Productivity Archives - Page 3 of 14

How To Decide What Task To Do Next

By Laura Earnest April 24, 2023

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that it is easier to choose between two options than it is to choose between twenty. By ranking your tasks in two different ways, you can limit your choices and make deciding what to do next easy.

Using and Creating OneNote Templates

By Laura Earnest April 10, 2023

Since I released my video on my OneNote work planning system, I have gotten questions about how to personalize the notebook. This video is about how to save time and effort by using templates to customize a OneNote notebook.

Do You Fall For These Time Management Lies?

By Laura Earnest April 3, 2023

Time management is the key to make sure that you don't fritter away a precious resource on meaningless activities - at least without meaning to. Yet many people fall for time management lies, much to their detriment. Do you fall for these time management lies?

Frogs and Productivity

By Laura Earnest March 20, 2023

What do frogs have to do with productivity? Mark Twain helps with getting those big things out of the way first thing. But what about the rest?

Next Actions Done Right

By Laura Earnest March 6, 2023

Next actions are defined as "the very next physical action required to move the situation forward" according to Getting Things Done. But this all depends on your definition of "forward".

Making Systems To Support Us

By Laura Earnest February 20, 2023

The systems that help our weaknesses are really the only ones we have to try for. We have to recognize our weaknesses and find tools to help us past them. And it doesn’t matter if it is due to neurodivergence, or if it is something brought on by stress, overwhelm and overextension.

Boiling Water, Or Being Aware of Stress

By Laura Earnest February 6, 2023

There's an old wives' tale that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water he will jump out, but if you put a frog in a pot of cool water and slowly raise it to boiling the frog will allow himself to be boiled to death.

The "temperature" of our lives is our stress level, and we react the same way.

OneNote Tips for Linking and Page Generation

By Laura Earnest January 30, 2023

These are the tips that I used to quickly generate a work productivity system using OneNote. This video shows two different shortcuts for linking, making pages from a list, and using templates to speed up page creation.

A Tour of My OneNote Work Productivity System

By Laura Earnest January 16, 2023

I had to recently switch from paper to electronic notes for work due to the need to do fast searches. Searching through five notebooks that were haphazardly backlinked was almost impossible. I made the switch to OneNote, and have worked hard to get a simple but workable system. This is a tour of how I use OneNote for work.

Tone Your Flabby Task List

By Laura Earnest December 26, 2022

Do you know how to use a task list to its fullest potential? Do you ever find yourself forgetting things, because they weren't on your list? Or realizing that you forgot to check your list and missed doing something important? Or turned away from it because it was overwhelming? These are all signs of a flabby task list.

Just as getting in physical shape requires a little effort and perseverance, so does getting your task list in shape. Here are five ways to shape it up: