Organize IT

In my last two posts I’ve repeatedly used my filing system as an example of productivity (epic) failure. As the end of the year is coming up I thought now would be a good time to shake things up a little. At the moment I use what is probably quite a traditional approach. It is split up alphabetically with subcategories for each section (I would have an insurance tab, B would have a bills tab, and so on). However, as far as I am concerned it’s more hassle than it’s worth and it crucially fails on three key accounts which I’ve detailed below.

If repetitive day-to-day tasks are even remotely complicated or time consuming you’ll end up not doing them. Whether it’s updating your to-do list, emptying your inbox, trying to get the lid of your expensive pen or just generally trying to be productive, you will find yourself at some point falling off the wagon. Imagine that an old fashioned manager wants to start using some calendar program on the shiny new laptop his daughter got him. Unfortunately the closest he ever got to technology was when he found a lost mobile phone and thought it was a calculator. It takes him five minutes to input his meeting with that boring bloke from finances. It would have taken him five seconds in a paper calendar. I don’t think I need to spell out where I’m going with this.

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Learning to be productive nowadays with our hectic lifestyles and demanding jobs is a tough prospect, made all the more difficult by the fact there is no one correct way of doing it. You have to learn as you go and falling off the wagon is a common problem. However, from reading about and listening to other people’s experiences, there are several common reasons why they fall down. In this post I want to address them and hopefully it will give any budding productivity fans a few different anges to focus on. As a bonus why not share your own experiences. What has caused your productivity to fall apart in the past? How did you resolve it?

Batching your work is one of the most common productivity tips out there. However, I’ve always had a little problem with it. Batching turns small, individual tasks into big, time consuming projects. Whenever I do any work I look to break it down so that I can do one individual element at a time, which makes it both comparatively easy and quick to do. Batching achieves the opposite.

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Over the last two weeks I’ve been looking at time management. Firstly, I looked at the misconception that there is never enough time in the day. I found that the more time we have the more likely we are to waste it anyway. As one comment said, even if we had 48 hours in the day we’d still want more. With this in mind I started looking at what it takes to use your time better by looking at the two building blocks of good time management; being effective and efficient. To conclude I want to take a look at how I personally manage my time using those two principles, so that you have a better idea of what is involved. Excuse all the links in this post but to avoid repeating stuff I think it’s better if I point you to other posts dedicated to the various topics rather than rehashing it here. I hope it proves useful for you.