Black Belt Productivity

I was browsing the David Co website and saw that you can pre-order Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life prior to its December 30, 2008 release. From the DavidCo website:

From the author of the bestseller “Getting Things Done,” comes a new book that will change your life. “Getting Things Done” hit a nerve and spawned a movement with businesses, students, and techies all the way from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia. Now, David Allen leads the world on a new path to achieve focus, control, and perspective. Throw out everything you know about productivity—”Making It All Work” will make life and work a game you can win. 

We are pleased today to publish a guest post from a longtime friend of BBP, Patrick Rhone. He is a well experienced practitioner of GTD, and is a master of what he calls “org-fu”. By day, Patrick is a workflow consultant, personal productivity coach, and web designer based out of St. Paul, MN. Bookmark www.patrickrhone.com for another great source of GTD based (among other things) web content. Special thanks to Patrick for the time he put into this writeup.

Jason Womack of the Jason Womack Company is one of the most respected names in personal productivity. Jason, as most of you know, is also a champion of Getting Things Done. He was a presenter for the David Allen Company for several years. These days, he coaches individuals and companies in enhancing workplace performance by implementing best practices in the workplace.

Jason also is a triathlete with a passion for helping others achieve their fitness goals.

Today, we publish Jason’s thoughts on GTD and metrics.

The original question that kicked off this discussion was submitted by Mayra.

Photo courtesy of Bitporters

New twitter, friendfeed and BBP friend, Rahsheen Porter, has begun a new series on his blog, SheenOnline, detailing his usage of Remember the Milk (RTM) for his GTD system. It all began when I posted a link in the GTD FriendFeed room to a great post on the RTM blog titled Advanced GTD with Remember the Milk written by Doug Ireton. It is a well thought out system using just RTM.

Stephen Smith at Productivity in Context has weighed in on the discussion about GTD and metrics with a great post.

It is definitely a must read.

- Jason

Our first installment in our Black Belt series on metrics comes from Matt Cornell. Matt describes himself and what he does on his website as follows…

Matthew Cornell is a former NASA engineer, and one of the few consultants in New England specializing in modern personal productivity techniques.

He has degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and is the author of many articles on productivity, technology, and creativity.

Matthew is available for one-on-one and small team workflow coaching, workshops, and seminars. He resides with his family in Western Massachusetts.

I have never been very big on metrics. It really has nothing to do with whether I like metrics or not. Where I typically have an issue with metrics is that most companies, especially large corporations, fall into the trap of establishing metrics that measure things for the sake of measuring things. We measure, but most of the time, we measure stuff that does not tell us anything. Metrics are useless if they do not provide information to the user that helps them determine if they are accomplishing their goals. But more often than not, we measure things and then are at a loss as to what they tell us about our performance.

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…