Checklists are a great tool for productivity. They can save a lot of time and prevent mistakes, rethinking, and missing steps. Yet many people don't use them. Here are 5 reasons to get checklists into your productivity system today.
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There are times when I feel like I've been run over with the dump truck of life. And then the truck backs over me for good measure. But life goes on. So as I am metaphorically picking myself up and dusting off the tire tracks, I need to have a plan. I need to figure out how to be productive when life blindsides me.
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Microsoft Excel, which is a spreadsheet meant for crunching numbers, may be the tool of accountants. But I rely on it heavily to help me with text. I generate text using Excel in order to feed data cleanly into systems. No, Excel is my powerhouse for assembling text. It occurred to me that people might get some benefit from learning how to do this, so here is my method:
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For a lighter Monday, I thought I would give you the top signs you know you're addicted to lists:
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There are many different ways that you can use to beat procrastination. In fact, whole books have been written about ways to get going. Here are the 5 techniques I use most often to get me going:
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A tickler file is one to manage date-sensitive information. It can be implemented for paper or electronic, and the classic version contains 43 folders. This can be overly burdensome, though, if you don't deal with a lot of date-sensitive material. Today's article is about simplifying the classic approach to ticklers.
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Scope creep is when you are asked to add things into a job to get it to done. It means that "done" becomes a moving target, and can cause things go be in a perpetual state of work.
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Feature creep is not just something that happens in software. The over-complication of devices that we use can lead to a near constant level of feature creep with every area of our lives.
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A reader asked me, "What are your thoughts on 'busy work'? For some whose jobs are based more on time than production, it's easy to get caught up doing some busy work to justify one's existence." I realized that there are actually two types of busy work: that which we engage in when our time is our own, and that we engage in to fill working hours owed to someone else. But we can turn busy work into productive time with a bit of planning and action.
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A couple of weeks ago I updated a post called "10 Things You Didn't Know About Me." So I thought I would update another 10 things post that had followed it years ago.
