Welcome to the second part of my Clutter 101 series. For the purposes of this article I am going to assume you are doing a big de-clutter of your entire environment (I will mention at the end of the post about how to do mini de-clutter sessions after you are on top of everything). As such you will be dealing with a rather large project so it’s wise to break it down. Take one room at a time and within each room decide the key points that need a de-clutter. For instance the bedroom could have the wardrobe, drawers and under the bed itself to deal with. Take each of these sections and do them fully and do all the sections in that one room before moving onto the next. De-cluttering sometimes means making more mess initially as you dig everything out so its wise to only have one room in this state at a time.

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A prime example of good parenting…

Organize IT’s weekly recap of interesting bits and pieces from this week:

• Ever spend half your night stuck waiting at the bar to order your drinks? I am sure all you readers from the UK can vouch for how bad Friday and Saturday nights in particular are so these little tips on how to get served quickly could come in quite handy
• Scott Young has written a neat post giving suggestions on how to read more quickly and includes such ideas as using a pointer and removing distractions. Having recently joined a library and doubled the amount of books I’m reading this is quite an interesting area. It’s something I’ve covered in a previous recap and I will look at going over it some more in the future.
• Lifehacker has some good suggestions on how to make MS Word less annoying. My personal suggestion? Download OpenOffice instead!
• I came across an interesting tool the other day called Thinking Rock. I’m not normally interested in hi-fi tools for managing my system and has such I may be going over old news. Either way I just feel it needs some mention because it looks simple and effective and I may just have to give it a go. Anybody out there tried it and have any thoughts?

Productivity:

1. having the power of producing; generative; creative: a productive effort
2. producing readily or abundantly; fertile: a productive vineyard

Productivity is what GTD is all about: creating the necessary tools and attitudes to increase your productivity so as to create and achieve more without a discernible increase in stress and pressure that would otherwise be associated with such increases.

David Allen likes to use the term black belt in regard to GTD. Black belt typically suggests a degree of competence and confidence in abilities to deal with situations. In martial arts for instance this situation could be dealing with an attacker. With productivity, it could be the confidence in oneself to come to terms with a new project quickly (putting it into your GTD system and working out next actions) by being calm and in control of the situation.

Being productive involves knowing why you are doing a project, seeing where you need to go next with it by having next actions, and having the final result in mind at all times. Having this sort of information off your mind allows you to think about the project itself and not the unproductive thoughts of why, how and when.

Lifeclever has quite the comprehensive list of audio and text based interviews with the GTD master, David Allen. The audio ones in particular look look especially in depth, especially considering the smallest is 20 mins long. Below is just a taster of that list:

• Productivity Talk: 43 Folders meets David Allen
• The Personal Productivity Show
• GTD: A new cult for the info age
• Cutting through the clutter to get things done
• David Allen’s path to bliss