New Year. New Start. At least I’m sure that’s what I said to myself last year when I declared email bankruptcy and started again. It’s always hard to stay on top. Regardless of your job eventually “stuff” sneaks up on you, and if you’re not prepared wait you could find yourself quickly sinking under the weight.
Last Christmas I got a copy of Getting Things Done, By David Allen and set about changing the way I do things. It’s not always been easy, but things have definitely been easier since I started on the GTD path. Along the way I have found myself taking the odd wrong turning in the quest for a bigger, better productivity application that will “Do it all”. Sadly, I can’t say I have found “The one”, but there are many useful tools out there. Here’s my Top 10 so far:
One – Getting Things Done by David Allen.
This is THE book to buy if you need a strategy for getting out of your hole and getting things done. I use many of these techniques to run multi million pound projects, my wife uses them to run the house – either way they are solid, proven methods for managing multiple projects. There is a great video of David Allen a Google thats well worth watching.
Two – The Hipster PDA
One of the core tenants of GTD is the ability to capture everything floating around in your head and translate it into actionable lists. Basically a pile of index cards, at any level the hipster pda is the perfect ubiquitous capture device. Merlin Man does the concept justice on his 43 folders site.
Three – The Filofax
The ubiquitous capture tool refined. If you can’t manage your life using a pen and paper there’s no electronic device out there that will do it for you. I have been using an A3 filofax filled with homemade GTD templates with great results. It’s smarter than the hipster pda, so if you hang out in the boardroom your unlikely to get strange looks from fellow executives.
You can remove pages and drop then straight into you inbox for action, and there probably even room for a picture of the kids / dog / wife. I don’t bother with the calendar as my Blackberry (linked to the exchange server) is the most up to date view of my ever changing schedule.
Four – Google docs
I have colleagues spread across the word and much of our work is collaborative. As the organisation we work for doesn’t have a seamless SharePoint solution in place Google doc’s gives us the ability to collaborate anywhere anytime. I’ve yet to get down and dirty with Google Wave, but I’m hoping for good things.
Five – Coloured folders and a Label Printer
Each project has a folder, each folder has a label. It sounds so simple it’s almost embarrassing to write about it, yet so few people seem to keep life that simple. Again, thanks to David Allen.
Six – Microsoft Exchange
Hmmmm, I have always been anti Microsoft, so embracing exchange was a hard move for me. I found there were a number of tasks that needed sharing around my organisation. Assigning tasks through exchange is pretty simple, and pretty robust. It also syncs well with Sharepoint, Google, etc and is easy to customise views. However, my favourite feature is the simple drag and drop (email) to create a new task. This speeds up email processing significantly and by using simple categories that match my projects allows me to get a quick output of next actions, waiting on, etc.
Seven – Remember The Milk
I used this as a task management application on the iPhone for 6 months and loved the interface, ease of use and general simplicity. Having a Blackberry and an iPhone really didn’t make sense, and the blackberry won.
Eight – Evernote
Like so many people these days much of my time is spent on the internet, either searching for answers, reviewing solutions or looking for ideas. Bookmarking is not always ideal for me, as I am often only interested in snippets of content. I may want to combine my own images, presentations or notes with found media, or add information to stuff already out there. Evernote lets me do all of that in spades and provides good search functionality to back it all up. It’s a notebook for the digital age.
Nine – Smartphone
SPEAK TO PEOPLE. Remember that cool thing we used to do before we had “smsmailtwitterupdates” to communicate by? It doesn’t need to be that smart, but linking back to the mother ship and emailing / reviewing tasks and schedules on the move certainly makes good use of dead time.
You may also want to take pictures as an aide memoir (and send them to Evernote for indexing), catch up on the news, check trains and planes and maybe even speak to someone you care about.
Ten – Spotlight (or maybe google desktop)
I love Spotlight; it is undoubtedly one of the greatest things to come out of Apple and saves me countless wasted minutes each day trying to find missing documents, emails and applications. If you haven’t seen it ask for a demo of its general awesomeness next time you’re in an Apple retailer.
If you have any killer app’s of your own you would like to share please comment below. If I get enough suggestions I will put together a second article reviewing your suggestions.
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