Increase Your Productivity By Touching It Once

Increase Your Productivity By Touching It Once

My primary takeaway from this article is the concept of "touching it once" to enhance productivity. This refers to handling tasks, such as reading emails or paying bills, in one go rather than repeatedly coming back to them. By adopting this approach, I can avoid wasting time and energy. However, implementing this strategy will require practice and conscious effort.
5 Reasons To Use Checklists

5 Reasons To Use Checklists

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.
Generate Text With Excel

Generate Text With Excel

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:
Simplified Tickler Files

Simplified Tickler Files

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.
pareto housecleaning

Applying Pareto To Housecleaning

I've talked about the 80/20 principle before. Formally known as the Pareto principle, it says that 80% of the results will come from 20% of your effort. Today I want to apply this rule to housecleaning.
Organize Project Notes

How I Organize Project Notes

One of the most useful things I have learned to do over the course of my professional career is to organize project notes. Not only does this allow me to tell you where the status of any piece of my work is at a given point, but it also allows me to revisit the items when questions arise after the work is completed.

These days I use a Bullet Journal. I also have used OneNote, Evernote, and a personal wiki to do the same thing. I believe that this general system can be used no matter how you track it.
flylady

Why Flylady Didn’t Work for Me

I followed Flylady for many years. And felt guilty for not being able to make it work. It was a struggle for me. Was I not doing it right? Flylady would tell me the problem was me.

Here are the ways Flylady doesn't work for me:
little and often

Little and Often: A Key To Consistent Progress

One of the things that I still struggle with, years into the productivity space, is making my to-do list doable. I don't want to put each step to complete something on the list, because a) I don't need to be reminded that I need to fetch the stepladder when changing a light bulb, and b) the list gets far too long the more granular I go.

On the other hand, if the tasks are too big, then I can't get them done in a small amount of time.

Enter Little And Often, one of Mark Forster's concepts.

I've been a fan of Mark Forster for a long time now. Besides being an eloquent writer, he takes it upon himself to innovate new systems and then try them out in his own life.
Evernote: Love, Hate and Usage

Evernote: Love, Hate and Usage

Have you ever bookmarked a website, to return later and find that it is gone? Or wished that you could make notes on a website and save it? These are the primary reasons to use a notebook application like Evernote instead of a bookmark manager.

I used a bookmark manager as my primary source of keeping track of useful information on the interwebs for years. But after realizing that many of my bookmarks pointed to sites that were no longer there, and the inability to access information without the internet made me reconsider how I was storing things. Enter Evernote. Evernote is a notebook tool that is available as desktop, web and mobile, allowing me to get to my notes no matter where I am.

Today I will talk about Evernote, its ups, downs and foibles, and how I use it.