use mindmaps for this: stick the thing you
want to think about in the middle (a problem you need to solve, a theme
you want to write about, etc.) and start writing whatever you think of.
Build off of each of the sub-topics, and each of their
sub-topics. Don’t worry about whether the ideas are any good or not —
you don’t have to follow through on them, just get them out of your
head. After a while, you’ll start surprising yourself with some really
creative concepts.
- Ubiquitous Capture: Always
carry something to take notes with — a pen and paper, a PDA, a stack of
index cards. Capture every thought that comes into your mind, whether
it’s an idea for a project you’d like to do, an appointment you need to
make, something you need to pick up next time you’re at the store,
whatever. Review it regularly and transfer everything to where it
belongs: a todo list, a filing system, a journal, etc.
- Get more sleep:
Sleep is essential to health, learning, and awareness. Research shows
the body goes through a complete sleep cycle in about 90 minutes, so
napping for less than that doesn’t have the same effect that real sleep
does (although it does make you feel better). Get 8 hours a night, at
least. Learn to see sleep as a pleasure, not a necessary evil or a
luxury.
- 10+2*5:
Work in short spurts of 10 minutes, interrupted by 2 minute breaks.
Use a timer. Do this 5 times an hour to stay on target without
over-taxing your physical and mental resources. Spend those 2 minutes
getting a drink, going to the bathroom, or staring out a window.
- SMART goals:
A rubric for creating and pursuing your goals, helping to avoid setting
goals that are simply unattainable. Stands for: Specific, Measurable,
Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
- SUCCES: From Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick,
SUCCES is a set of characteristics that make ideas memorable
(“sticky”): sticky ideas are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible,
Emotional Stories.
- Unschedule: Schedule all your fun activities and personal life stuff (the stuff you want to do) first
- 80/20 Rule/Pareto Principle: Generally
speaking, the 80/20 Principle says that most of our results come from a
small portion of our actual work, and conversely, that we spend most of
our energy doing things that aren’t ultimately all that important.
Figure out which part of your work has the greatest results and focus as
much of your energy as you can on that part.
- What’s the Next Action?:
Don’t plan out everything you need to do to finish a project, just
focus on the very next thing you need to do to move it forward. Usually
doing the next, little thing will lead to another, and another, until
we’re either done or we run into a block: we need more information, we
need someone else to catch up, etc. Be as concrete and discrete as
possible: you can’t “install cable”, all you can do is “call the cable
company to request cable installation”.
- The Secret: There is no secret.
- Slow Down:
Make time for yourself. Eat slowly. Enjoy a lazy weekend day. Take the
time to do things right, and keep a balance between the rush-rush world
of work and the rest of your life.
- Time Boxing:
Assign a set amount of time per day to work on a task or project.
Focus entirely on that one thing during that time. Don’t worry about
finishing it, just worry about giving that amount of undivided attention
to the project. (Variation: fixed goals. For example, you don’t get up
until you’ve written 1,000 words, or processed 10 orders, or whatever.)
- Batch Process:
Do all your similar tasks together. For example, don’t deal with
emails sporadically throughout the day; instead, set aside an hour to go
through your email inbox and respond to emails. Do the same with voice
mail, phone calls, responding to letters, filing, and so on — any
routine, repetitive tasks.
- Covey Quadrants: A
system for assigning priorities. Two axes, one for importance, the
other for urgency, intersect. Tasks are assigned to one of the four
quadrants: not important, not urgent; not important, urgent; important,
not urgent; and important and urgent. Purge the tasks that are neither
important nor urgent, defer the unimportant but urgent ones, try to
avoid letting the important ones become urgent, and as much as possible
work on the tasks in the important but not urgent quadrant.
- Handle Everything Once:
Don’t set things aside hoping you’ll have time to deal with them
later. Ask yourself “What do I need to do with this” every time you
pick up something from your email list, and either do it, schedule it
for later, defer it to someone else, or file it.
- Don’t Break the Chain:
Use a calendar to track your daily goals. Every day you do something,
like working out or writing 1,000 words, make a big red “X”. Every day
the chain will grow longer. Don’t break the chain! That is, don’t let
any non-X days interrupt your chain of successful days.
- Review:
Schedule a time with yourself every week to look over what you’ve done
that week and what you want to do the next week. Ask yourself if there
are any new projects you should be starting, and if what you’re working
on is moving you closer to your goals for your life.
- Roles: Everyone
fills several different roles in their life. For instance, I’m a
teacher, a student, a writer, a step-father, a partner, a brother, a
son, an uncle, an anthropologist, and so on. Understanding your
different roles and learning to keep them distinct when necessary can
help you keep some sense of balance between them. Make goals around the
various roles you fill, and make sure that your goals fit with your
goals in other roles.
- Flow: The flow state
happens when you’re so absorbed in whatever you’re doing that you have
no awareness of the passing of time and the work just happens
automatically. It’s hard to trigger consciously, but you can create the conditions for it by allowing yourself a block of uninterrupted time, minimizing distractions, and calming yourself.
- Do It Now:
Fight procrastination by adopting “do it now!” as your mantra. Limit
yourself to 60 seconds when making a decision, decide what you’re going
to do with every input in your life as soon as you encounter it, learn
to make bold decisions even when you’re not really sure. Keep moving
forward.
- Time Log:
Lawyers have to track everything they do in the day and how long they
do it so they can bill their clients and remain accountable. You need
to be accountable to yourself, so keep track of how much time you really spend on the things that are important to you by tracking your time.
- Structured Procrastination:
A strategy of recognizing and using one’s procrastinating tendencies to
get stuff done. Items at the top of top of the list are avoided by
doing seemingly less difficult and less important tasks further down the
list — making the procrastinator highly productive. The trick is to
make sure the items at the top are apparently urgent — with pressing
deadlines and apparently large consequences. But, of course, they
aren’t really all that urgent. Structured procrastination requires a
masterful skill at self-deception, which fortunately bigtime
procrastinators excel at.
- Personal Mission Statement:
Write a personal mission statement, and use it as a guide to set goals.
Ask if each goal or activity moves you closer to achieving your
mission. If it doesn’t, eliminate it. Periodically review and revise
your mission statement.
- Backwards Planning: A
planning strategy that works from the goal back to your next action.
Start with the end goal in mind. What do you have to have in place to
accomplish it? OK, now what do you have to have in place to accomplish
what you have to have in place to accomplish your end goal? And what do
you have to have in place to accomplish that? And so on, back to something you already have in place and/or can put in place immediately. That’s your next action.
- Tune Out:
Create a personal privacy zone by wearing headphones. People are much
more hesitant to interrupt someone wearing headphones. Note: actually
listening to music through your headphones is optional — nobody knows
but you.
- Write It Down: Don’t rely on your
memory as your system. Write down the things you need to do, your
schedule, anything you might need to refer to, and every passing thought
so you can relax, knowing you won’t forget. Use your brain for
thinking, use paper or your computer for keeping track of stuff.
- Gap Time:
The little blocks of time we have during the day while waiting for the
bus, standing in line, waiting for a meeting to start, etc. Have a list
of small, 5-minute tasks that you can do in these moments, or carry
something to read or work on to make the most of these spare minutes.
- Monotasking:
We like to think of ourselves as great multitaskers, but we aren’t.
What we do when we multitask is devote tiny slices of time to several
tasks in rapid succession. Since it takes more than a few minutes
(research suggests as long as 20) to really get into a task, we end up
working worse and more slowly than if we devoted longer blocks of time
to each task, worked until it was done, and moved on to the next one.
- Habits:
Habits are as much about the way we see and respond to the world as
about the actions we routinely take. Examine your own habits and ask
what they say about your relation to the world — and what would have to
change to create a worldview in which your goals were attainable.
- Triggers:
Place meaningful reminders around you to help you remember, as well as
to help create better habits. For example, put the books you need to
take back to the library in front of the door, so you can’t leave the
house without seeing them and remembering they need to go back.
- Unclutter:
Clutter is anything that’s out of place and in the way. IT’s not
necessarily neatness — someone can have a rigorously neat workspace and
not be able to get anything done. It’s being able to access what you
need, when you need it, without breaking the flow of your work to find
it. Figure out what is “clutter” in your working and living spaces, and
fix that.
- Visualize: Imagine yourself having
accomplished your goals. What is your life like? Are you who you want
to be? If not, rethink your goals. If so, then visualize yourself
taking the steps you need to take to get there. You’ve got yourself a
plan; write it down and do it.
- Tickler File: A
set of 43 folders, labeled 1 – 31 and January – December, used to remind
us of tasks we need to do on a specific day. For instance, if you have
a trip on March 23rd, you’d put your itinerary, tickets, and other
material in the “March” folder. At the start of each month, you move the
previous month’s folder to the back. On March 1st, you’d transfer your
travel information into the “23″ folder. Each day, you move the previous
day’s folder to the back. On the 23rd, the “23″ folder will be at the
front, and everything you need that day will be there for you.
- ToDon’t List: A list of things not to do — useful for keeping track of habits that lead you to be unproductive, like playing online flash games.
- Templates: Create templates for repetitive tasks, like letters, customer reply emails, blog posts, etc.
- Checklists:
When planning any big task, make a checklist so you don’t forget the
steps while in the busy middle part of doing it. Keep your checklists
so you can use them next time you have to do the same task.
- No:
Learning to say “no” — to new commitments, to interruptions, to
anything — is one of the most valuable skills you can develop to keep
you focused on your own commitments and give you time to work on them.
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