You know how it can be: You have an overwhelming to-do list as long as your arm, and it never gets any shorter. There are some things you want to accomplish, but weeks, months and even years slip by with no progress. You are tempted to laugh out loud when someone suggests adding daily exercise,…
Category Archives: Time
Why GTD Isn’t Working For You
Getting Things Done (GTD), the time management system based on David Allen’s best-selling book, is loved by many. It’s also no secret that not everyone finds it smooth sailing. GTD can become a cause of pain for some people, maybe for you. I often work with people who have tried GTD and after a while…
How Can a Tomato Give You Time-Management Superpowers?
We live in a world of interruptions and distractions. These interruptions can make it tough to finish the projects that matter most to us. And the answer to this problem is – a tomato. I’m talking about a time-management method called the Pomodoro Technique. First taught in the early 1990s, the technique was developed by…
Want To Save Hours Every Week? Read This Fast!
For years I considered myself a slow reader. But it wasn’t until I began to use an electronic reader that I understood just how slow. Routinely I would dawdle over a page of newspaper text for so long, that my iPad would time out and close up the document, thinking I wasn’t there anymore. I…
How Much Time Is There In An Eight-Hour Day?
Does this sound like a trick question? Let me ask it another way: have you ever planned to get a certain amount of work done only to find at the end of the day that you need another three or four hours to finish what you’d planned? Whether we work alone in a home office…
There’s a reason they’re called DEAD-lines
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. Douglas Adams This blog has fallen silent as I’ve been working on some other projects — more on those soon. In the meantime, I haven’t lost interest in organizing and productivity, and I will be back soon.
How Much Time Should Planning Take?
If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. – Seneca Once in a while a client avoids planning on the ground that it takes too much time. They’d much rather dive right in and spend that time getting some of their work done, instead of reviewing goals, choosing…
The Won't-Do List
Productivity is as much about what we choose not to do as it is about what we do. (Remember the Evil Overlord List? 100 tongue-in-cheek won’t-do entries that begins, “Being an Evil Overlord seems to be a good career choice.”) With this in mind, I’d like to supplement my list of committed tasks…
Worth Repeating – October posts from New Leaf News
I’ve dipped into the New Leaf News archives to share a few posts that still seem as fresh and relevant today as they did in Octobers past. In case you missed them the first time around, here they come again! I’m still using mind-mapping as a technique to organize and view more information than…
How Pareto's Principle can turn 20 percent of your effort into 80 percent of your results
Allow me to introduce someone who can profoundly affect your productivity. You may know him by his reputation, if not by his name or face. Name: Vilfredo Pareto. Claim to fame: formulated/discovered the Pareto Principle, also known as the “80/20 Rule.” Pareto was an Italian economist who first observed that in developed economies, about 80…