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Number 1 Productivity Practice
By Brick | April 28, 2008
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You may have noticed that I have been missing in action for a couple weeks. The culprit behind this absence? Multiple projects and an ongoing problem with perfectionism. With respect to the projects, I am working on two major activities at work, one of which is completely new, uncharted territory with the requisite, and inefficient, trial and error attributes. On top of that, I am in the middle of a significant home renovation. My wife was also on the road, leaving me to care for the kids! Busy, busy, busy! Of course, the curse of perfectionism has kept me from being out there (this post, being somewhat off the cuff, is my attempt to start addressing this issue).
In the past, this amount of stuff occurring concurrently at work and at home, coupled with a lack of family support would have drowned me in stress and anxiety. While I wasn’t organized enough to post, and fell behind on other tasks on a few occasions, I was pleased by the general lack of stress over the last couple of weeks. I attribute it to all the work I have done on personal productivity and lifestyle, including the great many blogs out there sharing lessons, tips and mentorship on productivity, simplification and life hacking.
It all got me to thinking, what is your number one productivity, or life hacking practice? After the challenges of the last couple weeks, I know what mine is: capture. The concept of capture is very well articulated in Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done. Basically it amounts to capturing everything, whether mail, to-do’s, ideas and even random thoughts into a real and tangible “inbox”. In this way, we can clear our heads, knowing that we won’t loose track of potentially important items that require our attention. In the midst of so much work, I was able to to stay sane knowing that everything and anything was captured in my system, and even though I had yet to process most of it, everything was there in my inbox - I didn’t have to mentally keep track of anything. While it is just the starting point for Getting Things Done (GTD), in my opinion, capture alone provides 80% of the benefits of the GTD methodology.
What is your number one productivity practice?
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Topics: Personal Productivity |
April 28th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I agree. My number one productivity practice is writing things down. That is, writing EVERYTHING down. Whenever I think I can get away with not capturing completely, I get into trouble.