Organize IT recap for 27th October 2007

• Chrissy, a regular commentator at Organize IT, has a great introductory article to GTD over at her blog, The Executive Assistant’s Tool Box.
• Organize IT has an extensive series of posts covering the process of organizing and de-cluttering your home. If you are interested in that topic, you may find this article by Organized Home, covering four different strategies for de-cluttering.
• Having been blogging extensively for over a year now, I understand the importance of having keywords in articles. However I never thought to apply the same principle to my resume.
• This chart is worthy of attention (designed by 2Time blog), as it breaks down GTD practices into four different levels ranging from novice to expert. I’m generally a mix of yellow and orange levels. What about you?

Blog Action Day was a very interesting experience and it was the first time I had taken part in a blog community activity. Looking at the stats there were over 23,000 posts out there related to the event, so I thought I would try and delve through some of the more intriguing posts my fellow productivity bloggers published. Do you have links to suggest?

• Evomend: Blog Action Day
• Blog To Discovery: Using GTD To Reduce Environmental Impact
• Zen Habits: 5 Ways To Save The World…
• Dumb Little Man: Items You Never Thought To Recycle
• Slow Leadership: Slowing Down For The Environment’s Sake
• Cranking Widgets: Tips For Environmentally Friendly GTD
• David Seah: Getting To Know My Environment
• Ian Fernando: Exercise With Nature
• Young Go Getter: 5 Innovative Environmental Business Ideas

Starting something and following it through to completion provides clarity because it gets it off your mind, and a clear mind is an important element of being productive. It’s difficult to get anything done when you have twenty things pulling your mental energy in different directions. Imagine all your next actions as blips on a radar. You don’t want to start a bunch of tasks, dawdle on a project and do half jobs on your next actions, because ultimately they will still be on your mental radar taking up all your time and energy and being a major distraction. Objects won’t disappear from that radar until they are done, wound up and signed off.

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When I originally started Organize IT, one of the main things I focused was on my collection of productivity templates that I had designed. One of the problems I had with tools like Filofax was that the sheets and refills did not fit my vision of an ideal GTD system or suit my specific needs. Thus, the logical step was to design my own sheets. I wanted them to be as low maintenance as possible to save on printing costs and I wanted enough variety to cover all circumstances. For too long I’ve left them lying around on my computer which is a waste quite frankly, so from today I am going to start putting them all up on the site for everyone to use. For all the latest updates and download links you can go to this specially created page. The first batch of templates I am putting up are listed below. If you have any thoughts, ideas or suggestions then please get in touch, and be sure to let me know if you find them useful

• Contacts list A4 A5
• Next actions list A4 A5
• Phone numbers A4 A5
• Roles & responsibilities A4 A5
• Vertical map A4 A5
• Weekly planner A4 A5
• Priority matrix A4 A5

Glitter spray gets everywhere. But not there!