David Hollingworth

It’s the age old adage; the less, the more. But how do you do less to do more?

One habit that I have adopted recently, both at work and at home, has helped me to do just that - I’m doing more by doing less.

What am I talking about? Email! If you let it email will simply gobble up tonnes and tonnes of your time as it used to do for me.

Ask yourself this question, “Do you use email to hold a conversation”? In other words do you respond to an email as soon as it arrives and when you get a reply to that you reply again, just like a verbal conversation? If you do then you’re probably wasting lots of time in your use of email.

If you’re doing the email conversation thing back and forth then your productivity will go way down. Have you ever timed how long it takes to type something rather than say it to some one? No? Let’s try a little experiment. Here’s a typical sentence I might include in an email conversation at work:

“The platform you are trying to install on is not supported at that release. You will have to manually hack the configuration file and re run the install”

That took me 47 seconds to type and correct a misspelled word. Now let me say it…

8.7 seconds later I’ve given over exactly the same piece of information. That’s just over five times faster than writing the same thing in an email!

So here’s my tips for improving your email productivity.

• Switch off the email notification. This only serves to distract you from what you’re doing productively and makes you the slave of your email client when it should be the other way around.
• Process email in a batch three times a day; first thing in the morning, just after lunch and again about an hour before you finish up. Often I find people come up with the solution themselves before I have time to reply to their email, which is empowering for them and saves me the time looking it up and responding.
• Don’t process email just as you’re finishing - if there’s any unpleasant surprises in your email you’ll worry about them all night when you can’t do anything about it until the following morning.
• Work down the emails from the most recent towards the oldest. If there’s been much activity in an email thread then the most recent email will have all the information you need and you can delete the rest.
• Don’t use email as a conversation tool, it’s a very inefficient way of speaking. Use your email to request information and to send information; but use the telephone to hold a conversation.

So do less emailing, do more real stuff.

PS. Instant Messaging is even worse. Avoid it like the plague!

After a few years implementing the ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) methodology by picking bits up here, there and everywhere online I thought it was high time I bought and read David Allen’s quintessential volume on personal productivity.

I thought there might be some snippets in the book that I’d not picked up before. I was not disappointed.

The book contains a huge wealth of information about implementing a GTD process for managing your (my) life, from the big picture down to handling the details.

From the stuff I’d read online I did think the book would take me on a minimalist crusade and have me setting up a productivity system using index cards, rubber bands and spring clips. This was not the case. Whilst Allen does mention the relative merits of electronic and low-tech tools the book seems to go out of it’s way to avoid discussing any particular method of implementing GTD. At points this might leave the reader wondering, “Just how to I do this in practice”, though in general the examples and suggestions are sufficient to allow the imagination to reach it’s own conclusions on how a particular chapter might be realized.

The book is divided into three main sections. The first deals with an overview of the concepts that lead to the GTD methodology. It introduces the reader to the idea that you can get your life and all its inputs under control. One of the most useful chapters for me was on planning projects. This was information I felt was missing from other productivity books I’ve read recently that seemed to be more focused on the tasks. Here Allen was encompassing the big picture too in a way the feeds directly into a GTD system.

The second sections is a step by step process for setting up your trusted GTD system. Here again I discovered a lot about the GTD system. One of the big things for me was the importance of creating a trusted filing system that’s simple and fun to use. This is an area of my life that is currently total chaos and is desperately in need of a make over. As well as the practical aspects of this system Allen reinforces the idea of getting all the open loops out of your head and into a ‘trusted system’ in order to free up the mind to be more receptive and creative.

The final part of the book revisits some of the concepts introduced during the practical sections earlier in order to reinforce the power of the simple constructs. So there are chapters on the power of the Collection Habit, Next Actions and Outcome Focusing that look deeper and the reasons why these practices work so well.

There’s so much in this book that I know it demands at least another reading, if not more. A full blown GTD system may not be for everybody; but I think that anybody who has more than a few tasks or projects to organize would be better off using a trusted system to manage the tasks than relying on the vagaries of memory alone. I certainly am.

I give this book five stars: * * * * *

I’ve been an avid fan of mind maps since I saw a colleague use one for recording meeting minutes. The way all the notes seemed to fit an organized structure, rather than just being a list, really spoke to me.

When I asked him how he’d produced the map he pointed me at MindManager ® from Mindjet.com. After using the trial version for a short period I just knew I had to have this tool in my armory.

What can you use Mind Manager for? Here’s some ideas drawn from my own experience;

• Collating large volumes of data. I love the ability to view the big picture and then drill down to concentrate on specific branches.
• Goal setting. Put your goal as the central topic, add an inspirational image, then brainstorm all the topics you can think of that will get you to your goal.
• Planning a novel. Put your idea at the center, add your characters as branches and develop their personalities off these. Add your plot lines as other branches and link your characters into the plot.
• Career development. Put yourself at the center and add branches for your skills, knowledge and desires. Identify strengths and areas where you need to improve.
• Blogging. Add information about your blog postings on themed branches. Create links between topic where they refer to each other. Use the information to plan the development of the topics within your blog.

The list is, literally, endless. There are other mind mapping tools out there and Mind Manager isn’t cheap. So why do I think it has the edge over other products?

1. A good supply of map templates and styles as well as regular newsletters providing more suggestions and templates.
2. Great export facilities so that I can save mind maps as PDF files or import them into My Life Organized (more on this fellow in a later post).
3. If I were a Microsoft ® Office ™ user I could synchronize with Outlook or export maps to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Project. As it is I can export to a very nice HTML format.
4. Plenty of built in images and icons to help visually enhance the information.

All round it’s a very professional package and highly functional. So I was delighted to hear that Mindjet are going to be releasing version 7 of Mind Manager at the end of May. I’ve had a sneak preview and it looks divine; but I’ll have to wait to see if the beauty of the new version goes deeper than just skin deep. Either way I can’t see my life now without Mind Manager.

Two recent posts from Scott Young and Leo Babauta have emphasized the need to do something daily if it’s going to become a habit.

In Scott’s posting on daily workouts he demonstrates how something that is done every other day is much less likely to become a habit than something that is done daily. This got me thinking. As I’m only walking three times a week at present this is unlikely to become a habit for me.

Meanwhile Leo has thrown down a challenge for the month of May; to make exercise a daily habit.

So I’m going to shelve the idea of getting out the bike until June and just concentrate on ingraining exercise as a daily habit. I shall, from today,

• walk for at least 20 minutes every day,
• get up 30 minutes earlier to do the walk first thing in the morning.

I shall have to watch that last one. Getting up earlier has, in the past, led to burn out and resentment; but I’m hoping the exercise will energize me instead.

I’ll report back weekly and let you know how I’m getting on.

Once you have set a goal you need a path to take you to it. This is where your task lists and your ‘trusted system’ come into play.

Without some tasks, some actions, we’ll never get to our goals. Goals don’t accomplish themselves. So for my cycling goal I have the following tasks:

1. Get the bike out of the back of the shed.
2. Service the bike.
3. Find my riding gear (or buy new stuff).
4. Devise a suitable route that’s going to give me my target 30 miles a week. This is probably 3 x 10 miles or maybe 2 x 15 miles.
5. Start building up the mileage.

How will I ensure that these tasks get done? Put them into my trusted system. The ‘trusted system’ is whatever methodology you choose for managing your goals and your tasks provided you trust it completely. If you don’t trust it to give you the tasks as and when you need them it will never work for you; but will work against you instead. More about trusted systems and how I work mine in a later posting.

I know I’m not going to be able to get on my bike and just cycle 30 miles. In fact I’ll be lucky if I can cycle 300 yards (metres); but I know that if I can get to point 5 then the battle is half won. The other half is making it a habit.