I think I'm done here.

I have passed on all the Outlook tips and productivity levers that I have. They're yours. And I'd say that they're not actually that bad.

But there's one thing. The thing is, well, I changed jobs. I was doing strategic work, where ideas came from ALL directions and I had to really dedicate myself to ubiquitous capture and critical prioritization. It was about keeping many ideas going and evolving simultaneously. Then, occasionally, having an idea come to fruition and implementing it.

Now, I'm in mergers and acquisitions. Certainly the ambiguity has been upped. But I'm still sorting out the basic structure of the work. I'm trying to figure out how to capture and prioritize the work when it's coming to me in very different ways.

Example - last job, email was maybe 15% of how "work" (action items, potential ideas, future notions) came to me. Instant messaging was probably 10% alone.

Now, this group is all about email. 90% of what I do now comes to me in email. The other 10% are written meeting notes. WTF. I'm having to completely re-tool my process at the same time I'm learning a new job.

So, we're out - for now. When I return, if I survive, I'll write some new posts about being an efficionado in the midst of an email-focused, spontaneous, loosely structured project.

In the meantime, go off and do great things. You're more organized and therefore more efficient than 85% of the other people you're working with. I don't know... there some satisfaction in that. Hope there is for you, too.

I was talking about the true test. About how your productivity system is really tested when you go through one of those super busy times.

I just went through one of those times. It sucked. My system broke. I sucked. I didn't completely lose it, thankfully. The big, important stuff did get done. I even received some recognition for those projects. That didn't suck.

Part of why that happened is that I had a flight and my laptop battery had died. I was left with pen and paper. I spent some time just thinking about how to better manage projects and priorities. I came up with a new thing that seems pretty useful.

If you've read any of these posts, you'll see that I fancy myself as pretty good at capturing tasks and projects, prioritizing them, and keeping a healthy system. Where it always breaks down for me is the prioritization. It's not that I don't prioritize, it's that I like too many things. It's very difficult for me to lower the priority of a good task. It would be some meaningful work. Maybe even fun. I might learn something. BUT - if it is not the most awesome thing, the biggest splash, the best project, then I'm taking my limited time away from the most awesome thing, the biggest splash, the best project.

If you like too many things, you can't get to a place where you really love one. The good is the enemy of the best. Perhaps those of us who are "jacks of all trades" have a built-in propensity to like too many things and never get to love just one. We do too many good things, and never really do a single stellar one.

That is profound for me. The following, however is geo-nerdy and you'll just have to deal. I took a lot of geology classes in college. Here's what came to me with pen in hand as I sat on that plane: priorities are like the structure of the earth. There is the inner core, where our passion lies. It's so hot that it's molten. Know what I'm saying? This is what really fires your motiviation and these should be the highest priority. The outer core is still close to the center. These are things that have to get done. You may not have the same fire for them but they are solid projects. The mantle is the problem. It's not molten, it's not solid, it's pastey, and it's too big. This is where so much of my work lands - it's not where the passion is. These are commitments I make because it's easier to say "okay" than "no". it's good but not the best. The mantle sucks. And the crust, well, it's a thin layer and on the surface. These are things I have to do for the sake of credibility, like showing up at the work networking thing with cake. They're shallow but needed.

So geo-nerdy, I know. But I made it through my busy Q1 and came out with a way to be even more focused. I'm kicking that mantle and really focusing on the inner core!

I have a system I'm proud of. I haven't dropped an action item in I don't know how long. I can find every email. My notes contain it all. I manage my time super well. My Outlook appointments block the time for me to do things I would normally blow off. I have it seriously going on.

At least, that's what I thought before December hit. Then I realized that the true test of any efficionado is a huge increase in workload and the stress, overbooking, messiness, and frustration that come with it. Well, it comes with it if you care about doing a good job. And I do. And I think you do, too or you wouldn't be wasting your time reading this.

I am still in the thick of it. I am living the planning system equivalent of hand to mouth. I am ashamed to admit that I even turned back on that little email envelope that Outlook puts in the system tray to tell you there's a new message. But I swear, work has been going at that pace and I seriously needed to know if that response to my question came in. Ugh. I shutter, listening to myself.

My email and tasks are still working for me. It's my calendar that's failed. I make appointments for myself and blow right through them doing something else. And the problem is that the calendar is really the most important thing, so when you neglect it, you neglect balance, you neglect control, you neglect hope of digging out. Perhaps a bit dramatic, but only a bit.

How are you doing with your system? Is it a folded up umbrella on a sunny day?

If I wanted to spend the effort I could find it. There is some study somewhere about this but take it as given that what I'm explaining here is legit. Actually, don't take my word for it. If it makes sense to you, good. If not, move on. This is not the advice you were looking for.

The theory goes that there are dorm room studiers, cafeteria studiers, and library studiers. Different people are more productive in different kinds of environments.That is to say, in the same way we have different learning styles, there are different studying styles. And in the same way that we learn best when we're being taught in our ideal learning style, we're most effective in our ideal studying style.

And by studying, I mean working.

Dorm room studiers like familiar surroundings. Not too much noise, but not totally silent. Familiar sounds. The gain their energy through the lack of newness and the sense of comfort.

Cafeteria studiers like to be around people. It can be people they don't know. It doesn't matter. They sort of feed off the energy in the room. Noise and activity generally don't bother them.

Library studiers, of course, need silence but in a place that's not too familiar. It's social without all the interaction.

Think about it. Are you stuck in a cube at work but you're a cafeteria studier? If so, you're probably annoying the people around you because you're getting up to talk to them and see who is around today.

Or maybe you're a library studier but your study partner (or project team) thinks it would be cool to work in a restaurant tonight. Well, it's a sports bar, really but the wings are awesome.

I myself am assigned a cube but I am away from it as often as possible. My home office is like a dorm room and I can be pretty efficient there. But when I go into the office, I try to avoid going into my cube. I head to the cafe if I don't have calls to make. So my preference is 1) cafe, 2) dorm, 3) library. How about you?

Find the environment that best feeds your energy, and be there.

In this blog, I am of course assuming that you have a recent version of Outlook. This piece of the knowledge worker's toolkit involves outlook categories. While at first, categories might seem like a way to spend time categorizing work rather than doing work. Admittedly, that is a danger for those so inclined, but there is the potential for huge efficiencies in the use of categories if you set them up right.

Here is what I recommend - and this will make a huge difference in your efficiency - synchronize the names of your categories, your email folders, and the file folders on your hard drive. Think about it.  Why should you have a different scheme for these? They work together, they're on the same team, give them all the same uniform. Okay, I don't know where the uniform reference came from.

Say an email comes to you, you read it and say, "Ah, that's the for the Flugelhorn project." You drag the mail to the Task icon and drop it. It becomes a task. Assign the category "flugelhorn". Go back to the email. It has an attachment you want to save off. Do your save as into the "fluegelhorn" file folder. And, then, you guessed it, you drag the email from your inbox to the email folder called "flugelhorn".

For, any work that comes to you in email (and for knowledge workers, that's where most of it originates) you've just saved yourself the time you'd normally spend searching for it. I won't even try to list all the various other ways you could do it and the ways you would then spend time looking for it. Not the point. Point is you don't have to.

And check it out - when you are looking at your task list and see that task that was created from that email, you may ask yourself what email folder that is in? Hey, the task is category flugelhorn. It's basically telling you what email folder it's in. And the date of the task creation is telling you the date of the email. Yes, okay, it sounds obvious, but you don't do it this way, do you?

I'll take this up a notch. Let's say you do your weekly planning and you know you need to spend three hours this week on the flugelhorn project and you need to spend it in two 1.5 hour blocks. Use your outlook calendar to block the two 1.5 hour timeslots. Right click the appointment. Choose category flugelhorn. Not only have you just set aside specific time to work on that project, but you've made your calendar colorful.

Really, I used to not be able to figure out how to use the categories, but I am really happy with this holistic use. It ties together your email, tasks, calendar items, and documents by project. That does sort of beg the question - what's a project? And how many projects can you do at a time? For me, it's about 3 personal categories, 3 sustaining categories, and 5 project categories. In other words, always under 10 and I should be able to recite them anytime, they're that significant and they last sort of long, so you're not constantly tweaking categories. And if it doesn't fit in these 10, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.......

So there you go: the best outlook tip I've developed. It takes some time to set up and maintain, but wow, it's worth it.

It is time to embrace Mondays. Monday morning specifically. There is no better opportunity for you to reset your sights on your personal mission statement, vision, or what-have-you and then go through all your tasks and ensure that what you say is important to you is what you're actually working on. If you think about it, that's very powerful.

I recommend you take one hour on Monday morning, with coffee or tea in hand, and level-set yourself and center on what you are all about. What are you trying to achieve in your job? In your career? And what are the three big things that you really need to do this week to make some progress towards that? This is the best way I know to actually make time for those personal development tasks that are so easy to put off, week after week. So, sit down, remember what you're about, and block time for your own growth.

Then, make the connection between your high priority tasks and the time on your calendar. This is, in my mind, the simple mechanics of doing what you say you're going to do. There is more to this task/calendar relationship, and I'll post that next time.

Read the rest of this post »

One of the keys to effectively using Outlook Tasks is the view you use. Outlook provides a pretty long list, most of which I find useless and I expect you will, too.

You want to get comfortable with View > Current View > Define Views in the Task pane. I use two main views, and I recently added a third.

1. View by Category. If you've set categories as I described in my last post, you'll want to see all the related work you have set out for yourself. View the tasks grouped by category and you'll have it. Within the category, I sort by priority, due date, and subject. This is a good way to realistically guage how much progress you can make on a particular project in a couple days - because remember, you're going to re-look at the tasks in two days, so you only need to be thinking about whether it gets done today or tomorrow.
2. View by Priority & Date. You need to group the tasks by priority first. This is super important because if you've already marked some tasks as low or normal priority, you don't want to be looking at them when you go to your task list to choose what to work on now. You want to work on high priority tasks - you already made that decision to do it today or tomorrow. Within all your high priority tasks, you want to group by due date. That way, you can see how the work deadlines lay out for the week. Maybe you move some due dates to spread the load more evenly or to work around personal responsibilities.

In my mind, only be viewing the tasks wth these two lenses of category and priority/date will you actually be choosing the right work to be doing. And for knowledge workers, that is one of the hardest parts of the job.

I don't know how other people manage.  I mean, seriously.  Work moves fast.  So much is said.  So many emails.  How do people keep track of everything that they are supposed to be doing, everything they are supposed to be working on?

For me, it is the Outlook task function.  Why?  Let me count the whys [sic].

1. Drag email from the inbox onto the Task icon and you have a task.
2. Type notes from meetings into a Task and you have a task.
3. You enter steps from your project plan into the Task list and you have a task.
4. You can assign a category.
5. You can assign a priority.
6. Obviously, you can assign a due date.

In the spirit of David Allen's Getting Things Done, you need ubiquitous capture.  You need a system to collect all the tasks that come into your sphere.  Merlin Mann does a great job of describing this in his amazing podcast series on iTunes.  The point is to be sure that you channel all your to-do's into one task system.

When you have the tasks captured, you need to categories.  I suggest that, if you try, you can put all your tasks into no more than twelve categories.  For me, I use about 4 personal categories, 4 project categories, and 4 management categories.  Using categories allows you to look at the priority of tasks relative to a similar area of activity.  If you don't do it this way, all the tasks associated with the hot project will get done, and nothing else.  If you keep that up too long, you're going to start missing commitments in other areas.

The priority comes in as you do your task review.  I review tasks every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.  I review one category at a time and decide on the priorities of each task within that category.  High priority means it should get done today or tomorrow, and I only assign high priority to what I realistically can do today or tomorrow.  Low priority means it's not getting done anytime soon but is still worth keeping on the list.  Everything else is just normal priority and I'll re-evaluate in no more than next Monday, Wednesday, or Friday.

This simple action - deciding if it needs to be done today or tomorrow - is huge.  Sure, everything *could* be done today or tomorrow, but could you push it off a couple days?  If you can, and do, you are immediately more efficient about how you spend your time.  It's also interesting how some tasks that seem so important on Monday, but don't need to be done until Friday, become just normal priority by Wednesday, and just are dropped by Friday.  That's my fav.

I've come to the conclusion that due dates in Outlook tasks are overrated.  I only use them when something must be done on a certain date.  Otherwise, it's not needed, because I'm doing the task today or tomorrow.  Otherwise, I'll look at it again day after tomorrow.  Now, project managers may freak out about this approach but I find the key to task management is not getting overly structured about dates.  If you do, you'll end up spending more time managing tasks than doing tasks.

So, 1) capture. 2) review and re-prioritize every other day. 3) use dates only when they are needed.  Again, how the heck to people keep track using paper?  I just don't know.

I don't mean "it's me" as in, "hey, hi, it's me, I'm back."  I mean it as in, "I found out what harshens my mellow, and it's me."  That's what I set out to discover in my last blog post.

I have several disappointments in this regard:

1. That took longer than I wanted to discover.  Something on the order of 2.2 months, I reckon.
2. I didn't want it to be me that harshened my mellow.  That puts an unwelcome damper on my blame game.
3. It was obvious and yet I didn't notice it.

It was the hilarious/annoying Merlin Mann that made me see it.  And yes, I'm getting just as sick as you are of me sounding like a Merlin Mann fanboy.  Sorry, but that's how it happened.  I was listening to one of his 43 Folders podcasts and heard him say, "We procrastinate when we've forgotten who we are."  And there you have it.

I got back from South by Southwest (SxSW) and let the negative aspects of my work environment become my focus.  I procrastinated acting on the things that I was inspired about from SxSW and lost my edge.  Probably more accurately, I gained an edge - a very grouchy edge.  But I'd forgotten who I am, which is what SxSw helped do for me.

So, in this moment of clarity, I simply changed focus and spent about a week getting back to what I should have been focusing on.  And it worked.  Would I like to spend all my time on my creative work?  Yes.  But my current job doesn't allow it.  So, I timebox the hours in the week when I'll do the non-fun work and I find that I don't procrastinate.

More about timeboxing soon.  In the meantime, take a moment and remember who you are.

[A short side road before part 3 of the knowledge worker's toolkit.]

I had a really great time at the South By Southwest Interactive conference.  I got a lot out of it and took home lots of new ideas and thoughts about the future.  Somehow, I once again became buried in the day-to-day blah of my job - though, actually, it's not my job.  I rather like my job.  It's more the whole work environment.  It's a bit like really enjoying your house, but knowing it's located in an awful neighborhood.

So, for the next week (before I go on holiday) I am planning to clear the decks.  I'm going to take a hard look at the things in the work environment that stifle one's energy, squelch one's innovation, cloud one's vision, and if it's not too dramatic, kills one's soul.  Okay, yes, probably a bit too much - fine - cramps one's creative spirit.  There.  Better.

How do you keep the fire burning and kick the fire extinguishers in the shins?  I will discover this and share it.  Knowledge is the key to understanding, and self-awareness is the key to knowledge.  I just made that up, but I like it.  Point is - I realized the funk I've landed in and I'm going to get back to the bright, shiny post-SxSW vibe - stat!