Diigo - A really useful program

A program I’m finding incredibly useful at the moment is Diigo. It’s an online bookmarking service, which allows you to annotate and highlight webpages. It’s at last solved the problem of what I do with interesting websites and articles, other than just let them pile up in the “Favourites” section of Internet Explorer.

Now I can easily find any webpage that I have bookmarked, and not only find it but also see the bits I found especially interesting with any comments that I made.

That’s only scratching the surfuce of what Diigo can do. This video will give you a much better idea than I can describe in a short posting:

Just Do Three Things

A correspondent has drawn my attention to an article on the New Music Strategies blog entitled Just Do Three Things 

It’s a very sensible article aimed at musicians particularly. But of course it applies to anyone who has trouble organising themselves and doesn’t have the desire to embark on a full-scale time management system. Often little tips like this can make a real difference in someone’s life.

Useful Google Features

We all know that Google is not just a search engine by now, but Google has a whole range of functions of which most people are unaware. Here’s a couple:

Dictionary. Type “define:” (without the quotation marks) plus a word into the seach box and you will get a list of web definitions. Try it with “define: time management” and see what you get. Don’t forget the colon after “define”.

Clock. Type “time” (again without the quotation marks) into the search box and it will come up with the correct time where you are located. Very useful for days on which the time has changed like today! Or you can type “time:” plus a place name and you will get the time anywhere in the world, e.g. time: Moscow.

Three Skills of an Effective Time Manager

I was asked the other day what I considered to be the skills needed for effective time management. I could of course have produced a list as long as my arm, but on reflection I decided that there were three skills which lie at the root of being effective. In fact they are not so much skills as attitudes.

1. What’s really important? The ability to identify what is really important to your work and the determination to concentrate on it is fundamental. To identify this you have to be quite clear what you are aiming to achieve overall and what is needed to get there. This attitude is the exact opposite of the sort of “thinking” behind phrases like I really need to run a marketing campaign, but I haven’t been able to get round to it.
   
2. Think systems. Businesses are often made or broken by how good their systems are. If your own personal systems are bad they will waste vast amounts of your time and hold you back. Poor time managers tend to use “work-arounds” when a system doesn’t work properly. Effective time managers take the time to put the system right so that the work-arounds are no longer necessary.
   
3. Work to completion. The effective time manager never leaves things unfinished. That doesn’t mean that he or she necessarily finishes everything in one session. What it does mean is that the momentum is kept going and that loose ends are tidied up. Poor time managers tend to start projects off with a burst of enthusiasm and then let them slide once the original enthusiasm has abated. The result is not only that the project isn’t completed but that the time spent on it is not available for other projects.

Over the next few days I intend to write in a bit more depth about each of these three subjects.

Feedback from 19 September seminar

Here is the feed-back from the 19th September one-day “Do It Tomorrow” seminar:

“I have a much better understanding of the process and procedures having been on the course. I found the team sessions and inter discussions very informative.”
Alister Mc Kinnon Clark

“Practical, step-by-step solutions to get back on track and keep all my business and personal commitments.”
Scott Allison, Access Business Communications, www.callabc.co.uk

“Excellent exploration of the principles and how to make them work effectively in one’s own context/role/environment.”
Nick Garring

“Very helpful to recap on the book and to share ideas and difficulties with other people who have read/written the book. It’s now down to me to implement and I am pleased that the day has given me fresh motivation to continue.”
Jackie Brazier

Update on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 8:37 by Mark Forster

Since writing the above, I have received the following email from Alister Mc Kinnon Clark:

Good Morning Mark

Thank you for the Seminar on Friday which I thoroughly enjoyed, and more importantly found very useful. I am very determined to work on and install the principles.

I already have a tidy desk and am working on one thing at a time and have minimized my interruptions using some of the techniques we learned on Friday.

I found the depth that we explored time management very refreshing and quite different to many of the courses that I have been on, this has enabled me to see where I can more effective and also more productive. I thought the number of people attending the course was a great balance and that their input and sharing of ideas was interesting and helpful.

I look forward to implementing more of the processes in the next few weeks and reaping the rewards by retaining my sanity.

Kind regards

Alister

Procrastination: the holistic approach

Virtually everyone has problems with procrastination at some point in their life. For many people it is relatively easily overcome. For others it has a permanently crippling effect on their lives. Whatever their talents and however big their dreams, they are unable to express them fully because they keep putting the necessary action off. So their dreams and visions remain dreams and visions and nothing more for year after year.

If you are one of those seriously affected by procrastination, the usual band-aid approaches such as concentrating on the first step will not be sufficient to prevent the feeling that, if you carry on the way you are, written on your tombstone will be the epitaph “Could have done better”. So in this article I want to look at some of the deeper reasons why people procrastinate.

Procrastination is usually seen in people who for one reason or another feel unsatisfied with their work. It comes worst in two types of people - those who feel overwhelmed and those who don’t have enough to do. Frequently they are the same person in different circumstances. They need the pressure of deadlines and the consequences of missing them to get them moving at all.

If this describes you, then you are showing the symptoms of being out of the flow. To be in the flow of work you need to feel challenged but not overwhelmed. If you are overwhelmed you lose the sense of flow, and the exactly the same applies if you are not challenged enough. The result in both cases is dissatisfaction, the feeling that you are not achieving anything. “Busyness” and “goofing off” are two sides of the same coin.

The real solution to procrastination therefore is to get back into the flow. You need to identify the work that uses your talents and your skills It should present you with fresh challenges that stretch your ability but don’t go over your head. A good question to ask yourself is whether, in the context of your organisation, you are doing work that only you can do. If anyone could do your work then you are unlikely to be being stretched or challenged in any way at all. If you find you are not using your skills or that you are overwhelmed with trivial work, you have fallen into the trap of being busy rather than productive. In that case procrastination is almost inevitable.

Another closely related cure for procrastination is to be on top of your work. Even work you don’t particularly like becomes much less resistance-inducing if you are on top of it. Not many of us like washing dishes, but think of the difference between doing the washing up immediately after every meal so that it is out of the way, and leaving it for a week so that you have the constant threat of it hanging over your head!

To achieve this, you need to fight backlogs like the plague. Never allow yourself to run up against deadlines. Always use all the time available to do something. For example if you are given two weeks to write a report, then use the whole two weeks. Don’t leave it till the evening of the night before the deadline!

Letting work pile up into a backlog drains everything you do. Clearing a backlog should always be the first priority. Nothing is more important. If it proves impossible to clear a backlog, then you need to review your commitments. If you have so much on that you are constantly behind on your work then you will always be under stress.

If you take this kind of holistic approach to procrastination, you are much more likely to find that it drops away of its own accord, rather than your having to fight it every inch of the way. Maybe your tombstone will read “Achieved everything he/she set out to do”

Is this the way I want it?

One of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves is “Is this the way I want it?” It’s a question that we can ask about our lives as a whole, or about the simple things which affect us every day. So for instance as I write this article I can look around my office and say “Is this the way I want my office to be?” If my answer is “Yes, it is”, then I can pat myself on the back and feel a sense of satisfaction.

More likely my answer will be “No, it isn’t”. Then my next question must be “What do I need to do to make it the way I want it to be?” In the case of an office the answer to that may simply be: “I need to tidy the bookshelf” in which case I can just get on with tidying the bookshelf. Sometimes the answer may be much more complicated than that: “I need to get a bigger office”. In that case I can ask myself the further question “What do I need to do to get a bigger office?” The answer to that might be “I need to get a bigger house!” That leads to “What do I need to do to get a bigger house?” Sometimes very small questions can lead to big results.

“Is this the way I want it?” is a question which is significant both when dealing with major issues and minor annoyances. Sometimes quite small things can get left undone, and irritate us every time we see them. For instance we may think every time we open a certain drawer “I really must sort that out”. But we never do. Everything that is not the way we want it drains us. The more things that we have in our lives that we put up with, the less we are going to be happy in our work or life.

If our workspace is not the way we want it, we won’t be working as well as we could be. If our house is not the way we want it, we will not be able to relax properly or enjoy entertaining our friends. If our weight or our fitness is not the way we want it, we are putting our health at risk. Often if we neglect these things they gradually get worse, until they let us down with a bump.

Sometimes of course we have to accept that there is nothing we can do about something. Not many of us like paying taxes for example, but we don’t have much choice about it. In that case it is important that we learn to let go of it so that it no longer affects us. Sometimes we put up with things for the sake of other people. That is our conscious choice.

As an exercise, you could try walking around your house or workplace with a notebook, asking yourself “Is this the way I want it?” Write down everything you find that isn’t the way you want it to be. Then pick one thing off the list and resolve to make it the way you want it to be. Pick something easy to start off with. You might set aside a portion of time each day to cross more items off the list.

(This article was published in the latest edition of my newsletter)

Feedback from the One Day Seminar

Here are the comments from the One Day Seminar which I ran on Thursday last week:

“Amongst the most worthwhile uses you can make of a day that you’re not able to spend outdoors. Mark Forster has genuine insight and wisdom, in contrast to the many impractical and complex ‘systems’ on offer. Superb.”
Perry Duke, Head of Finance Control Division, DEFRA, www.perryduke.org

“A good way to crystalise the book. Now I have consolidated Do It Tomorrow I am looking forward to applying it.”
Aaron Pascoe

“Great value, really good to be able to bring the fantastic ideas in the book to life”.
Iain Gray, Win More Clients www.winmoreclients.co.uk

“I am optimistic that I will implement the DIT structure. Many useful ideas”.
Pauline Hay

“Very useful in terms of learning about practically applying the DIT system”.
Frank Wessely

“It was very good to meet you and pick at my own personal issues with keeping going on the DIT system.”
Mark Jameson

There are still places on the next seminar this Friday, October 19th. Click here for details.

101 Little Hacks to Help You Get Your Work Finished More Quickly

There’s a great articles on the Bootstrapper blog, entitled 101 Little Hacks to Help You Get Your Work Finished More Quickly. The tips range from downloading free mind mapping software to prioritizing by location.

I think everyone will find something useful here - I certainly did!

Panic Stations!

It may be due to unforeseen circumstances or just to our own bad planning or procrastination, but we all sometimes get to the point where we have so much work to do that we have no idea where to begin. We are seized with paralysis - we can’t start on anything because of all the other things pressing on us. Of course doing nothing makes the problem even worse. So we get into a vicious circle: we can’t act because of our sense of panic; the fact that we’re not acting makes the situation worse - and therefore our panic increases.

It’s at times like this that we may do some really stupid things. These may range from the relatively mild, like snapping our colleagues’ heads off, to the disastrous, such as resigning from our job or having a nervous breakdown. Once we lose control what usually happens is a crash of some sort. If we’re lucky we will escape with just bruised self- esteem, but we may have irretreviably damaged a project or our whole career.

So what can we do when we first start feeling that sense of panic? We want to be able to get back in control. It may seem impossible at the time but in fact there are several things we can do.

Basically there are two things to remember when we get into this state. Firstly, it is motivated by fear, so anything we can do to reduce the fear will help. The best remedy for fear is always action. So we need to stop running around like a headless chicken and start taking purposeful action.

The second thing to remember is that in this state of panic we are being driven by our primitive mind, not our rational mind. We are in the “fight, flight or freeze” state that we inherited from the days when our ancestors were lizard-like creatures sitting on rocks. We perceive a threat and we tend to react to it, rather than approach it in a rational way.

In my book “Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play” I suggest writing down a list of everything that you have to do and then grading it “Must Do”, “Should Do”, “Could Do”. Concentrate on the “Must Dos” and you will quickly increase your sense of control so that you get out of the vicious circle.

Another thing you can do is to identify the one thing that you are most resisting doing. Very often if you can get this moving you will free up all the other things that you have to do. You usually know perfectly well what this is, even if you avoid thinking about it as much as possible! Ask yourself what the very first step would be to get this job done and concentrate on that. Once you’ve got started it is much easier to keep going.

Finally, remember that procrastination is often caused by perfectionism. We make tasks unnecessarily large because we can’t accept that we are going to do them anything less than perfectly. The result is that we often don’t do them at all! Counteract this by asking yourself “What’s the minimum I can do here that’s good enough?” Concentrate on getting that minimum done and you will start to regain control again.

(This article appeared in the latest edition of my newsletter)

Seminar October 11th

There are still places available on the full day seminar this Thursday (October 11th). Click here for details.

Please note that if you are already considering coming on this seminar, the method of applying for a place has changed due to the postal strike. Full details are given on the application form.

Seminar Booking Now Open

The booking is now open for the two one-day seminars which I am running in October:

Thursday October 11th

Friday October 19th

For further details and to download the booking form, click here.

Great Inspirational Movie

Here’s a great movie for inspiring yourself. Only three minutes long!

www.natureofsuccessmovie.com

Review of "Do It Tomorrow"

Rob Gourdie has written a very positive review of Do It Tomorrow on his blog. He’s only been using the methods for four days and has already found that they are revolutionising his life.

Seminar Dates: Advanced Notice

For your diary:

I am introducing a whole day seminar for those who have read Do It Tomorrow and would like the opportunity to explore how to adapt it to their own particular circumstances and to share their experiences of the system with other people. It will be an excellent opportunity to tailor the general principles contained in the book to your own working environment.

The cost for the whole day will be £225 + VAT. Meals are not included.

The first two of these seminars will be run in Horsham, West Sussex on the following dates:

• Thursday 11 October 2007
• Friday 19 October 2007

Booking for these seminars will open in the next few days. Watch out for it!

Just how organised do I have to be?

A question I often get asked is “Just how organised do I have to be?”

My answer is “enough and no more!”

Over-organisation can be almost as big a problem as under-organisation. The reason for this is that once you have got organised enough to carry out your function satisfactorily any further organisation is going to take up time and effort unproductively. We can all think up plenty of examples of this simply by bringing the words “government” and “bureaucracy” into our minds. When I was working on inner-city projects for the Church of England twenty or so years ago, I remember we were shown, as an example of “good practice”, the form which an American governmental organisation required projects to complete when they were applying for grants. It was forty pages long! Bear in mind that these grants were intended to help small community projects, whose staff were very hard-pressed and frequently not particularly literate. We decided not to use a form at all, but simply asked projects to write in and tell us whatever they felt like about what they intended to do - and if we liked the sound of it we went and looked at it on the ground.

Another aspect of organisation which people often have trouble with is keeping their desk tidy. In many organisations having a tidy desk is taken as being an indicator of efficiency. Whether this is really the case or not is doubtful. If you ask a successful businessperson what the secrets of their success were, I doubt if “having a tidy desk” would feature in their list. They may or may not have a tidy desk - it’s just that they don’t see the tidiness of their desk as being a relevant factor in their success.

Personally I’ve never found it easy to keep a tidy desk, and if I look at my desk now I’ve got a whole load of junk on it. Let’s have a look:

Two books I’m currently reading
A Travel Guide for my forthcoming holiday destination
A prescription I’ve just picked up from the pharmacy
A tube of toothpaste I bought at the same time
An empty cup of tea
My car keys
My wallet
My binoculars
A heap of credit card vouchers which I’m weeding
My task list
My list of personal contacts
A ballpoint pen

It looks a mess, but I can put my hands on every one of those items instantaneously, and they are all in the process of being actioned in some way. In other words, although it looks a mess, it is actually highly functional. If I try to keep my desk tidier, then a) I will have to spend much more time doing so; and b) I won’t be able to find so quickly the stuff which I’m using. Now of course a desk can easily become so untidy that it stops being functional and starts to impede your efficiency. I know all about that - I’ve been there! The point is that we need to find the degree of order which gives us the greatest degree of effectiveness.

Progress Report

I’ve been using the technique I described in Procrastination Buster for most of this week now, and I’m finding it a very efficient way of processing stuff. Although it may appear to be very different from the techniques described in Do It Tomorrow, it is actually based on very much the same principles. It is essentially a method of converting an open list into a series of closed lists (in this case numbering two items each). The advantage compared with Do It Tomorrow is that it is more flexible and can be fitted a bit more easily into irregular time slots. The disadvantage is that some work items will take longer before they get dealt with than others. I’ve still got one difficult item which I put on the list at the beginning of the week and remains unactioned. That’s almost certainly a lot less items than would be left over with a conventional To Do list, but with Do It Tomorrow, I would have actioned all the items either the day they came up or the day after.

Here are a few pointers which have surfaced for me this week while using this method:

• To Do lists always tend to suffer from list expansion - in other words they tend to grow faster than one can process the items. In order to avoid this happening it is important to keep the list well weeded by throwing out unnecessary items.
• As a guide you should be able to complete at least one circuit of the list during the course of an average day (bearing in mind that you will be actioning about half the items on the list on each circuit). If you can’t do that, you should take some time to weed the list.
• If you find yourself further from the end of the list at the end of the day than you were at the beginning, you are seriously trying to do too much! You need not only to weed the list, but look at your commitments too.
• Just as with Do It Tomorrow, you don’t necessarily have to do the whole of every item. You can always do part of it and then cross it out and re-enter it at the end of the list. This achieves the little and often ideal which I recommend in my books for dealing with major projects.

I’d be interested to hear from you in the Comments or in the Discussion Forum if you try out this method - and how you get on with it.

Back from Holiday

Many of us will be beginning to think about the holiday season round about now and how great it will be to get away from the office for a few weeks. But what about what happens when we get back from our break and find our computer full of 600+ unread emails?

There are basically four possible ways of dealing with these emails. Three are effective and one is ineffective. Unfortunately the ineffective one is the one most often used!

Method One
Go through all the emails picking out the ones you feel like doing something about and leaving the rest “for later”. This is the least effective method and unfortunately the most common. It results in a backlog of email that may take weeks to clear.

Method Two
Highlight the entire contents of the inbox and press the delete button. Highly effective! In fact an even better method is to write an Outlook rule before leaving on holiday which automatically deletes all email as it is received. However if you value your job it is probably a good idea to have an automatic reply to all emails saying you are away until such and such a date, and that emails should be resent on your return. You can give a colleague’s address for urgent matters.

Method Three
Assuming you are not brave enough for Method Two, then the third method is to sit down for a few hours and clear the lot. This will probably take less time than you expect and will mean you can now start again with a clear in-box. This is very effective but requires a certain amount of will-power. It also depends on your having left sufficient time in your schedule to carry it out.

Method Four
This is perhaps the most realistic method and still quite effective. You treat the email that has come in during the holiday as a backlog. Your first step is to move the lot into a Backlog folder. Then deal with new email as it comes in first, and chip away at the backlog second. This means you are straight back on top of new email, and the backlog will diminish quickly because it’s not being added to.

You can use exactly the same techniques for the paperwork, telephone calls and tasks that have piled up on your desk during your time off.

And it’s a really good idea to decide which method you’re going to use when you get back before you go on holiday!

More on the Procrastination Buster

There are many other ways in which one can use the principle outlined in my previous post. Remember the aim is to make a difficult or unwelcome task seem relatively easier by pitting it against an even more difficult or unwelcome task.

One way you could do this if you have a long to do list is by having a rule that you have to action half the items on a page (rounded up) before you can move onto the next page. Each time you get to the end of the list, you start again from the beginning.

Since you’ll be constantly adding items to the last page, you can wait until the page is full until starting work on the items. That happens surprisingly quickly if you write down literally everything that you have to do!

Procrastination Buster

There are many ways to beat procrastination, and I have dealt with quite a few in my books and on this blog. Here’s one which I don’t think I have written about before.

One way to get yourself moving on a task you don’t want to do is to use it as an avoidance activity for a task you are trying to avoid even more!

So for instance let’s see what happens if we have a hard task to do and several easy tasks. Our task list will look like this:

Hard Task
Easy Task 1
Easy Task 2
Easy Task 3

If we only have time to complete three out of the four tasks, there’s no prizes for guessing which task will get left undone!

But what happens if our task list looks like this?

Incredibly Hard Task
Extremely Hard Task
Very Hard Task
Hard Task

Which task is going to get done first? Yes, suddenly the Hard Task seems relatively easy and becomes the most attractive. The difficulty of a task is relative to the difficulty of the other tasks one has to do.

We can take advantage of this to process our to do list. The simplest technique is to start at the top of the list and do either the first item or the next item. We are presenting ourselves with two items, and chosing one. One will appear to be easier relative to the other, so we will do that one. Once we’ve done that item, we move on to the next item and compare it in the same way with the following item. Again, we make a choice between the two items and do the one we prefer. We carry on in the same way to the end of the list.

Once we’ve reached the end of the list we go through it again. This time of course the items are the ones we rejected the first time so they are more difficult than on the first pass. However we continue to compare one item with the next item, and do the easier. We are constantly doing the easier or more attractive of two items.

The mental effect of doing it this way is that we fool ourselves into thinking that we are always doing the easy item. They may in absolute terms be getting more difficult, but relatively they are the easy ones.

This technique is designed for use with an open list to which you are adding new items as you go along. There is of course no need to use it with a closed list because you can simply do the easiest items first anyway.