47.9 deg in Lara and Avalon - highest ever recorded temperature in Victoria's history! Cool change through now, only 38.5 deg!

testing GMail offline with Remember the Milk and Soocial. Is it goodbye Outlook??

Tame the Email Monster!

Here is a short presentation with many ideas how you might spend less time "doing" email and focus on more important things!

Email Report

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: website traffic)

!nnova Productivity Seminar Aug08

Check out this SlideShare Presentation which briefly covers the elements of the !nnova Productity System, based on GTD by David Allen, with other inputs and using Mindmapping:

!nnova Productivity Seminar Aug08

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: productivity gtd)

Being Prepared - Small Things Can Make a Difference

It's good to be prepared. You know the old saying "Fail to prepare and you prepare to fail!" I was due to go on a 210 km bike ride along the Great Ocean Road this morning, getting an early start. Having organized all my bike gear as well as my shower stuff and change of clothes for the evening dinner with my cycling buddies, I met up with a mate and we drove 1.5 hours to where we were to start the ride. After unloading the bike and collecting the helmet, gloves and other paraphanalia, I realised that I had left my bike shoes at home. For those of you who are not cyclists, you need to know that clip in pedals without the matching shoes simply doesn't work. In other words, I was not equipped to ride 210 km, with several significant climbs and in a pelleton that would travel at between 30-35 kmh. To say I was disappointed is an understatement! I had trained hard for this event over many months. I had rested well in the preceeding week. I had carefully watched my food intake during the week to have my body in peak condition today. Everything was perfect! Or so I thought. Just that little thing of not putting the shoes in the car.

Ok, so I'm still disappointed - my cycling buddies are out there now, in the sunshine, no wind, on one of the most beautiful stretches of road in the world and no doubt having a ball. So what's the lesson? Don't overlook the "small" things. Had I prepared a check list, I may have remembered to take the shoes this morning. I love check lists! So why did I not use one this time - well, they say "familiarity breeds contempt" - I've done so much cycling recently that I believed I didn't need a list.

Bottom line - use check lists! Always! They can help you get PROPERLY prepared and remind you about the "small things" that can derail a significant project or event.

Looking for "Stuff"

You don't have time to do everything you only have time to do everything that matters!
If we can get clear about those activities that make the biggest difference to our productivity we can get more done in less time and free ourselves up to get on with whatever else we choose.

According to the New York Times, today's executives spend 1-2 hours a day looking for "stuff" - computer files, paper files, documents, articles, passwords, web URLs and so on. Imagine!!! If that is true both in the office and at home, that means about 14 hours a week or about a full day of waking time!

Now, if you were to implement systems and processes that reduced every "search" to a matter of seconds, that would surely save a lot of time - could easily be the equivalent of a full work-day every week, that could be spent much more productively (either on work projects, on your hobbies or with your loved ones).

So, consider if a lifetime of 8 or more EXTRA productive hours EVERY week is worth an up-front investment in an effective system, and think about what systems and processes you could implement to make "looking for stuff" fast, easy and effective.

Appointments with Yourself

If we make an appointment with another person, and enter that appointment into our calendar, then we commit to it. If something comes up to disrupt that, we arrange with the other person to move the appointment to another time.

Why not make some appointments with yourself, to schedule time to do "stuff". You could make an appointment to work on that special project, write that report, clear out your email inbox, go out for your morning excercise and so on.

There are two big benefits of doing this:

1. By scheduling much of what you need and want to do, you get a sense of what might be possible in a given time period and are less likley to overcommit. If you have scheduled appointements for the entire week, then you are unlikely to make another appointment that would conflict with one - you would simply say "This week I have no free time, could we schedule for next week?"
2. By scheduling an appointment for a given task, you are much more likely to commit to it - but you MUST honour appointments with yourself as highly as appointments with others. YOU TOO are important!

So, get out those calendars and start making appointments with yourself!