Black Belt Productivity

Yes, today is my birthday. As I begin my 35th year of life here on planet Earth, I am wondering…am I truly getting things done to the level that I need to be doing. The answer of course is…no, I could be doing a lot better. We all could.

My calendar is pretty solid. I write down all of my appointments in my Moleskine 18-Month Planner. I really love it (and it was added to the picture above). My off the cuff NAs are pretty good to. I keep up with any one off next actions that fall my way. I am using the Planner page in the Moleskine to keep up with my next actions.

My biggest area of frustration currently is my projects and project planning. My job is a Network Administrator for a local government. I am by myself as the 1-Man IT Department for a city of about 20,000 folks. I have been working for the last year to transition our network from a Novell network to a Windows network. [For you non-IT types...that is a pretty big job!] I have gotten a lot of it done up to this point and now that we are about to have a new budget, I need to move into Phase 2 of the project. Only problem is that Phase 2 has a couple of dependent prerequisites that I had not thought about. Had I been able to properly plan the project out, I think that I would have seen this impasse coming and been able to plan accordingly.

So, with the help of my new Mindjet MindManager program, I am going to use this long weekend to properly map out the remainder of the network transition to reflect the prereq’s that are needing to be done.

I am also going to attempt a good BrainDump. I have not done a good mental drain in a long time. There is a good list of trigger questions in GTD on pages 114-117. I also found a file from Kathy Paauw’s website that has an even better (IMHO) listing of triggers for your mind dump. She breaks down the triggers in a more logical way that I find easier to follow.

For a good and effective dumping of the mental RAM, find a couple of hours that you can be by yourself and have your calendar and any project material that you need with you. Sit down and go through all of your projects and plan them out (in my case) and get all of the appropriate NA in place and put anything needed on your calendar. If you are disciplined not to need a ‘triggers’ list then more power to you. I will use Ms. Paauw’s list as a guideline for my thinking. It seems to ask ‘all the right questions’ to keep things moving through the process.

Hopefully after I am able to create a couple of maps for my life, I will be a little closer to getting ALL the things done. And any suggestions to help me with the planning process would be greatly appreciated. I tend to let it slide since I am the only one affected by it.

- Michael