Author: misdirects

The goal of this blog is to highlight -- one idea at a time -- specific personal productivity/efficiency techniques that I have found invaluable, almost all of which I use on a daily basis.

In the midst of a drought, a crow half-dead with thirst saw a water pitcher.

But it was nearly empty and he couldn’t reach the water that was left.

Then he had . . . one idea.

He dropped pebbles into the pitcher one by one until the water was high enough to drink. 

"Bit by bit does the trick."

If it's irrelevant, discard it. If you can handle it in less than two minutes, do it. If someone else can handle it, delegate it. Otherwise, divide it into parts and defer each part to a specific place on your calendar.

As part of the Five Ds methodology, process items that cross your path immediately: i.e., make a decision on what you're going to do with them, do that thing, then move to the next item.

Each day, focus on the "most important thing" with respect to your main goals and, in particular, pick the most unpleasant -- but necessary -- task to do first ("eat the frog").

Prioritize your life work by considering things in terms of easy/hard, urgent/not-urgent, important/not-important.

Instead of using a traditional multipage calendar, I use a one-page Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all upcoming deadlines, events/meetings, and tasks that must be done. Because everything is on one page and listed chronologically, it is easier to determine what I need to be working on during any given time frame.

If you keep doing the same thing over and over and don't enjoy it, fix it.

Publicly committing yourself to specific deadlines for interim project milestones -- even for parts of a project only you will ever see and even for projects that are entirely personal -- is a great way to make yourself more accountable to yourself.

Batch processing is a great way to increase the volume and speed of progress -- and even creativity! -- in your personal and work projects.