Organize IT

Effective:

• Producing or capable of producing an intended result.
• Doing something adequately to accomplish a purpose.

Effectiveness is all about doing the right things. While what projects and tasks one can class as appropriate to do will vary between situations and individuals, the general rule of thumb is to determine how much value the task will provide to you (or the company) by doing it. If attending a conference full of open minded people will lead to lots of new clients, that is an high value task making good use of your time and energy. However, if you were to start randomly ringing people up from your phonebook in the hopes of raising business that would be a poor choice of task, likely to result in minimal rewards for the amount of time it sucks up.

A few weeks ago I took a look at time management strategies. However, human nature being what it is, one minute you wish you had more time to get stuff done, and then you wish time would speed up so you can get out of a boring meeting or not have to wait around so long at the airport. Delays and queues are rife in our lives nowadays. However, you don’t have to be a victim to such frustrating circumstances. Below I’ve detailed some of the strategies I use to make a boring trip or a tedious wait in the till queue go that little bit quicker.

This past month I got a mention on Lifehacker about my weekly planner and received lots of new readers out of it (a big welcome to you all). As ever, if you have missed any of my posts from the last several weeks, I’ve done a handy recap below. If you have an opinion on any of them please leave a comment sharing your thoughts, I always try to reply to as many as possible.

Efficiency:

• Producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or effort.
• Ability to accomplish a job with a minimum expenditure of time.

Efficiency and productivity (in its traditional sense) have a key similarity. They both involve doing work in the most economical way possible and as a result there are numerous tips, practices and suggestions you can follow to achieve that. Efficiency can be measured in any number of ways, from how well you use your time to how little energy and stress you exert in doing your work. Nobody wants their work to become a chore but by being efficient this can be minimized.

Several months ago I wrote nine reasons why GTD sucks. Yes, nine whole reasons! However, as I stated at the time, it wasn’t representative of my true feelings, it was more an opportunity to provide an alternative perspective to counter the GTD cultism. I’m no hater (I’m no fanboy either for that matter) so today I want to go full circle and look at why GTD is so popular to provide a nice, balanced perspective. Last time I got some excellent comments and I got some great discussion out of it. Hopefully with this GTD lovefest of a post it will provoke a similar reaction. Do you agree/disagree with my points?