A guide to personal productivity

Personal productivity is a strange ’science’. Quite a while ago I used to think it lay somewhere between evangelical preachers grabbing your money on live television, and How-to-Get-from-Where-You-are-to-Where-You-Want-to-be self-help books.

Actually a lot of things written about personal productivity do fall into that category. But, in the last few years the revolution of simplicity over complexity, software that “does less” and a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done have opened up the world of self-management systems (termed action management) to a whole new crowd.

GTD was a revolution (1)(2) in that it defined a logical, structured and technology agnostic system (a bundle of index cards being one implementation) that appealed to the geeky crowd and open-source mentality. It is thus the topic of much debate and refactoring, leaving the subject to take a life of its own as it spreads via a sleuth of new software tools and thought.

I’ve been employing my own version of GTD for several years now and after evaluating the new task management software ‘Things’ (not for me until they have cloud-sync), coupled with the dawn of a new year, I decided to sit down and review my own workflow and make some changes here and there. I thought it might be interesting to share how I’m now organising myself.

Disclaimers

The system described is for my personal management. Although we organise company-related tasks and projects using the same basic methodology, more group-based processes and systems are used. It’s also just about task management and does not cover my general data organisation (contacts, schedule, etc.)

So this is a method that works well for me, which is loosely based on the GTD principles (for which the Wikipedia page is an excellent introduction).

Tools

Backpack – This is the cornerstone of everything. A super simple, web-based organisation tool that is so flexible it can accommodate almost any work flow you can think of. Although it has recently grown into a group-based, ‘intranet’ system, it still scales-down to support the lone user.

My tasks are essentially organised into a series of to-do lists that are in turn grouped into a number of pages. My page setup looks like this:

• 0. Dropbox – This is my task inbox. Anything that I have on my mind initially ends up in here, whether it’s a quick admin chore, an idea for a new project, or a life goal – the dropbox gets everything out of my head and stored safely into my system. Backpack even supports emailing text and files directly into this page. It also contains my today/urgent list (more on that later).
• 1. Tasks – General to-dos and things that have a definite goal are grouped together here: ‘buy X a birthday present’, ‘pay electricity bill’ and ‘pump up bicycle tyres’ are all examples of short, succinct tasks. Within this page I have five lists titled General, People, Administration, Finances and Technology, which is what I can categorise most of my tasks into. I often make location-based task lists too. These are groups of tasks that I need to do the next time I’m at at a certain place, like the post office or train station.
• 2. Projects – As I’ve already mentioned, all of my company/team-related projects are in another system entirely. This page is for my solo, non-client projects. The definition of a project, as opposed to a task, is something that has a long term, abstract goal with an ongoing series of tasks to reach it. Examples of projects are Writing, Creative, Learning German and Chess Club. Each project has its own list on the page and always contains the next atomic tasks I need to complete in order to move that project forward.
• 3. Waiting For – A record of everything that I’m waiting for other people to complete. This page is grouped up into Orders (goods that I’ve purchased online and am waiting to arrive in the mail), Administration (usually questions about some legal or taxation issue) and Financial (people who owe me money :)
• 4. To Buy – A simple list of things that I need to buy, grouped by the general locations where I can get them from.
• 5. Someday – This is the daydreaming list. ‘Write a film’, ‘fly to the stars’ and ’save the whale’ are all things I (maybe) want to do at some point in my life, but there’s no way of breaking them down into concrete, atomic tasks at the moment, so they end up here where they’re safe and organised.
• @PAGES – I have a lot of information pages where I just group together thoughts and supporting documents about things I’m working on. I prefix all of these with @’s.
• §PAGES – Finally, I lied slightly about this being a totally personal system. My girlfriend Lucy and I share some pages and these are prefixed with §’s. The examples above are to store films we’d both like to see and who last did the grocery shopping.

The final type of task is the recurring task. These are the things that come around on a regular basis, like visiting the dentist, paying taxes or watering the plants. Backpack supports these too with its ‘reminders’ feature. Simply add the task to receive an email (and optionally an SMS) at the defined interval. Reminders are also great for single items that have a specific deadline – this really helps to keep tasks out of your calendar.

iPhone – This device has really revolutionised my productivity. I’m often dashing to meetings out of the office, or going between Zürich and Copenhagen, and having my entire system stored up in the cloud was a frustrating experience at these times. With the iPhone I can access and update everything from (almost) anywhere. It really is the key to my productivity now and although outside of the general scope of this discussion, a constantly synced address book and calendar is another huge boom.

Moleskine – Despite my trumpeting of the iPhone, my Moleskine notebook still has an important function. There are always times when it is more pleasurable to jot notes and sketch ideas with a pen. Of course all useful information and new tasks are extracted from the pages as soon as possible and entered into my digital system. Nothing important should only exist in a notebook!

Zero inbox – The final tool is more of a general methodology that has some implications for my task management. I ruthlessly strive to “zero my inbox” at every opportunity. By this I mean deleting every e-mail that has no related actions left on it. Therefore my inbox also serves as a kind of secondary ‘dropbox’. If there are e-mails in there, then they require action.

Typically these actions are just replying to the message, as if there is a larger task associated with it then it usually gets forwarded to my Backpack dropbox page. An empty inbox is a happy inbox and I believe it’s one of the best ways to deal with the general e-mail stress most people suffer with.

Deleting every inbound email might sound a little scary at first; what about all the valuable information in them? Well, firstly if you’re well organised then you’ll find there should be little of importance left in there. Secondly, most significant mails require a reply from me, so the full conversations end up being stored in my ’sent’ folder anyway.

The process

Now that all of my tasks are safe and organised, I need to do the most important thing and actually complete them! I process my tasks and ideas in three review iterations. There’s the daily cycle, the weekly cycle and the soul-searching cycle:

Daily cycle – Each morning, before I begin anything else, I go through my pages and start prioritising. The first step is to take everything out of the dropbox, classify it and move it to the relevant page and to-do list group. Then I scan pages 1-4, reorder some things if necessary, tick off completed tasks that might still be open and build up a mental image of what lies ahead of me. Even though the individual tasks number into the 100’s, I find that I quickly build up a mind map of the important things that need doing for the weeks ahead anyway, which makes the daily scan quite quick.

I then gather up all the urgent tasks and move them to the today/urgent list that sits atop my dropbox page. There might be some leftover things from yesterday that didn’t get done too, so these are reaccessed and left in today’s agenda or moved back to a categorised list.

Weekly cycle – A more thorough scan that takes place once a week, usually over the weekend or on Monday morning as part of my daily cycle. During this session I scrutinise all tasks still open – checking if they are still valid, asking myself if their importance has changed, creating new list categories if required and performing general ‘housekeeping’. It might seem like a chore at times, but giving myself just 15 to 30 minutes a week to review how I’m doing is a very beneficial process.

Soul-searching cycle – This is the irregular one; the one I do when I’m periodically questioning if I’m achieving everything I want to, looking for New Year’s resolutions or want to tackle one of the more abstract goals I’ve set myself. It’s meant to involve taking some time out with the ’someday’ list and seeing if now is the right time to save that whale, but quite often I end up reviewing and refactoring the very system itself.

Summary

There are many benefits to the business of being hyper-organised – increased productivity is obviously the major reason for undertaking such a mission. However, I also find a beauty in having every single task and idea out of my head and organised in my system. It tends to wrap ‘doing important stuff’ up into a single task. When I have time to dedicate to my jobs, I sit down and and work through them, but the rest of the time I find I’m able to put things to the back of my mind, safe in the knowledge that everything important is documented somewhere. If something new comes up then I just add it to my dropbox, knowing that it can be processed later and not forgotten.

I think I’ve covered most of my system here, but I’m very interested in hearing how other people organise themselves too, so please add your comments and thoughts.