Make a list, check it twice

I feel like I’m being remarkably unproductive these says. I know that part of it is that I am talking with people…and that has little short-term productivity, though huge long-term potential impact. However, today I had great hope.

I made a list.

And then, halfway through the day, I realized that my work had been too fragmented. I had pieces of several things done (and a great meeting) but nothing finished. I also had a very messy 3×5 card.

So I tried this.

1. I created a mousepad for my optical mouse out of an 11×17 sheet of paper.
(I have a glass-topped desk and an optical just doesn’t work.)

2. I wrote all over it during a meeting.

3. When my first list wasn’t working, I created a new list right on my mousepad/worksheet.

4. I just started working through the list.

A couple things aren’t done but they will take reflective time which I have tomorrow. The rest of the list got pretty well done.

Why talk about it? Because odd habits actually work sometimes. I can’t carry around the mousepad, but it puts my list in the middle of my workspace where I can be reminded even when I’m online. And that’s a really helpful thing.

Blogged with Flock

protopage praise

I started using Protopage a couple weeks ago. The best way to describe it is as a web-based portable desktop. You create a free page, like this. Then you can customize it with a variety of specialized boxes, or widgets. These include boxes for entering links, weather, pictures, webpages, and, my favorite…the sticky note.

I am working to bring some organization to my life drawing on Getting Things Done, by David Allen and ideas I’m gleaning from others (Chris Brogan, life-hacks, pastor-hacks) Drawing on the idea of one in-box for everything that has to get done, I have made the protopage sticky note the heart of my organization for the past two weeks, and it may be helping. At the beginning of the process I started one for the day. As I completed items I crossed them off, as I thought of items I added them. When today became tomorrow, I added that date to the label of the note. At the end of the week, I duplicated the note, deleted all the completed items, redated the new one for the new week, and moved ahead.

Here’s why protopage has been so helpful:

• Same list can be accessed at home, at work, at different computers at work. Anything that happens in between those places gets added to the list the next time I sit down. And I sit at a terminal way too often.
• the sticky note approach fits with how I think.
• the list of favorite links saves me a tremendous amount of time because I can have it anywhere I am on a computer.
• I can have one main page as my workspace and then have several additional pages for old lists, for brainstorming, for keeping quotes.
• I can have coffee beans as the background.

Here’s what I don’t know: How well my life is being backed up! I can print the lists, which helps, but I don’t have the files…protopage does. and I have to investigate this. However, this is a hack that has been tremendous…and I can’t remember who mentioned it.

technorati tags:protopage, productivity, gtd

Blogged with Flock

What happens to time.

This is a great posting about trying to capture our time.

This is a great posting about our time being stolen.

While the writer of both probably sleeps too little and talks a lot, his point is very well taken. We’ve got to redeem the time because we are in the middle of evil days,

Blogged with Flock

Time management vs productivity

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/the-myth-of-productivity-advice.html

about ministry and productivity

The idea of a blog with the motto, "Less time on tasks…more time on people" is probablly worth looking at. Also, Bob's church, Evergreen, in portland OR is something I want to followup with, as is Joomla which is the content driver for his website.

Just some stuff to remember.