Most of us have a whole lot of techniques for ways to get things done. Roles, goals, next action lists, someday/maybe lists, closed lists, timers, distraction blockers and most-important-tasks are some examples of these. These techniques fill a toolbox, and often times people will bicker about which tool is best.
There are some basics points that should be considered:
Gathering everything you need to give attention to is crucial to productivity; however, until you actually give it attention, your stuff won’t be anything more than a pile crying out to you.
GTD addresses this during the weekly review and the clearing of the inboxes. Seven Habits doesn’t address it, but the underlying assumption is that you are aware of what is going on in your life. Do It Tomorrow is all about putting things into your work for tomorrow, and keeping up with the inflow.
In this segment of “The Whys of Productivity”, we will look at why productivity systems all want us to process all the things we have gathered.
It doesn’t matter which system you look at: Daytimer, Filofax, 7 Habits, GTD, Do It Tomorrow, Bullet Journal…every system insists that you write things down. Each system differs on how and where you should write them down, but they all want you to get it down on paper (or electrons).
Every system out there, particularly those that are dependent on a specific format and/or planner, advocate putting everything in one place. Some systems insist that the only place to put things is in their product; GTD advocates a more realistic approach: minimizing how many places you put stuff.
Looking at this from a practical standpoint, it makes sense that the fewer places you put things, the fewer places you have to keep track of.
Recently I looked at the pros of batching, where you lump activities that require the same tools together to do at the same time. Today I will look at the disadvantages of batching.
The secret to any organizational system is that like items should be stored together, be it by type or by purpose. But in order to see what needs to be organized, you have to know what you have.
Gathering is simply a fancy way of getting information into one place so it can be stored together.
One of the concepts that has shown up in quite a few productivity methods is to “batch” activities. This means that you do all like activities on your list at once.
There are pros and cons to this batching technique. In this article, I will present the pros.
Throughout all the years that I have been writing about productivity and researching productivity, I see a lot of articles on the “how”. But knowing how to do something isn’t enough if you want to expand on it. As a math teacher, I know it isn’t enough to have students memorize formulas. They have to be able to understand why a formula works if they are to be able to apply it.
As I was considering this, I decided to revamp and expand a series on the “Whys of Productivity”. Over the next few weeks, I will look at the similar basics to several productivity systems and dig down into the “whys” behind each method.
I work in IT. As a function of my job, I know a lot of little tips and tricks for many programs. Excel is one of my go-to programs, but I rarely use it for numbers – I generate code and do a lot of data work with it instead.
I recently had a long list of information to print out as reference material. It contained several columns, and I wanted a quick way to follow the information across the printed row without having to use an external guide.
In programming, we have a term: GIGO. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. It is particularly apt in my professional field because too often clients expect us to take mangled data and buff it into usable format, without any guidance or structure. GIGO.
GIGO isn’t just in data, though. I find it really does play a lot into the rest of my life.
