Two decisions I made to help me actually get things done

There is no shortage of advice out there, both on the web and in print, when it comes to the topic of personal productivity. Probably more than any other generation before us, we today feel the increased pressure of trying to get more things done in the same 24-hour day that our parents had at their disposal … and it doesn’t seem to get any easier. It’s probably one of the negative side-effects of the information age - we have access to so much more data, so many more ideas, and that brings on the pressure of exploring many new avenues that were probably not even considered by those who came before us.

I personally believe that one should only look at ways to increase personal productivity once the list of tasks was properly inspected and that person is convinced that each task, once completed, will bring that person closer to his or her personal goals. It really makes no sense to try to be more productive in doing things that will only sidetrack you from your goals - I think we all can agree that it’s so easy for such ‘junk’ to-do items to appear on our task lists.

I personally read many books and web articles on the topic of personal productivity. Many people out there claim to have come up with the ultimate system for helping you get things done. Much of what I read on the topic I forgot already - it’s quite obvious then that such advice is only useful and has a chance of working when you’re actually ready to put it in practice.

Here are two rules I’ve been trying to follow lately to help me get more out of my time:

1. Redeem the time by dividing larger tasks into smaller parts that can be completed when time is available.

I personally would prefer to work on something from start to finish and not be interrupted. I really don’t like loose ends that result when I have to start various tasks without completing them. Well…that’s what I’d like - but life certainly doesn’t work like that. It’s very rare when I can say “here’s a two hour block - go ahead and do task A”. Life just isn’t partitioned like that - interruptions are a fact of life. Therefore, when will that two hour task actually get done?

Let me give you an example. Say you place an order for pizza delivery, and you have 20 minutes until it gets there and you can start eating. What do you do in those 20 minutes? I would often consider that as wasted time - not really long enough for doing anything important - and would probably just go to digg.com (fill in your favorite time waster website) to see what’s happening in the world. I just let go of twenty minutes in which I did nothing that brought me closer to my goals. This was mainly because I considered that time period as not long enough to fit any of the tasks on my list. If I had divided, in advance, a larger task into smaller parts with concrete goals, maybe I would have actually been able to work on something important during that time.

I’d just like to clarify here that I’m not proposing the idea of multitasking - this is not what it’s about. Multitasking is something that’s better left to the CPUs in our computers. If anybody says that they can handle 2 phone calls and 3 emails at the same time I think they’re just deceiving themselves. The act of context switching - moving from one task to another - can be time consuming and should be kept to a minimum.

What I’m proposing here is a way to make the most of those 10, 20, 30 minute intervals during the day when we might actually be able to get stuff done if our big and important tasks would be properly divided into smaller parts.

2. Try not to handle the same issue more than once.

This is actually a rewrite of a suggestion I saw somewhere on how to be more productive when dealing with email: do not handle the same email more than once. The idea is this: when an email comes into your inbox, do one of three things:

• if it’s junk, delete it and get it out of there
• if it’s something you can deal with relatively fast, then do it right away and get that email out of there
• otherwise, if the email pertains to an issue that would take longer to deal with, quickly file it away into a special area and deal with it later

The idea is to keep the inbox clean at all times - treat the inbox as a routing station not as a collection area. This way you’ll quickly know what you still have to work on.

I try to take the same approach when dealing with my to-do list. Once I have a good set of priorities and tasks (I’m done cleaning the junk), then I try to first get done those things that can be taken care of quickly. This way I can quickly get the satisfaction of actually getting some stuff done. For the longer tasks, I’ll quickly divide them into smaller parts (see above) and then file them away for when time will become available. What I try to avoid here is having to constantly look at task A and ask myself how I’d go about doing it. I should only have to do that once. After that I’ll divide it into smaller parts and work on those individually. If I don’t follow this principle, then I would just get discouraged about my productivity since I’d keep looking at the same long task that won’t change and won’t go away.

There it is - I hope you’ll find this information useful.

Filed under: Productivity