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.
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 work in a corporate environment. So as you can imagine, we are using Microsoft products exclusively here at the office. So I am constantly looking for ways to make Outlook more effective and efficient.
My use of Outlook has been streamlined a bit recently. I have used some keyboard shortcuts to create new emails (CTRL+Shift+M) and file memos away in my reference folder (CTRL+Shift+V) for a while now. However, I still opened about 7 windows in Outlook to keep my calendar, reference folder, action folder, notes, contacts and other things handy.
There is a better way.
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.)
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.