25 February 2007
Down a new path
Posted by Brian under: My Thoughts; Productivity; Work .
The to-do lists at work and at home started to pile up with no end in sight. The stress levels were peaking at previously unseen levels. Dreams started to be less about beautiful places and beautiful woman (Val), and more about work (more like a nightmare). I decided it was time for a change. Time to take back control of my life by having more control over my day to day schedule. I’ve got most of the basis to do this with classes that I’ve taken through my work. Thanks to Franklin Covey I’ve got a good method for taking a few minutes at the beginning of the week, and a few more each morning to schedule out my day, and keep up with all of the tasks that I needed to complete. I went through the training almost three years ago, but back then there weren’t that many tasks that I had to complete. I could keep up with all of them in my head, and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth. So the first task in getting organized was to re-implement the daily planner. I opted for the electronic version due to the fact that I spend a fair amount of time on my computer, and most of my tasks come down through email. I’ve been using the planner again now for only two weeks, but it seems to be helping. Less forgetting items, and less time thinking “now what was it I needed to do?”, and more time actually getting things done. Second and Third on the list of things to do was read the book “Lifehacker - 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day”, and “Getting Things Done”. Lifehacker is done, and several of the tips are implemented. The most major change has been reducing my 23 different email folders and sub folders down to just four. Now I am left with only the Inbox, Action, Archive and Hold folders. The premise is to do something with everything that comes into the inbox, and keep it cleared out. If it takes less than a minute to do, then just do it. If it takes more than a minute, move it to the Action folder. If you need to keep it around for a short time, or wait for someone else to do it, then it goes in the Hold folder. And everything ends up in the Archive folder. How do you find something a month later then? Using the advanced search features built into most modern email clients, or using the Google Desktop. The only hitch that I can see to going to this method is Subject lines to emails need to get more specific. No more subject lines like this:
One Comment so far...
Kacy Says:
1 March 2007 at 3:24 pm.
Hey Andrew - Do you still check this sight? Guess what…one of the helicopters on my line is being built for Lowes. One of the littles ones…an S-76…the sixth hundred and fifty third one that we’ve built. Maybe one day you will be an executive and get to ride in it…and when that day comes…hopefully it won’t crash. Some bad luck though…# 653 was one of the first ones we outsourced to a non-union company in PA…which managed to piss all of our floor workers off and is taking about 4 times as long to build. :o/