I'm re-reading David Allen's "Getting Things Done", in anticipation of tracking down his latest. He's a 'personal productivity guru', or so the cover blurb says.
I tried one of his techniques and emptied my inbox down to zero! Of course there are 130 things in an "action" folder waiting to be prioritized and acted on, but at least I know none of them will catch on fire, and I know that they are each 15 minute tasks and not 2 minute tasks.
I find that I don't multitask at all. Whatever is on top of the screen gets my attention, and I don't overlap windows. This means that chat and instant message are death to productivity, because I can't and don't get anything done in any other window. (I must be old.)
Some of my most productive time seems to be on long airplane trips, where there is a limited amount of stuff around and no connectivity and little distraction. Do they have office layouts anywhere with a pulled apart fuselage and a row of comfy first class seats with tray tables to work at?
Strange, I find working whilst travelling very hard indeed. Especially on planes. (Though I suppose I might in first class)
Posted by: Lindsay | February 02, 2004 at 07:34 AM
I am very pleased with "Getting things done". I read it on the plane this weekend and have instituted several of his suggestions already. I now have a nice stack of colored folders for projects and have evicted all of my hanging folders. I'm pricing a new file cabinet for my reference files. And more importantly, I have whittled down the floating todo's in my Palm Pilot to a half dozen from more than fifty.
Highly recommended for writing style and content.
Posted by: John Hritz | March 08, 2004 at 01:18 PM