I think my simplest self-imposed challenge was to: go entirely paperless at the office this month. It was so simple it’s almost laughable. I’m so confident that I met my own goal I’ve posted this a week before the end of the month. So how did I do it and how did it spill over into my personal life?
These days we all have laptops: they’re light, portable, and can go anywhere. I’m fortunate enough to have one for both work and play.
I’m a huge fan of simplicity; I’ve been working on de-cluttering, simplifying, and reducing the unnecessary in my life lately (which is why I’m in love with Zen Habits). I’ve started tracking the many things I want to do by using Joe’s Goals.
Joe’s Goals is a simple site where you set a goal (positive or negative), which days it applies to, it’s weighting (1 point? 2 points?) and then you have a simple grid with days across the top and goals across the side. As you complete a goal every day you check it. Joe’s Goals tracks this for me and serves as a simple checklist (with a history).
If you’re looking to start making change in your life, set up an account and set it as your homepage. I’ve done this and, again, being greeted (aware) of what you want to change is sometimes all it takes.
One of the most useful habits I’ve begun is very simple. It’s helped me accomplish more each day. It’s helped me feel accomplished before I go to bed. The best part about this technique? There are only three steps!
I use my BlackBerry Tasks application to dump every single task I think of. You can do the same with a piece of paper, whiteboard, etc. Just jot down every thing that comes up.
If it needs to be done in a week, put it down. If it needs to be done in a few hours, put it down. Now we have a list!
At this point I know what I need to do. I can simply pick out the tasks I want to get done tomorrow. If the day is looking slow I’d better come up with some things that will make me feel effective. I want to look at my accomplishments and know the day was well spent.
Once I have my major tasks planned out I simply head to bed. I have tomorrows quasi-agenda laid out on my phone/sticky note/whiteboard.
Email will throw a wrench in whatever best laid plans you’ve put together. Sure, you can get your Daily Dilbert fix but don’t address anything else. By mid-day (lunch-ish) I do a status check. I see where I am with my list and by then, everyone else has woken up and filled my inbox. So, take a break, check your emails and see if there’s anything else that needs to be done by end-of-day (be sure to add it to the list!).
The last few days I’ve started doing this have been productive. People will admit that email commonly controls their lives and daily agenda. Breaking away from it will let you do what you want to do for the day.
Just try it out. Skipping email in the morning keeps you focused and, I promise, you won’t miss much.
Did you like this tip? Check out The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
If you’re like me, you enjoy spending all your money using a credit card (bonus miles, reward points, easier to track, etc.). But, when month-end comes and you spent $1,200 of your $1,800 limit it’s going to look really bad on your credit score (because you’re using a lot of credit). Since I’m paid twice a month I pay my bill twice a month. In other words, pay off your balance half-way through the month to keep your final balance low. Plus, it helps remind your checking account that you are indeed spending real money.
This week is the perfect storm. Apparently professors are very good at taking the number of weeks in a semester and dividing by three because they all decided this was the week. My projects, presentations, papers and exams won’t catch me off-guard though; I saw them coming thanks to some foresight (a calendar).
But, how do you make the best use of your time?
I’ve been asked how I keep my busy life on track. Honestly, it’s become second nature and don’t put much thought into it. But, now that I sit here I realize there are some tips I can share to hopefully keep you organized. But, first things first:
So, if you don’t know already: I’m pretty clever. Not really but I sometimes impress myself with my ability to put two and two together. Remember that time I made an infrared receiver for my keyboard? I took another binder clip, taped it to the back of my desk, put my MacBook power cable through it and tada, no annoying power cable on the desk (nor falling behind it). Click here for the pictures. I know, I know, pretty clever eh?
I’ve been keeping another secret from you guys. I have a genius way to keep track of my ‘todo’ list. GMail is so powerful I don’t know if people really realize it. Thus, my mini-guide to making your own todo list in GMail. (Hmm, before posting this I realized someone else has done this same thing, but hey, I still thought of it and it’s still worth sharing).
Create a new ‘todo’ filter for your todo email address
Simply click “Create a filter” to the right of the search bar in GMail. The only field you need to define is the “To:” field which should be your email address with a +todo appended to the left side of the email address. In other words, [email protected] or even [email protected] (if you’re using Google for Domains). Click ‘Next Step’
Create a ‘todo’ label to tag all your todo items
This is simple, click the ‘Apply the label…’ check box and create a new label called ‘Todo’. You can also choose to do something like set the filter to ‘Skip the inbox’ in order to do some clever categorization. For example, all new todos will go straight into the archive as ‘unread’, thus you’ll have number next to the Todo label. You could use this to let you know how many total todo items you have. You could also use unread items to mean todos that haven’t been started. Or, they could represent the high priority todos you have. Anyway, those are just some ideas..
Send emails to yourself
Now if you ever need to add an item, just compose a new message to ‘Todo’ and off you go! What’s nice is I can now send items to my list from my cellphone and they’ll be available wherever.
If you live in Google products as much as I do (if I suddenly lost GMail and Calendar I’d probably be disconnected from my own life) then this is a great solution. Now I can see, at a glance, I have 5 “priority” Todos and they’re all right there with my email (a todo list in and of itself). I’ve tried a bunch of todo list products out there and this is, by far, the most convenient…
Hopefully this was useful to someone, let me know your thoughts or any other suggestions you have to tweak this…
Update: Be sure to use the RSS feed to it’s fullest potential as shown here.
Update 2 (6/28/08): Look into Remember the Milk as they have a great Firefox plugin to add your todo list to your Gmail page. I use RTM with my iPhone and Gmail and it’s a great way to have my todo lists all in one place.
I think this is one of the more excitingly useful features. At first I was like,
