Getting things done

There must be hundreds of ways to become more effective and productive but here is a method I have been using for the last few months that really seems to have worked.

The old way of working

In the old days the first thing I would do in the morning was boot up the PC log into my email and get stuck in to whatever was in the inbox. In other words I was reacting to other people's agendas and allowing them to define how I started my working day.

The new way of working

For the first 15 minutes of the day...leave the PC alone or turned off!

Allow yourself to reflect and think about what is important to you in the day ahead. Without the chatter and noise of email, you'll quickly put together a list of things that can usefully be done that day.

Work sideways

When writing out that list, turn your piece of paper sideways so that you are writing with the long edge horizontal and the short edge vertical. It seems to give you more space to write down your thoughts and allows them to flow more easily.

There is another reason to work sideways and I'll get to that in a moment.

Start working!

So now begin your regular day but be guided by your list first and your email inbox second. Put a line through each task as you complete it. It feels good to complete your own tasks.

End of day

At the end of the working day, your sheet of paper will probably be covered with notes, scribbles and crossings out, this is a valuable document so why not take a picture of it.

I use my Canon digital camera to take a picture of the page (because it was turned sideways it fits the frame very well). When I connect the camera to my PC the image is automatically date stamped and stored in my picture folders on the PC. This means I can easily go back and refer to what I was doing on any given day. The best thing is that this automatic indexing driven by the date stamp from when the picture was taken.

Give it a try

Try this for yourself, I'm sure there are numerous tweaks that might improve the method but this has the advantage of being very simple to use and understand. No matter how many PDAs and programs I use, notes taken on a piece of paper still seem to come out on top. Using this method I have those notes sequenced and stored very easily.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on.