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

I am very proud of my organisation system and will talk about it to anyone who will listen. I think the key to organisation is to develop your own system and believe the reason many people don’t continue using systems is because they are trying to use someone else’s structure. However, the situation has arisen that provides me the opportunity to discover if my organisation system is transferable. This is only a very small scale test because my husband, ED, has asked to learn more about my system.

ED and I have very different personalities. I like to move between things quickly and if something doesn’t work easily I move on to something else. Whereas my husband will not give up on anything until he has solved it, even if he has to think about it for several days. Our work is also different, I’m an environmental consultant working on projects in the UK while he works on international engineering projects. Therefore I am intrigued to know if my system is suitable for him and his work environment.

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:

Things didn’t go as I expected over the past week. My new role involves an increased amount of time out of the office, but I thought with my new organisation system that I could easily cope being away for a few days. And I did up to a point, but having had time to think about it over the long weekend I know that I could perform much better and be much more effective.

Last week I was only in the office for one and a half days; I had two trips to London (including one overnight) and one to Birmingham. So all this travel means I need to be make effective use of my time in the office to meet people and use specific software I can’t use on other computers, but I also need to be more aware of those tasks that I can complete while I’m out of the office. Of course, Getting things done has the solution with the use of contexts. I tried using these in my first attempt at implementing GTD, but I didn’t find it very useful because I was in the office most of the time. However I think I will benefit considerably from considering this concept again.

For the last few weeks I’ve felt overloaded at work with an ever increasing to do list which I wasn’t making much impact on. Instead of the usual 3 sheets of double sided A5 paper it had stretched on to the 5th sheet and I was finding it unmanageable.

You know what it is like, each time you look at your list it makes you feel down because you don’t know how you will be able to clear it. Plus because you are writing everything down the list is growing longer each day; and usually by more tasks than you cross off. However all this changed a few days ago.

I have struggled previously with paper diaries because of changing appointments which get messy and then confusing to decipher; I have therefore stuck with electronic diaries for the past few years. However I had inspiration in the hairdressers a few months ago when I realised they booked appointments in with a pencil so they can rub them out if they move. Such a simple tip that I had never considered.

I am currently using a standard DIY planner A5 calendar template. Its not perfect for my needs, but because I haven’t managed to create my own template I have adapted my use of theirs. You can read notes on the picture to help with the description by clicking on it.

The week pages

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.