Organize IT

A few months ago I started experimenting with a different form or prioritizing, where tasks are prioritized by whether I need, should, or just want to do them. While this is hardly a radical departure from traditional forms of prioritizing, I do find it to be much more flexible (for instance, you don’t need to do something when the deadline is a long time away) and in line with basic commonsense. I’ve introduced the concept but now I want to expand on it. In the first part of this regular guide I take a look at the lowest (I use the word loosely) level of the hierarchy, which covers items you want to do.

Recently, it occurred to me that there are four practices in my life that I use to great effect. I’m so used to thinking in terms of fully systems like GTD that I hadn’t thought about individual methods and practises that I use. Below I’ve detailed them and discuss how they all work together to great effect. As part of this it would be very interesting to see what you would choose as your four techniques, tools or ideas that boost your productivity. Share them in the comments!

This is a guest post by Shanel Yang of Easy Steps To Success.

Is your main focus to be as productive as humanly possible, accomplishing more in one lifetime than you ever imagined possible? Or, are you more interested in slowing down your life and simplifying it, so you can enjoy it at a more leisurely pace? What will bring you the most happiness?

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GTD has helped foster a culture of indiscriminately adding to your workload due to its lack of prioritizing. As a result people spend many a time doing stuff they don’t really need to do. All the tools and systems in the world won’t make life any easier if you have a huge to-do list. How do you fit in leisure time? How can you relax and recharge your batteries? How can you focus on your work and truly enjoy what you’re doing? It’s time to get out of this silly trend. It’s time we started doing less, not more. It’s time we started doing the right things, not any thing.

In this age of instant access information, always available entertainment and bottom line obsessed business our time, energy and focus is always at a premium. It seems to be a common and accepted part of life that we need to multitask to keep on top of it all. The only problem is we aren’t actually very good at it…