blog to discovery

As the most popular post on my blog continues to be How I successfully plan my day I have realised there is obvious interest in my planner incorporating ideas from Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Get Everything Done : and Still Have Time to Play and Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management. Therefore I have decided to offer my planner as a download (and this will be a test for my free hosting ).

I developed the planner for my own organiser so it is not pretty. However now that I know it works for me I am intending to improve its appearance, therefore please let me know of any ideas you have on how I can improve it and I will consider incorporating them.

A5 day planner (148mm x 210 mm)

Downloaded a total of 111 times

When I first introduced the ideas from Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management all tasks that came in today were added to tomorrow’s list which meant I had a plan of action. However when I realised this wasn’t going to work and started developing my own system I realised I missed the daily plan of action which wasn’t provided with a complete task list which just provided a list of all the things I could be working on. I needed something to lead me through the day in a clear, productive and defined way, so I developed a today planner.

Morning routine

At the top of the page are the tasks I should complete every morning to ensure I am set up for the day.

The current initiative is an idea of Mark Forster’s, so I will let him describe it:

The second section of my organiser is my ASAP list; these are all the actions that I could work on now and should be completed as soon as possible. Unfortunately because I’ve been following Getting Things Done guidance and writing everything down the list is long, but I know that everything is listed.

The concepts

The list is based on the idea of a next action list from Getting Things Done, but I have also incorporated some ideas from Mark Forster’s booksGet Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play and still have time to play and Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management. Mark Forster is not a supporter of a to do list:

I like computers. I got my first computer in 1995 before going to university, when most of my friends thought I was mad not putting the money towards a car. I got my first pda in 2000 just after I finished my undergraduate degree. There are so many reasons why I like IT solutions that when I create a new system I always use a computer.

However I have never found my pda (Palm Tungsten E) very useful for organising tasks. The best programme I have found so far is shadowplan, however I think because I am unable to install any desktop software at work I fail to capture all my tasks so it became an ineffective system. Therefore before Christmas I decided to try something new and started using a spreadsheet for my system incorporating aspects of both GTD and DIT. There was a sheet for:

• backlog tasks

Before Christmas things were getting busier and more hectic and I knew if I didn’t want to be stressing about my workload I had to review my system. For me, the way forward was to develop my own system incorporating ideas from other people as well as things that already worked for me. No one else know how my mind works or my working and home environments, therefore I do not believe that anyone else’s system can be implemented ‘as is’ into my life.

I started by rereading the three books mentioned in my previous post and wrote down all the key points on paper and just collected them. I then started analysing the information, looking for the key points and any similarities where the different methods could work together.

As a consultant working on multiple projects, task management is a key skill and one that I’ve never really been taught. Instead (after noticing the importance of the skill) I tried to improve by picking up tips from colleagues and general concepts on time management.

As part of this hunt for improvement, I read Get everything done and still have time to play by Mark Forster (links: USA, UK) a few years ago. I found it full of new ideas and implemented several of them, such as rotating between projects, working little and often and working on the area of most resistance first, and found they really made a difference. It was a great feeling at first, but then I started to noticed all the areas which still needed improvements.