Hi,

I recently took some of my own sustained performance advice by taking a three day weekend, destination Port Douglas on the North Queensland coast (perfect). While waiting to board the flight I decided to buy some “relaxing” reading material to take my mind off work while lying by the pool.

Well, while my intentions were good, the book I chose was
How to Get Things Done by David Allen, hardly relaxing or unrelated to work. Knowing my girlfriend Jodi would ridicule me for my choice, I attempted to keep
the book hidden by sneakily angling the cover away from her. My attempts failed however when I fell asleep reading its contents (at least it relaxed me). When I woke Jodi had taken the book and told me to read something else. Seeing how my only other choice was a psychology book, (equally as unrelaxing) I decided to just sip on my mango daiquiri and watch the palm trees.

On my return I did read How to Get Things Done, and came across a very good system for managing all of your “stuff”. In the last issue I talked about the importance of being organised, and how being organised will help you be efficient, effective and in control.

In this issue I want to explore this a little further. Most people I work with keep some sort of “to do list”, and most people I work with agree it’s a floored system. Have you noticed that some items on your list are easily crossed off, while others seem to be added to your list many times over only causing you stress when you see them still sitting there? Or, is your “in tray” or “in box” full of stuff in no particular manageable order?

This workflow diagram from David Allen’s book is a great system to assist you in sorting through all that stuff.

The first part of the system is to ask yourself what is it? So many people have a desk, draw or inbox full of stuff that they never took a second to find out what it is.

Once you have identified what it is you need to ask yourself another question, is it actionable? For which there are two answers.

If the answer is no, there are three possibilities.

1. Trash – no longer needed, get rid of it immediately
2. Someday/maybe – no action required now but may be in the future, file in a physical or digital “someday/maybe” file.
3. Reference – file in a logical manner as to be easily accessible later on.

If the answer is yes, you need to ask yourself, what is the next action?

If it is a project, you need to place it in your projects folder, which you must review a couple of times per week as projects can take varied lengths of time to complete.

For items that aren’t projects you need to ask, will it take less than two minutes? Then you have three options.

If the answer is yes DO IT! Don’t add it to a to do list, just get it out of the way.

If the answer is no you have two choices. If you aren’t the right person to do it you should delegate it. Alternatively, if you are the right person to do it you need to put it in your calendar to be done at a specific time or place it in your next actions list to be completed as soon as you can.

As you can see this is a much more comprehensive system than the old to-do list.. To make this work for you, you will need to truly trust and live by it. Like all habits this may take a while, and may require some personal tweaking to suit your needs.

Allen’s book goes much deeper into this system so if you truly want to get stuff done I’d recommend this book to you. While organisational systems is a riveting subject (not), I’d also recommend it as bed time reading to help send you into a deep sleep. It worked for me in Port Douglas (or was it the mango daiquiris?)

Cheers,

Daniel Carlin.

,

A big thanks to everyone
who participated in our short survey last issue.

A complimentary health coaching session was up for grabs and the winner
is ......Lara Best

CORPORATE CORNER

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