Get Everything Done

A remark today by a reader in my Discussion Forum reminded me of something which had intrigued me in the past but which I had never followed up. This is the Noguchi Filing System. I was intrigued by it because it is in some ways similar to the filing system which I use myself and often recommend, though I developed this before I had heard of Noguchi.

In both systems the idea is that files are put on a shelf rather than in a filing cabinet, and the most recently used file is always replaced at the left end of the shelf so that files are in the order they were last used. This results in much faster retrieval of files because the most used files are always to be found towards the left of the shelf.

Where the systems differ is that I keep papers in fairly conventional subject files, while Noguchi suggests opening a folder (actually a cut-down large envelope) for every document.

I was very interested to know how this would work in practice. It is one of those counter-intuitive systems which can only be judged by trying it out.

So having armed myself with a large number of C4 envelopes, I started filing the Noguchi way this afternoon. And actually my first impression is that it works quite well, especially with the type of document one never quite knows what to do with. 

Looking at my shelf, from the left I now have the following documents each filed in its own envelope with a description written down the right hand edge, where I can see it easily:

• A leaflet giving changes to my bank’s standard tariff
• A pamphlet from my bank giving “important information” about my business account
• A pamphlet giving the Terms & Conditions for my business bank account
• My list of commonly used phone numbers
• A newspaper article about “Discretionary Portfolio Management”
• The latest copy of my Parish Magazine
• The latest weekly “pew sheet” from my church

Since I’ve only just filed these, they are not yet in “last-used” order, but I feel that I am now in control of them and can retrieve them easily. As you will have seen, none of these are the sort of thing which fits easily into a conventional file (which is the reason why they were lying around in the first place!) So far then, a definite improvement.

I’m getting back into the swing of things now by using the Do It Tomorrow methods, but it’s brought back to me that there is a definite tension between having a methodical system for one’s work and being spontaneous and creative. It’s very easy to become a ‘prisoner of the system’. That is in fact the reason that I have spent the last year or more trying to find a more intuitive and spontaneous way of working. The fact that I failed shows how necessary it is to have structure in one’s life.

Nevertheless it is immensely important to preserve the creative aspects of working without preconceived structure. So the solution is to wear the structure lightly, but also to be able to avoid doing nothing more than drift when the structure has been relaxed. How can we do that?

In my article Feeling Good I wrote about how using a simple method to monitor one’s state of mind could have a major effect on one’s productivity and effectiveness. Basically it consisted of asking oneself at regular intervals “How good am I feeling right now?” and then marking oneself out of 10. I described in my article how I even succeeded in curing myself of a fear of flying by using this technique.

I’ve discovered an even more powerful question to use in this way. The question is “How much resistance am I feeling right now?” Just as with the “feeling good” question, you mark yourself out of 10. However in this case you are aiming for a low score rather than a high score!

What does the question mean? You may be saying to yourself “resistance to what?” The answer is resistance to whatever your mind is subconsciously telling you would be the best thing for you to be doing at this precise moment. You are either doing it, or resisting doing it.

So for instance this morning instead of getting on with the next item on my list I started following up a thought I had just had by googling it. Instantly my resistance went up from 0 to 7! And it took a while to fall back to 0 even after I had stopped surfing. By contrast when it was time for lunch I felt the resistance grow because I was working instead of relaxing.

Like the Feeling Good method, it is important you don’t try to force this. The idea is simply to monitor your level of resistance and let it adjust itself. The process of monitoring itself will cause the resistance to fall overall. You will soon begin to discover what sort of things make it rise and make it fall. You will also discover that they will be different things according to the time of day or the circumstances.

Buy Do It Tomorrow

It’s too early to assess the results of the request I sent out yesterday about the future of my newsletter, but one fact is coming out very clearly - most people have very little idea of what is available on this website.

There are over 200 articles on every aspect of time management, personal organisation and achieving goals. The website acts as an archive for every article I’ve written which still has some currency.

How can you access this information?

If you’re looking for a specific article or subject, then use the Search Box at the top of the left margin. This is fast, accurate and completely up-to-date (if you don’t believe me then try searching for any word that appears in this posting). You can search by category if you want to narrow it down further.

However the key to the articles is the Blog Archive link in the Navigation section in the left margin. This gives all the entries by Category, by Title, by Week and by Month.

Also in the left margin you will find links to the Most Popular Articles.

Happy browsing!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

As I have several times written before, Alexa is a useful tool for anyone who runs a website or is interested in websites - which probably includes most of my readers.

You’ve always been able to find out things on Alexa like the traffic rank of any site on a world-wide basis, sites which link into it, and the other sites most visited by the people who visit the site. Now they’ve added a couple of features (or perhaps they’ve just made them easier to find). One is a breakdown of where the readers of a site come from. Here is the breakdown relating to this site:

No great surprises there, though I would have expected the percentage of United States readers (18.6%) to be a little higher judging from the amount of correspondence I get from the US. Perhaps they just like communicating more than the Brits!

Another new feature is traffic rank by country. Here’s the ranking for this site:

It’s certainly very gratifying to find that this site is the 9,908th most popular in the United Kindom, and it’s great to see that it’s so popular in Spain too.

By the way, I used the very convenient screen clipper built into Evernote to extract the figures from the Alexa site.

Here’s a couple of tips which you might find useful when you are trying to improve the look of your website:

Have you ever wanted to duplicate an effect on a website but didn’t know how to code it in html? You can find out the code for any page by using a facility on Internet Explorer. Simply go to the View menu and select Source. That will show you the complete code for the current page as a text file. A lot of people don’t know that menu item is there (I didn’t until recently myself) but it can save you hours.

If you ever want to match on-screen colours, there’s a very simple utility called Color Cop which will tell you the code for any colour you see on screen. You can use it to magnify the colours so that you can identify the individual pixels. What’s more it’s free!