Black Belt Productivity

Being one who does not have a photographic memory, I tend to take a lot of notes. Notes can come from all kinds of sources. I may document a phone call. I may make lists of things I need to remember or do. There could even be notes from the dreaded…meeting (gasp).

Tips and tricks on taking notes are numerous. What works for one person, will not necessarily work for another. Sometimes I try to decipher someone else’s notes from a meeting and get glazed over in the details. However, for that person, the notes make perfect sense.

When you search Google for productivity, you get a number of different definitions. I think that my favorite is from Labour Canada’s list of Industrial Terms:

Productivity: Output per unit of input: a measure of efficiency.

So, by this definition, you have an input and an output. Your input should be defined in your trusted system somewhere. It could be an item in your Next Action (NA) list, it could be a Most Important Task (MiT) [from Leo Babuta's great zen habits blog], an under 2 minute task that you are ready to complete, or just something that you thought that you needed to do.

I have been an Evernote user for a couple of years. Recently, I was fortunate to get an invite to try out the new version. It has refreshed me on one of the best functions of Evernote…tagging.

Of course, being able to tag things can help us find things later. However, one of the best uses I find for the tags, is to mark items for specific use later. Once you process the items, you can remove the tag, and start tagging new items for the next processing period.

A couple of examples that I use…