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…

Jason and I have been tweeting for a little over a year now. We have both established a long list of friends that we have met through twitter. Last night, we decided that we wanted Black Belt Productivity to have an official presence on twitter. So we created the @blackbeltprod twitter id (bbp was taken by someone else, to our chagrin).

Not sure what twitter is, watch this video located at CommonCraft. It explains it really well. (I tried to embed the video here, but could never get it to NOT screw up the formatting of the rest of the post.)

Yesterday, I was interviewed by Harlem Quijano and Peter Nikolaidis from the Fresh Ubuntu podcast. I have been a fan of Fresh Ubuntu for quite some time, and it was an honor for them to ask me to be on. We had a good time, and I got to give a brief overview of GTD and how it may evolve technologically speaking.

Peter has began to practice GTD, and Harlem was interested in what it was all about. Hopefully, I will be able to make a return appearance so that we can delve into some more GTD topics a little more in-depth.

This past weekend, I talked to a large group at church about the fast paced lives that we live today. One of the points I made was that living life in fast-forward without regular times of solitude, reflection, and deep soul care, can lead to many health risks related to stress.

This past October, an article was published by the American Psychiatric Association that stated that Americans are, “stressed out, can’t sleep, drinking too much, and its getting worse.”

Their study showed that 48% of Americans say that they are more stressed than they were 5 years ago.

Well, you may have noticed (if you are actually at the site), there is a new look to Black Belt Productivity now. It is a pre-made theme that I found because I don’t know CSS or PHP…yet.

One of my goals for 2008 is to learn some rudimentary CSS and PHP so that I can customize our site a little more.

Another new change is the change of our URL. We are now located at http://blog.blackbeltproductivity.net/. It always bothered me to redirect the root domain to the actual /blog directory. So I thought that this was a good time to make some changes.

If you’re like me, you’re in the office on a bright Monday morning scanning your next action contexts for the next item in your productive crosshairs. You sit behind your desk with your computer checking email and voice mail, or looking through your read/review list.

This scenario is played out in corporate offices all across the world, with a high degree of success if you believe the twitterverse and interweb. It spans accounting departments (see Jason), IT departments (that’s me), and hundreds of other departments in corporate America.

Greetings all,

I ran across this post this morning about ‘How to Turn Your Desk into a Productivity Zone‘.  There are a lot of good items on this list. They are things that anyone can do to help you increase your productivity.

Also, BBP friend, Brett Kelly, has penned a great article about how GTD problems are not system related. This post has hit me pretty close to home. As those who follow BBP on twitter (michaelramm and jasonechols, respectiviely) have seen, we have both fallen off the wagon here lately. I am going to use my Christmas vacation (11/22 throught 1/2) to revamp my GTD system to a more basic implementation. I am also going to re-read Getting Things Done (time #5) and possibly reedit/rewrite the GTD Primer here on BBP. There also may be a new look to BBP coming in the new year.

For some of you that are more hardcore Jott users than I am, this might be old news. But this morning I discovered that Jott now allows you to set up a reminder over the phone. Really a cool new feature.

This will probably make me a more frequent user of Jott. I am one that is highly dependent on reminders to keep me on track. This feature will certainly enhance the value of the tool for me.

If you are not using Jott, let me recommend it. It is a great tool to help you “toss” items into your inbox…when you are not near your capture tools.