Some books entertain you and some change the way you think. But a small number of these impact your life in such a dramatic manner that it is fair to say that they have, literally, changed your life.
One such books for me was David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”. You haven’t read it, buy it here, read it, and multiply the time that you spent reading it many times over (pun intended) in future savings.
You can get it on Amazon here:
Read it! :)
This book describes a workflow that, although quite simple, as all sublime things are, is extremely powerful, as not only allows you to fit the handling of all sorts of tasks into an unified process but, most of all, allows you to clear your mind and make mode Inner-time available.
The general look of the diagram that describes the workflow can be found at the FranckCrum blog and looks something like this:
So let’s walk through the whole process.
We start by considering that you have a virtual inbox where literally EVERYTHING that requires time and work goes into. Received a letter? Goes into your inbox. Got an email? Inbox. Someone requested you something? Inbox.
Once you have everything there, go through each item one by one. For each item start off by asking:
“Is it actionable?”
The purpose of this question is to allow you to quickly decide if that item in your inbox requires you to do something about it or is merely informational.
So, if the answer to this is “no”, you either trash it and forget it, keep it around for further review or, if you consider ii may be important in the future, you archive it somewhere you can find easily.
A recommendation I can give you here is: whenever possible, trash it! It’s amazing how fast stuff starts to pile up and becomes impossible to manage. Although I have been steadily improving, I am terrible at this, so I can guarantee it does become a problem. 😃
If the answer is “yes”, then ask yourself immediately “can I do it now in 2 minutes?”.
If you can, then there’s no point on spending any more time noting it down somewhere, the overhead alone would make it inefficient to do so. So just do it!
Should it take longer or you are unable to do it now, then you just note it down on you task list, task manager or calendar.
How to decide where? Easy! If there is a special time you need to do it, it goes in the calendar. So meetings, parties, trips and travels and other appointments go in you calendar, everything else to your task list.
Of the tasks noted on your task list, decide which ones can be done by someone who’s not you. And delegate them. BUT keep them noted in your task list as a delegated task, otherwise you’ll have to spend Inner-time trying to remember to check-up on people.
If you do this consistently, you will immediately feel an enormous decrease in stress and increase of inner time. But this is just the basic workflow!
But more about that on a later post...
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