photo credit: Irina Souiki

This week I’ve been trying something new. Instead of making a todo list for the day and hammering out as many items as I can before the 5 ‘o clock whistle, I’m participating in what I like to call “Binge Productivity”. In a nutshell, Binge Productivity is working productively on whatever I want for as long as I want. And I have to say, it’s working out pretty well for me.

There will always be things that have to be done every day (aka Stephen Covey’s “big rocks“). You should never miss these. Once you’re done doing the time sensitive things though, your time is totally free to work on any project that needs to be done sometime soon, but not immediately. So here’s what my last few days have looked like so far.

Tuesday- Personal Project. Worked solely on a uber-cool yet secret project. It’s one of my own, and once I started working on it, I totally got sucked in and worked for about 6 hours straight on it.

Today- Focused on LifeDev. Wrote one blog post and found myself among a bed of fresh ideas for other posts. Instead of moving on to another task in the todo list, I started writing two more blog posts. I also worked on sending emails to future guest posters and set up a guest post for myself on another great blog.

So as you can see, it’s a much more flexible approach to working. It gives me the ability to work on what tickles my fancy each day, yet things are still getting done. But there are some soft spots to this approach. I’ve outlined some pros and cons to Binge Productivity below.

Pros

• Do what you want. There’s much less focus on only doing what’s on the list, and more on what’s on your heart. The choice is yours.
• More flow. It’s easier to get in the flow of a project when you don’t have to worry about checking something off of a list.
• Lighter work experience. There’s no buzzkill like starting the day knowing that you’ll be doing a task you hate for three hours. Binge Productivity allows for a much lighter work atmosphere.

Cons

• Deadlines. Even though the mood is much lighter, every now and again I find myself worrying about whether or not I’m getting everything done I should. It’s almost a guilty feeling due to the fact that I’m enjoying work so much.
• Too Free. Sometimes it’s easier to want to just stop working and do whatever the heart desires with Binge Productivity. Because there is a lot of flexibility associated in the workflow, it almost seems natural to just want to stop working altogether.
• No Real Quittin’ Time. Because of the freedom, it’s harder to stop working at a static time. But that could just be my experience.

While there are definitely still some kinks to be worked out, I really enjoy the Binge Productivity system. It’s a much more palatable workday, if you’re the type of person who doesn’t always like a lot of structure.

What are your thoughts? Am I off my rocker suggesting this type of system? Or do you think it could be a viable option for web workers? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

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I can still remember my first experience with an incubator as a child. Our elementary school had an incubator where we artificially heated chicken eggs until they eventually hatched, in our very own classroom. Every day we’d all be sure to gather round the incubator and check the progress of the eggs. And when the day finally arrived when the baby chicks finally poked their beaks through, my classmates and I all felt a feeling of accomplishment. We’d been there from day one.

Imagine our joy when my brother and I had the privilege of taking two of the chicks home to raise on our own! (Never mind that later in the week we accidentally “sent them to heaven” playing basketball in our driveway… that’s for another post and a good session of therapy.)

The concept of a having an idea “incubator” is the same as the real ones used in 3rd grade classrooms. A place where you can toss your ideas, give ‘em some heat for a few months and let them grow. Here’s how to set up a project incubator, with all the steps needed to make sure your ideas eventually hatch.

Capture

A project incubator is a really just a place to quickly store all of your ideas. I like to use a system with Google Docs where I create a folder specifically for ideas. Then, for every idea that pops into my noggin, I plunk it in that folder. Over time, I’ll sort the ideas into different folders and add to each file as an idea develops.

GTD‘ers may see this as merely the capture stage of the GTD process. Make sure you get a system where you’re able to capture every idea, at every time. You’ll be glad you did. We all know ideas never come at opportune times.

Pruning projects

While watching chicks hatch out of a shell in a classroom of 3rd graders is a pretty cool experience, there’s always a downside to watching nature unfold. There’s always a few eggs that don’t hatch. It’s a fact of life.

Pruning the project incubator is an especially important aspect of developing ideas. Ideas change over time, and some even turn out to be duds. But that’s OK because you won’t have time to develop all of your ideas anyway. Just be open and honest with yourself about them. Do you really think this will work? Will you really have time to work on it? You’ll quickly find that many of your ideas just won’t be feasible to pursue, which will in turn help you quickly focus on the best ideas to work on.

Review, review, review

Pick a time to review your ideas on a regular. If you need a reminder, use a calender like GCal or 30 Boxes to send you an email when it’s that time again. I like to review every week or so, but to each his own. The important thing is to regularly think about your ideas. This helps the idea grow and evolve into something that you can actually create.

Work on one idea every day

The best time to work an idea is right when you have it. Adrenaline is great for getting a project going. But it’s even better to pace yourself and work on one idea a little bit every day. This could be just researching, or beginning to plan the idea. Small steps ensure that you won’t get burned out on the idea, and you’ll be able to monitor your progress. Just like the chicks didn’t hatch overnight, your idea probably won’t be polished off for a while. (And will most likely take longer than you expect.) But take heart creative one, for with a steady pace, you’ll soon see the fruits of your labor.

Photo by Cowgirl Jules

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Instead of giving you the usual, in-depth review, I thought I’d make a haiku of the beta-released Things project management software instead.

Things

Smart, pretty and fun
Without GTD jargon
Just needs Quicksilver

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Good buddy Leo Babauta of ZenHabits has a great post fusing GTD and blogging, specifically for us bloggers who suffer from not using our time productively. Between reading, writing, commenting, responding to emails, advertising, and many other tasks, it can get a little hairy for someone without a trusty system. Fortunately GTD plays perfectly into a blogger’s workflow, as Leo goes on to illustrate.

While the post is full of tasty examples for bloggers,  I especially loved this part of the post:

One of the problems with the way people implement GTD is that they spend too much time fiddling with the system and their tools. You’re a busy person — you don’t have time to do all that. Pick a tool, and stick with it. Now spend your time actually writing your posts, and responding to comments, and making your blog better.

How many serial GTD’ers suffer from this problem, even aside from blogging?  When we realize that it’s not all about the system and actually start doing things, we’ve figured out the true meaning of GTD.

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It’s vital to any project that it be broken down into action steps along the way. However, you can get a little too trigger happy when breaking these down.  Some people like to put every little minute detail into an action step.

1. Take out index cards
2. Open pen cap
3. Write next action

While others prefer the vague approach, perilously getting close to summing up a project with a single “action step”.

1. Make scrapbook
2. Show family

What other steps go into making the scrapbook? I personally wouldn’t know, as I’m not much of a scrapbooker, but others will tell you that you have to buy a myriad of things from the craft store, carefully plan your layouts, get your pictures in order, and assemble the book. Phew!  This approach may benefit from a little more detail in their lists.

Steve Pavlina has a wonderful post analyzing these two approaches, and then showing a happy medium between the two.  This is straight outta the GTD methodology, known as Next Actions.   Next actions are simple the  “next action” needed to complete a project.

As to how vague or descriptive your action steps should be, it all depends on one thing: You. If you’re comfortable with really vague lists, use ‘em.  If that anal retentive side of you really needs that much detail, then break that project down into tiny slivers of actions.  The important thing is making GTD (or microtasking) work best for you.

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Now here’s something a little different than what you might normally hear concerning productivity and task lists. The David constantly states that during the GTD sweep, it’s imperative that we throw away our crusty old tasks, projects, and even contexts once they’re spent. The guys at Behance have a different idea.

Instead of tossing away your task lists that you’ve put blood, sweat and tears into, why not put them on display to motivate yourself into action on future projects?

Why not decorate your work space with completed action steps? While we tend to surround ourselves with art and imagery that serves to inspire us in our work, is it more inspiration that we need? Most creative professionals report that they are not short of ideas, but rather the discipline and organization to make them happen. For this reason, consider surrounding yourself with testaments to taking action.

Although I was a bit hesitant when I first read the article, the idea has grown on me somewhat. It does kind of seem like a shame that I can’t proudly display what I’ve been working on as a badge of honor. I can just see myself hanging my best “dones” on the wall, and giving tours with an Australian accent.

“And this little project I bagged on the 14th hour of a Monday in mid-March. What a beaut!”

Or maybe not. But it is fun to think about. How about you guys? How would you display your completed tasks?

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Just a heads up that Nude Recreation Week is coming up this July 9-15, and according to the American Association for Nude Recreation and The Naturist Society, there is an upswing of people working at home in the buff.

I wonder how this affects productivity…

Hat tip: WebWorkerDaily

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This guest post was written by Leo Babauta of the Zen Habits blog.

I’m a big fan of Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, and adopted the system wholeheartedly a year and a half ago. This year, I’ve written a number of posts on GTD, but one of my habits is to take whatever I do and try to simplify it.

Slowly, I’ve been reducing my time management system (based on GTD) to its barest minimum.

And you know what? It’s not only simpler, I’ve found that it’s so much more productive, less hassle, and more stress-free than the official GTD system, or even other time-management systems I’ve tried.

Before I get into simplification, let’s look at the main elements of GTD:

• Capture - write everything down as you think of it.
• Process - process your notes and inboxes, putting everything in its appropriate place.
• Contexts - break your to-do list into several lists based on the context you’re in and what you can actually do right now.
• Projects – Anything that takes more than one physical action is a project.
• Workflow – This is really fluid in GTD … you can do whatever tasks right now that your context, time or energy allow. Basically, you decide what to do from moment to moment.
• Weekly Review – This is the key to GTD — making sure you have everything in your system, and that it’s in the right place. By reviewing it weekly, you can ensure that you are in working order.
• Tickler - A way to remind yourself about things coming up. Allen suggests using a system of folders, 12 for the months and 31 for the days of the month (43 total).
• Filing - He recommends a simple alphabetical system, easy to use so that you actually file right away.
• Someday/maybe & waiting on – Two additional lists that are very useful for parking projects you don’t plan to do now and for following up on stuff you’re waiting for from other people.
• Goals – Not very emphasized in GTD — it does talk about higher altitudes, where you look at things like goals, and those should be done during the Weekly Review, but it doesn’t seem very important to the main thrust of GTD, which is more focused on daily actions.

Those are the basics — there are other stuff, but I think I’ve outlined the system fairly well. And let me say — it works very well, and if you adopt this system you will most likely become more productive (unless you focus (obsess) too much on the tools and keep revising your system instead of getting things done).

Simplifying the System
As you can see, GTD is a lot of things to implement and keep track of, which is why the Weekly Review is so necessary. But it can be made simpler, and by doing so, you will reduce what you need to do and the time you spend maintaining the system. Here’s how:

1. Reduce your tasks. My philosophy with everything is this: before you organize, reduce. If you only have three things to organize, instead of 20, you actually don’t need to organize. How can you apply that to time management? Reduce what you need to do. You can eliminate tasks, delegate them, postpone them, get out of commitments. For more on this topic read posts I’ve written elsewhere: on Zen Habits, FreelanceSwitch, and Lifehack.
2. Capture. I think this is one of the most valuable tools of GTD. Write down ideas as they come to you, tasks that you need to do, before you forget about them. Get it out of your head. I carry around a small Moleskine pocket notebook and write things down in that.
3. MITs. Of all the stuff you need to do, which are the three Most Important Tasks (MITs) you need to do today? Write those on the top of your little notebook (or on your computer) and only those. Those are the three tasks you are going to focus on. Single-task and don’t get distracted from them. If you get only these three things done today, you’ve been very productive.
4. Batch process. Besides your MITs, there are a lot of little tasks you need to do throughout the day. Don’t let them interrupt the more important stuff. To be more productive, batch them up and do them all at once, preferably towards the end of the day. Batch like things together — do all your email once a day, at 4 p.m., instead of throughout the day. Do all your paperwork at once. Process your physical inbox to empty. Don’t do them throughout the day. I keep a little list of batch process tasks at the bottom of my notebook page (MITs are at the top).
5. Goals. I think goals are very important. But having too many can cause you to lose focus, and you’ll end up not doing any of them. Instead, use a simple goal system: choose one goal to focus on this year, and a smaller sub-goal of your one-year goal to accomplish in 6 months. Then choose a smaller sub-goal to accomplish within the next week or two, and each day, work towards that short-term goal. Your MITs for today should include at least one task to move you forward towards your short-term goal. Focus on one goal, not many, and you will make it happen.

That’s it. That’s about as simplified as you can get while still getting stuff off your mind. This system allows you to focus on what’s important, to limit your workload to something a bit more sane, and to increase your effectiveness by focusing less on the busy work and more on the high-powered tasks.

Some notes on my simple system:

• Tools. I recommend a simple pocket notebook, and that’s it. You can use this notebook to capture everything as you think of it, to write down your MITs and batch process tasks for today, and to write down your one goal. If you only have one tool, you don’t need to worry about it too much.
• Weekly Review. It’s not really necessary if you don’t have a lot of tasks to process. However, if you want to do a short 10-minute review of your tasks for this coming week, and to be sure that you are re-focused on your One Goal, that would probably be a good use of your time.
• Someday/maybe, Projects, Waiting for. If you want to add these lists to my simple system, they could be helpful. I don’t use them at the current time, as I’ve simplified my tasks and projects and system and daily life so that they’re not absolutely necessary, but I don’t see anything wrong with them.
• Filing. I don’t really file anymore. I try to keep everything online, using Google Docs and Gmail and Picasa, and with all of those tools I just archive and search if I need to find anything. For paper documents at work, I still have my simple filing system, but I rarely use it.
• Tickler. I don’t think a system of 43 folders is necessary if you don’t have much to remember. Simplify your commitments, and you don’t need a tickler system. I use Gcal for hard landscape tasks, but I try to schedule as little as possible. Basically I use it for my kids’ activities and dental and doctor appointments.

Conclusion
The fewer tasks you have, the less you have to do to organize them. Focus only on those tasks that give you the absolute most return on your time investment, and you will become more productive and have less to do. You will need only the simplest tools and system, and you will be much less stressed. I think that’s a winning combination.

Focus always on simplifying, reducing, eliminating. And keep your focus on what’s important. Everything else is easy.

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