Asian Efficiency

ASIAN EFFICIENCY

PRIMER

(this page left intentionally blank)

For more premium products, visit:

store.asianefficiency.com

ASIAN EFFICIENCY PRIMER Published by Asian Efficiency Limited Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Version 2.0 Copyright © 2014 Asian Efficiency Limited All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under the Hong Kong Copyright Ordinance, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to Asian Efficiency Limited at [email protected]. Neither this book, nor any of the contents of this book, are approved or endorsed by any companies or brands mentioned within. It is not the purpose of this book to cover the full range of information that is otherwise available on this topic, but instead to complement, amplify and supplement other texts. You are urged to read all available material and tailor the information to your individual needs. Every effort has been made to make this book as accurate as possible. However, there may be mistakes, and with all the rapid changes online, some details may be inaccurate by the time you read this. Therefore, this text should be used only as a general guide and not as the ultimate source of information on the topic.

4

TRADEMARKS All trademarks are the property of their respective owners including the following: The terms Apple®, iCloud®, iOS®, Mac®, OS X®, iPad®, and iPhone® are registered trademarks of Apple, Inc. For more information on Apple, Inc. and its products, visit www.apple.com. The terms Google®, Google Docs®, Google Calendar®, Gmail® and Android® are registered trademarks of Google, Inc. For more information on Google and its products, visit www.google.com. The terms Windows® and Outlook® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. For more information on Microsoft and its products, visit www.microsoft.com. The term Remember the Milk is a trademark of Remember The Milk Inc. For more information about Remember The Milk and its products, visit www.rememberthemilk.com. The term Evernote® is a registered trademark of Evernote Corporation. For more information on Evernote and its products, visit www.evernote.com. The term Dropbox is a product and intellectual property of Dropbox Inc. For more information on Dropbox and its products, visit www.dropbox.com. The term The Pomodoro Technique is a registered trademark of Francesco Cirillo. For more information, visit www.pomodorotechnique.com. The term Getting Things Done® is a registered trademarks of the David Allen Company. For more information on the David Allen Company’s products, visit their website at www.davidco.com. This product refers to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® and Stephen Covey’s time management matrix and time management quadrants. It is not affiliated with, approved by or endorsed by Stephen Covey, FranklinCovey or any publishers or Stephen Covey’s work. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® is a registered trademark of FranklinCovey. For more information on FranklinCovey and their products, visit www.franklincovey.com.

5

Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Asian Efficiency®, Asian Efficiency Premium®, the A+E Logo®, related trade dress and intellectual property are trademarks of Asian Efficiency Limited, and may not be used without written permission. All images, clipart and diagrams are property of Asian Efficiency Limited or used under licence from BigStock (www.bigstockphoto.com) and ThinkStock Photos (www.thinkstockphotos.com).

LIMITATION OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher and authors are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising therefrom. Any organizations or websites referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or publisher endorses the information the organization or website may provide or recommendations it may make. Readers should be aware that Internet websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

6

Contents

CONTENTS Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management . . . . . . 14 The Simple Guide to Managing Your Email Effectively . . . 15 Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management . . . . . . . 29 Simple Task Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Managing Your Task List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List . . . . . . . . 65 How to Use Your Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 How To Use A Calendar and To-Do List With Each Other 71 Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Chapter 04: Rituals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Introducing Rituals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Morning Ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Action Steps for Morning Rituals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Daytime Ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

7

Contents Evening Ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Action Steps for Evening Rituals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 In Closing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 The One Habit That Stops You From Procrastinating . . . . 99 Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Chapter 06: Eat That Frog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Do Your Most Important Tasks In The Morning . . . . . . . . 106 Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Chapter 07: Beat Procrastination . . . . . . . . . . 111 Beating Procrastination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Hero Mode: Productivity Super Powers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Action Steps for Implementing Hero Mode . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Solar Flaring to Overcome Procrastination . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Action Steps for Using Solar Flaring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Timeboxing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Timeboxing Technique Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Beating Procrastination Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

Chapter 09: Going Paperless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 8

Contents The Simple Guide to Going Paperless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 Going Paperless with Your Magazines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Chapter 10: Organizing Your Files, Folders and Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Organizing Your Files, Folders and Documents . . . . . . . . 145 Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

Chapter 11: Time Tracking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Basics of Time Tracking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

Chapter 12: Putting It Together (Case Study) 183 Putting It Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Implementation and Action Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

In Closing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 In Closing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 About Asian Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

9

Contents

10

Introduction

Introduction INTRODUCTION Thank you for purchasing the Asian Efficiency Primer. This work represents an introduction to the best of the best of Asian Efficiency – we’ve taken our most high-impact and popular writing, cleaned it up, addressed issues that have arisen since it was written and put it together in an easy step-by-step format that any productivity novice can take, follow and implement. This book has been written in a modular manner, meaning that you can pick and choose any chapter that you find most interesting and dive right in. However, you will get the most benefits from reading and working through the book in sequential order – future chapters do build on prior chapters. Here’s a brief overview of each chapter: • Simple Email Management: A look into the high-stress world of email, and how some simple guidelines and rules can keep it neat and organized. • Simple Task Management: The basic principles of modern-day task management, and some examples of different applications you can use. • Calendar and To-do List: How to differentiate your calendar from our todo list, and how to use your calendar effectively and properly. • Rituals: How to build a foundation of solid physical and mental energy every single day, skyrocketing your productivity. • Clear to Neutral: A simple habit that lets you stop-and-start work effectively. • Eat That Frog: How to really prioritize your days and get more things done than 90% of the population. • Beating Procrastination: Some assorted techniques and strategies for beating procrastination. Think of them as tools to pull out when you really need them. • Sex, Relationships & Productivity: The most controversial content we have ever published, rewritten with a big emphasis on actionable items. • Going Paperless: A brief guide to going paperless. • Organizing Files, Folders and Documents: Once you’ve gone paperless,

12

Introduction here’s how you keep your files and documents on your computer organized and accessible. • Time Tracking: How to track the one metric that really matters, and some of the surprising conclusions it may give you. • Putting it Together (Case Study): How the principles in this book look together in an integrated whole. Recommended reading after everything else. You’ll notice that a lot of the screenshots used in this book are from Mac OS X – at Asian Efficiency, we love Macs, but if you’re on Windows or another platform, don’t let that distract you. The principles and underlying structure of the systems remains the same, and where possible we’ve included Windows/ Android alternatives to Apple products. We want this book to be interactive. You’ll find a lot of hyperlinks scattered throughout the text, often to articles we have written on our blog or studies that we reference. None of these are required in the journey to become more productive, but they are there if you are interested. For simplicity we use the third-person pronouns “he” and “she” interchangeably and where possible the text has been presented as a conversation between us, and you, the reader. “We” or “I” refers to the team at Asian Efficiency or the writer of the particular chapter. Thanks again for making the purchase of the Asian Efficiency Primer – we hope you will enjoy it and get a lot out of it. - The Asian Efficiency Team Hong Kong, SAR

13

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management THE SIMPLE GUIDE TO MANAGING YOUR EMAIL EFFECTIVELY

Managing your email has become an important part of modern knowledge work. As common it is for everyone to have email, most people still do not know how to properly manage their email inboxes. People often complain that email is one of their largest sources of distraction, and that using email ends up wasting a lot of valuable time. One of the best things you can do for getting your email under control is to apply a folder structure and have a specific workflow that you can use. I am going to introduce to you a workflow that has been proven to be very effective for managing email. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use Gmail as an example on how to use folders for managing your email. This idea can be applied to any other email providers too (Yahoo!, Hotmail, and so on) or email clients (Apple Mail, Postbox, Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, etc). So if you use something other than Gmail, don’t panic. You can use the same ideas for your email provider or application. Our recommended email clients are: • Mac – Mailplane, Postbox or Apple Mail. • Windows – Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird.

15

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management INBOX ZERO

The first idea I want you to understand is the idea of what some people call Inbox Zero. Most people see their email inbox as the place where all emails are stored, but I want you to start looking at your inbox differently. Here’s how I want you to look at your inbox: View your email inbox as a temporary holding place where you need to start processing emails. Put in other words, only unread emails are in your inbox. Processed and read emails are not in your inbox (they go somewhere else, as I will show you in a bit).

Each time you process your email the objective is to go through your inbox and get the count to zero.

Each time you process your email, the goal should be to have your inbox count at zero. Psychologically it is much better to know that you have managed your email and that you only have to process whatever is in your inbox. When your inbox is full of email, it makes it very hard to look for certain messages that you need to reply to, especially if you have to scan through hundreds of emails. Additionally, looking for emails you are awaiting for a

16

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management response to is a pain when your inbox count is at 295,346. There is a simple solution for this as we will see later. A clear and empty inbox give you a sense of organization and the feeling that you have email under control. That’s why it’s important to make that mental shift on how you view your inbox and what its purpose is. Start looking at your inbox as a temporary holding place of emails you still need to read and decide on what to do with. Each time you process your inbox you want to get it to be zero.

FOLDER STRUCTURE

Let’s get to the setup of the workflow. This workflow requires for you to create 3 folders: Reply, Waiting and Archive. Here is what each folder is meant for: • Reply: all emails go in here that take longer than 2 minutes to respond to. • Waiting: all emails go in here where you are waiting for a response or want to process later. • Archive: all other emails go in here that you want to be able to access later. Whichever email client you use, you need to setup these folders. In this chapter I will use Gmail as an example. Within Gmail, they use folders too but they call them “labels”. Here is how you set them up: 1. Top right corner, click on the Settings Gear image and then click on Settings.

17

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management

Go to Settings Gear > Settings (top right corner)

2. Click on the Labels tab.

Click on the Labels tab to create the labels / folders.

3. Create the new labels Reply and Waiting. Gmail already comes with an Archive folder called All Mail so you don’t have to create one (but you do in your email clients and other email providers).

Create the labels/ folders in Gmail.

18

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management PURPOSE REPLY FOLDER

Some typical emails that belong in the Reply folder: • Someone is requesting you to do something (with or without deadline). ––Examples include submitting reports, verifying something, and taking on any task. • Someone is asking you to respond to something but it requires more deep thoughts from you to respond. ––Examples include people asking for your opinion or asking about your availability for an event. After you’ve replied to emails in this folder, you then move them to the Archive folder. Within Gmail it’s easy, you remove the Reply label by clicking on the X next to the label name.

Removing a label from an email in Gmail

PURPOSE WAITING FOLDER

Typical emails that go in the Waiting folder: • Tracking codes for UPS or Fedex packages coming your way. ––Examples include shipping tracking numbers from online shopping. • You delegated a task and you are waiting for a response / result. ––Examples include emails from (virtual) assistants, employees, and anyone you are waiting to hear from. • Confirmation from someone. ––Examples include asking another person if he/she received something from you (like a package).

19

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management THE 2-MINUTE RULE

Another golden rule of managing your email is the 2-minute rule. It’s really simple: if it takes longer than 2 minutes to process or reply to an email, reply to it later and put the email in the Reply folder. Otherwise, reply right away. When it comes to managing your email, you want to apply the productivity principle of touch it once. Do not reread the same email – that’s just a waste of time. Especially when you have to deal with dozens or hundreds of emails every day. To put it another way, as soon as you’re reading an email – decide right away what to do with it. Don’t let it linger around in your inbox because you will forget what the email is about and this will force you to read it again. Touch it once and move to the next email. The value in this rule is that you go through your inbox really fast, and you initially process only what is necessary. If someone needs a quick response, you’ve taken care of that. If an email needs more attention, you can work on that later and prioritize which email gets the most attention (after your inbox is processed and at zero). What most people tend to do is process emails one-by-one and sequentially handle each email as they receive it throughout the day. This is a very inefficient way of managing your email, because you aren’t prioritizing. Let’s say you have 10 unread emails in your inbox. How do you know if email #2 is more important and higher priority than email #9? You don’t know if you spend a lot of time on each email. That’s why this time limit rule is so effective because you will quickly find which emails need the most attention. Two minutes is the limit I’ve set for myself. Adjust this for yourself based on how much time a day you want to spend on email and the volume of emails you get. Personally, I want to spend less than one hour a day on managing my email. At my current volume, I receive fewer than 50 emails a day, and with the 2-minute limit I get to manage my email daily in less than an hour. As a guideline: the more emails you get per day, the shorter your time limit should be.

20

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management I cannot stress this enough, but when it comes to managing your email you really want to apply the touch it once rule. You will waste a lot of time by rereading emails over the span of weeks and by just implementing this rule you’ll save a lot of time.

21

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management WORKFLOW

To quickly recap – as you process your inbox, you want to apply the inbox zero, 2-minute rule and the touch it once principle. These are essential to this workflow and now let’s tie all the pieces together. Below is a simplified diagram of the workflow.

Email Management Workflow Diagram

Once you have your inbox at zero, that’s when you can effectively start managing your email. By default, you know that all emails in the Reply folder require your focus and attention (they require more than 2 minutes of your

22

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management time). When you apply this workflow this is what happens: • As you process your email, you will have responded to all the messages that didn’t require much attention from you (each email took less than two minutes to respond to). • Anything that was important is in the Reply folder, and you can work on it later and prioritize accordingly (each emails takes longer than two minutes to respond to). Once your inbox is zero that’s when you can decide how you are going to prioritize your emails in your Reply folder. You should be able to process your inbox fairly quickly by scanning the email content, decide what the next step is and process accordingly. After your inbox is at zero, usually you want to process your Reply folder next and treat each email with focus (because you know they require more attention hence why there are in the Reply folder).

23

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management For more intermediate and advanced readers: you can make every email in your Reply folder an action item on your to-do list. This is actually what I prefer but it requires that you use a to-do list or task manager (we’ll discuss tasks in the next chapter). By the mere fact that emails that go to the Reply folder, I want to make it an item in my task manager.

Email Management Workflow Diagram (Advanced)

24

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management It also is not uncommon that a request in the email requires you to do something that might be a (big) project. Your boss might say, “Hey I want you to research what the 3 hottest stocks are in precious metals and recommend to me which one has the best prospects. Please send it to me within 5 days from today.” Now this is an extreme example, but I hope you see what I mean. With such emails you have to create an action item (or even a project), work on it, finish it, and then reply to that email. A simpler example might be that a friend is asking if you can join her for a concert in two weeks. What you can do is respond right away saying you’ll look into it, put it on your to-do list and figure it out later. Three days later, after you figured out your schedule, you reply saying “Yes I’ve checked my schedule and I’m available. Let’s do it!” and put a check mark on your to-do list action item.

SEPARATING EMAIL FROM TO-DO LISTS

A common mistake people make is that they see their email inbox as a to-do list manager. Rather, you want separate a to-do list manager and email inbox. You want to view your email inbox as another source of where tasks might come from. Just like your boss might give you a task, or a phone call, so is email another source. By creating action items on your to-do list you force yourself to stay within the email client (or on the same website) and you prevent yourself going off doing something else. It’s common to read an email, click on a link, read something interesting, click on something else and before you know it you’ve wasted an hour. That’s one of the many reasons why treating your email inbox simultaneously as your to-do list is so dangerous. Please try to avoid that and use a separate task manager (such as OmniFocus).

25

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management WORKFLOW EXAMPLE

The key to make this system work is that you have to review your folders regularly. A good habit to this workflow is to check your email twice a day at fixed times. That means going through your inbox twice in one day and where you apply the inbox zero concept and 2-minute rule. As an example, I will show you how I manage my email. • Monday-Friday: process email at 11am. • Monday-Friday: process email at 4pm. • Friday: review Waiting folder at 4:30pm (usually after processing email).

This is roughly how my days look like where you can see when and how long I manage my email

I process my email only twice a day and at fixed times. Once in the morning after I’ve done my most important tasks (never check email first thing in the morning, it will kill your productivity). By the time I’m processing my emails, I have already done my highest level activities and anything after that is nice to complete.

26

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management Between the time I process my email inbox the first time and second time, there is a gap of time I can use to get work done. This work may include tasks that I got assigned through email earlier that morning. As I’m processing my email inbox the second time, I can update my task list again and prepare my to-do list for tomorrow (if I got any emails with assignments and tasks handed to me). By checking my email again at the end of the day, I can setup what my most important tasks are the next day. Before the weekend hits, that’s when I review my Waiting folder. I do this once a week. I treat it like a separate inbox and go through it as fast as possible. If I didn’t get a response from someone within 48 hours, I’ll send a quick reminder. What I really like about this workflow is the sequencing of doing your most important tasks first, then checking email, and then planning. Since I’ve already completed work between 9 and 11 (I usually start working at 9) without the distraction of email, by the time I’m checking my email I’ve already done the most important thing I could do that day. Whatever tasks I might get my way through email can be done later that day or some other time. • 9-11am: do highest leverage work (can be stuff from email from yesterday). • 11-11.30am: process emails. • 12.30pm – 3.30pm: do other work (that include new tasks just processed from emails earlier in the morning). • 4pm – 4.30pm: process emails. • 4.30pm – 4.45pm: manage to-do list based on tasks worked on today and the last set of emails. This is a great workflow for people who work in an environment where email is the main communication medium. Now this was a lot of theory and examples. It can be overwhelming to learn, but experiment with and implement this email management workflow.

27

Chapter 01: Simple Email Management ACTION STEPS 1. Create the 3 folders: Reply, Waiting and Archive. 2. Move your current inbox into the Archive folder. 3. Starting now, follow this workflow. 4. Figure out how many times a day you want to check your email and at what times. 5. Review your Waiting folder every Friday.

28

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management SIMPLE TASK MANAGEMENT

Task Management is a simple productivity concept but one that is often overlooked. Anyone who has tried to get more organized, or get their priorities or life in order has inevitably used a task list of some sort. This chapter will explain exactly what a task is (and how it differs from say an appointment or a piece of information), how to prioritize, organize and manage your tasks on an ongoing basis. It will also provide some strategies for managing your task list so that it doesn’t grow nonstop and spiral out of control. We are going to introduce four different methods for managing your task list in this chapter – pen and paper, a text or Microsoft Word document, Things (for Mac) and Remember the Milk (online). All these solutions work, and we’ll outline their pros and cons as we go along. Note: “Task”, “To-do” and “Action” are used interchangeably. If you read this and decide that you need a more complex solution, we highly recommend OmniFocus (for Mac and iOS) and our guide, OmniFocus Premium Posts.

30

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management WHAT IS A TASK

A task is an actionable item that needs to be done now, or at a later date. By exclusion, a task is something that you have to do that doesn’t occupy a specific time slot on your schedule (those are appointments). It is important to not confuse tasks and information. The act of filing information or organizing a piece of information is a task, but the information itself is not. For example: • Dinner with Suzie on Friday – appointment. • Call restaurant to make dinner reservations for Friday – task. • Restaurant’s address, phone number and directions – information. People who are familiar with task lists will recognize the above immediately. Once upon a time, tasks were single-sentence descriptions in numerical order. Now, they are far more complex – you now have the ability to describe tasks in terms of the projects they belong to as well as the contexts (tools, locations, mindsets) they belong to. While to some it may seem that this extra information attached to each task is unnecessary, in reality it has increased the level of clarity we have over our to-do lists by allowing us to see the relationship between individual actions, and how they all add up to our goals and different parts of our lives.

WHY TASK MANAGEMENT

Task management is important, for the simple reason that success in this world (however you wish to define it) seems to be the result of 1) knowing what you want, and then 2) directing action towards it. Without a clear list of tasks, there can be no directed action. At the most basic level, tasks allow you to externalize the ideas and thoughts you have floating in your head. We all have thoughts and ideas that in the moment we think are fantastic, and tell ourselves “I’ll remember that later”. Well, maybe we will or maybe we won’t. Writing them down and turning them into actionable items guarantees that you will. Having actionable items captured and externalized also allows us to utilize our

31

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management organizational skills to decide what is important and what is not. Is watching reruns of Lost more important, or is doing your laundry? Actively managed task lists also create a certain degree of accountability. It very clearly indicates where we have fallen short in terms of directed action, and is a good (and somewhat pressure-free) wakeup call to get more done.

THE 2-MINUTE RULE

Here’s the 2-minute rule from Getting Things Done®: “If it takes less than 2 minutes to do it, do it now.” If you think of something to do and it takes less than 2 minutes to handle, do it now. Don’t put it in your task list. Try to apply this anytime you’re dealing with something to do.

TASK HIERARCHIES

This is the most complex part of this guide. Different people have different ways of dividing up the different parts of their lives, but the one that we have seen fairly often and that works for most people is a division into: • Health • Wealth (including career) • Relationships (friends, family, significant other) • General Happiness (catchall for everything else) • Errands (mundane everyday tasks) It would therefore make sense for our tasks to fall into these categories too. The Errands category is for the everyday mundane that doesn’t belong anywhere else – things like going to the bank, doing the laundry, doing the grocery shopping etc. Now for some people this is too structured. In which case we would recommend: Projects: personal projects you have that you want to complete, like redecorating the living room, cleaning out the garage, or finishing a certain book. • Events: planning a dinner party, outlining a vacation, organizing a family trip out of town. • Errands: same as the “Errands” list above.

32

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management • Things For Later: ideas that you want to revisit one day, just not at the moment.

PEN AND PAPER TASK MANAGEMENT

Pen and paper is the simplest form of task management, and the one that most people use (to varying degrees). The biggest problem with pen and paper is actually that most people start to develop a great task management system, then they stop using it or maintaining it due to the busyness of their lives. The benefits of paper are many. It is very simple – you don’t need any complicated or expensive equipment or apps, and it’s something you could easily teach to your mom/dad/family or any non-technically-inclined friends. That’s not to say there aren’t downsides compared to other task management systems – the biggest probably being that you have to copy tasks over to the next day every single day to maintain a functioning system. For this reason, while you can work with pen and paper, we highly recommend a digital system (outlined later in this chapter). With that out of the way, here’s what you’ll need: • Paper. Preferably in the form of a notebook (We recommend US Letter or A4/A5 size). • Post-it notes. • At least 2 different colored pens – one for writing, one for highlighting. Getting this system started is straightforward. Sit down, and take the time to write down everything on your mind. Write down all the things you have to do, all the random thoughts you have – everything. Grocery shopping for this week? Write it down. Doctor’s appointment in 2 weeks? Write it down. Call Jean back about dinner next week? Write it down. You should end up with a large list of unorganized thoughts and actions the first time you do this. Now you need to sort. In general, there will be three types of items you have listed: tasks, appointments and information. You want to separate these out. Appointments will go in your schedule or calendar (see the chapter on Calendar and To-do List). Information should

33

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management technically go into a personal wiki or database (covered in the chapter on Going Paperless), but if we’re being simple here, just transfer it to another notebook for the time being. Tasks are what you want to focus on for now. Taking this list of tasks, start ordering them – start at 1, and go through to x, where x is the number of items on your list. There’s no real need for categories with a paper system, it just tends to complicate things. You may find that certain tasks group together around events or projects, and if they do you can list them that way. Now that you have your initial list of tasks, it’s time to learn how to use the system effectively. You’ll have two lists: an “immediate action” list, and an “everything else” list. At the start of every day, pick a new page in your workbook, put down today’s date, and list down all the “immediate action” items on your task list. These are tasks that are due today, or overdue, or will be completed in the next couple of days. Usually about 5 items is right for most people. All the other tasks, should sit in a separate notebook or in a page at the back of your notebook – we’ll come back to this second list later. Now as you start your day, look at task number one, and start doing it until it’s done. Then onto task number two, and three and so on… As you complete each task, tick it off or cross it out using a different colored pen. You can also reorganize the order of tasks on-the-fly if necessary (just cross out the numbers and write beside them). At the end of every day, transfer everything left over to the next day. Now is also the time to take a look at that second “everything else” list, and see what needs to brought into your “immediate action” list for the next day. If you have random thoughts or ideas during the day, grab a post-it and write it down. At the end of the day, the content of these post-its should either go into your “immediate action” list or “everything else” list – the post-its themselves should go in the bin. As an example, here’s a sample list of tasks on pen and paper.

34


Day 01

Day 02

35


Day 03

36


Here’s the “everything else” list where tasks are crossed off and added on a daily basis. You may want to start a new one of these every week.

Now we’re going to take this sample list of tasks, and show you how to set it up in Microsoft Word or more fully-featured task management applications.

37

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management NOTEPAD, TEXTEDIT AND MICROSOFT WORD TASK MANAGEMENT Digital text or what we like to call “Microsoft Word Task Management” is the next logical step towards more easily automating and managing your task list. It is essentially the same as pen and paper task management, except everything is stored as files on your computer rather than in a notebook. This system is best used in an office environment, and where you don’t have the ability to mix your business and personal tasks together into one list. Starting to use the system is the same as with pen and paper – begin by typing out everything you have on your mind. Sort out the appointments and information, and then organize the remaining tasks into a hierarchical order. You will likely want to use the task hierarchy we mentioned earlier here, especially in a workplace where things are completed based on projects. Using the system is a little different. You will have one new document per each day. The filename should be something like tasklist-yyyymmdd.docx, i.e., tasklist-20130201.docx. This document will have both your task list (at the top), and at the bottom, it should have your “everything else” list – your items for later action. At the beginning of each day, sort your tasks into relevant order (under projects or subsections if necessary) and begin working through them. At the end of each day, use the “save as” function to create a file with the next day’s date. As with pen and paper, move items into or out of the “everything else” section as necessary. Any random notes and ideas you accumulate throughout the day should go at the bottom in the “everything else” section. While this system works best in the workplace, you can also adopt it for personal use at home. Simply replace your work projects with a list of your personal projects, events and errands. Here are some example documents showing the progression of tasks over a few days, and how the system is used to manage them.

38


Text Task List Day 01

39



40



41

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management THINGS (FOR MAC) TASK MANAGEMENT

Of the systems that have been outlined here, Things (for Mac only – if you are on Windows, see the next section), is the most complex yet the most elegant. It’s also our recommended choice for learning how to use tasks to boost your personal productivity. Things has a distinct hierarchy built into the software. There are: • Tasks. • Projects. • Areas of Responsibility. These are equivalent to: • Tasks: individual actions. • Projects: sets of tasks that have a finite limit. i.e., after a certain number of tasks, the project can be considered complete. • Areas of Responsibility: an ongoing list of activities that is never complete. If we look back at our task hierarchy, we see that Areas of Responsibility match up well to the general areas of Health, Wealth, Relationship and Happiness. They also serve well as a “Things for Later” list and an “Everyday” list. If you use Things, it is highly recommended that you use this particular hierarchy. If you choose instead to go organize around personal projects and events, that is also possible. You will likely not use Areas of Responsibility in that case, except for your “Things for Later” and “Everyday” lists.

42

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management As with the prior two systems, begin by collecting all your thoughts and actionable items in one place. In Things, this is called the Inbox and can be found at the top of the sidebar.

Things Inbox View

43

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management The next step is to establish your task hierarchy. You should create an “Everyday/Errands” Area of Responsibility. The “for later” area found in the prior two systems is replaced in Things by the “Someday” list. If you choose to use structured categories, set them up too: If not, then you will create appropriate projects as you sort the tasks now collected in your inbox, which is the next step. Take each of the tasks in your Inbox, and put them into projects as necessary, and put those projects (or tasks) into the appropriate Areas of Responsibility. One of the great benefits of a task manager like Things is that you can assign due dates to individual tasks (and projects) in a useable fashion. So, be sure to assign due dates where required, and appropriate notes and tags to each task as necessary. Using this system is as deceptively simple. Use the different views in Things to see your tasks through different perspectives and filters.

Things Sidebar

44

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management The Today view lets you see everything immediately due – similar to the “immediate actions” lists from the pen and paper and digital text systems.

Things Today View

45

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management The Next view lets you see the next available actions across each of your projects.

Things Next View

46

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management The Scheduled view lets you see items set to start at a later date.

Things Scheduled View

47

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management The Someday view lets you see items that are actionable later.

Things Someday View

We suggest starting with the Today or Next views at the beginning of the day, and switching back and forth as necessary. As you complete a task, simply check it off your list (you can always review what you’ve completed in the Logbook). At the end of each day, review what you’ve done in the Logbook, then look at the Someday and Inbox views and move items into projects as necessary. Any thoughts or ideas you collect during the day should go into the Things Inbox, for categorization at the end of each day. The main benefit of using a dedicated task manager like Things is that there’s

48

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management no need to create a new list for each day – the list is always active, and automatically carries onto the next day. The other big benefit is the ability to synchronize with your iPhone and have your task list on-the-go all the time.

49

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management REMEMBER THE MILK

Remember The Milk (RTM) is a simple web-based task manager that also has mobile applications across most major platforms. It’s a good alternative for Windows users or people who don’t want to be tied to any one particular operating system. This is not to say that other web-based applications like Wunderlist can’t be used – almost any task manager will work, it just seems that a lot of productive people who use Windows use Remember The Milk. The first thing you want to do is sign up – email, Facebook or Google login – any will work.

Remember The Milk signup page

Once you’re signed up, be sure to log in.

50

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management Remember the Milk’s hierarchical layout is a little different from the solutions we’ve outlined before. In this case, Remember The Milk uses what are called “Lists” to equivocate to both Areas of Life and Projects. You can modify these by going to Settings > Lists.

Adding in our areas of life under Lists in Remember The Milk

You’ll notice that for differentiation we’ve prefixed each list with “Area” or “Project”.

51

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management As with all applications and methods that we’ve mentioned before, you want to input your tasks and items into Remember The Milk’s “Inbox” list. From there, you can drag and drop items into the different relevant Lists (Areas and Projects).

Remember The Milk Inbox

52

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management Your “someday” items can sit in a separate list called “Someday”.

Someday list view

Using Remember The Milk is a matter of using the correct views.

53

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management Here is the Inbox where items are input:

Remember The Milk Inbox

54

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management You can of course, navigate to each individual list to see what you need to do, but that is largely inefficient. It is much better to use the Overview view to see what is due today, tomorrow or overdue.

Overview View

55

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management The Weekly Planner view is also not bad for forecasting what you have due in the upcoming days.

Weekly Planner View

Remember The Milk also uses a priority system for tasks – you can assign each task priority 1-3, similar to how you assign tasks as “Today” tasks in Things or select tasks for “Immediate Action” in the text-based systems. It can be found under the “More Actions” drop-down menu. We recommend keeping it simple – everything immediately actionable due today gets a Priority of 1, everything else has no priority.

56

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management You can use these priorities as a filter in either Overview view (flicking between Today/Tomorrow/Weekly Planner), in each individual list, or in the “All Tasks” list.

All Tasks View

As you complete tasks, remember to check them off as “Complete”! If you have any other devices you use, Remember The Milk also syncs across to your smartphone and other devices.

57

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management GENERAL PRINCIPLES

All these task management systems are easy to use and apply with a tiny bit of effort. They are all built on solid principles that should be in every task management system, namely: • Easy to maintain. • Sequential order of tasks. • Ability to capture new tasks. • Recognizing that not everything is immediately actionable. You can start with these and make them as simple or complex as you like.

58

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management MANAGING YOUR TASK LIST

As we collect more and more tasks and more and more things to do, our tasks lists can start to grow quite complex. Here are some guidelines that will help you keep you task list manageable. Think of them as guideposts to help you decide what to do with a particular task when you’re unsure.

1. CLEAR YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY

Your inbox is where you collect all stray thoughts and incoming items. It can be physical (an in-tray), note-based (post-it notes in the pen and paper system above) or digital (in the case of a text document you can create an inbox section, and for apps there will usually be a dedicated inbox area). While our inboxes are a great place to collect things we need to do and process, we must remember to clear them at least once per day. The digital version of clutter is an inbox that is overfilling with tasks and items. Just like your email inbox, you must set aside some time every day to clear your task inbox. Having an overly-full inbox is not good – it becomes this big, scary monster that we’re afraid to look at because it just keeps on growing and growing and growing… and this leads to procrastination and missing important items. Try to clear your inbox at least once a day. Either do it, file it in a list or delete it.

59

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management 2. GET RID OF JUNK

We all have times when we come up with a great idea or something we need to do, so we write it down. Sometimes days, weeks or even months later, we find out that we never acted on them and they’re just filling up space on our to-do list. If an item has been on your list for too long, delete it! If it is really important, it will find a way back on your to-do list. Until then, out of sight, out of mind.

3. 80/20 YOUR ACTIVE PROJECTS

There is no point in having over dozens of active projects (collections of tasks) on your task list, because you cannot work on all of them at the same time. You have to focus on your most important projects, or in other words apply the 80/20 rule. Keep 3-5 active projects and focus on those.

4. NO MORE OUTCOMES

Stop writing down outcomes and start writing down actionable steps. When you read your to-do list, you should be able to know right away what you should be doing next. What a lot people often do is that they write down the outcome they want, but the problem is that they often don’t know how to get started which leads to procrastination. Instead of writing down “supplements”, write down “Go to the pharmacy and buy multivitamins”. Instead of “boxing”, you write “Order the PPV package for Saturday’s match”. You get the idea.

5. START YOUR TASKS WITH VERBS

To follow up on the previous point, to make your action items actionable you should start all of them with a verb. This is really simple trick and it does wonders. For example: • Email John about the Q2 reports • Text Gina for availability for a date this Saturday • Call Alan and ask which car mechanic he uses • Take the trash out

60

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management By starting your task with a verb, you know right away what to do. This also helps you avoid writing down outcomes. One verb to avoid using is “contact” because it is too ambiguous; it could mean texting, calling, emailing, and so on. When you read an action item, there should be no ambiguity on what needs to be done.

6. WHY?

We have written before on the power of having a why. When you deal with your tasks, ask yourself these questions: • Why am I adding this to my to-do list? If you don’t plan to act on it, don’t bother to add it. • Why do I need to do this? If you are not the best person to do this, outsource it. • Why is this important? If it is not important, delete it.

7. ADD A TIME ESTIMATE

Not all tasks take the same amount of time. By adding an estimation to your tasks you will see if a task is too big to handle. When a task takes longer than an hour, that is a sign that the task is too big. Break it down into smaller tasks, because if the task is too big you are more likely to procrastinate. About 20 minutes is right for most tasks. An example of a task that is too big is “renovate the living room”. This will definitely take more than an hour to complete and it involves a lot of other tasks, so it is a good idea to break this down and maybe even make this a project. In the beginning we are all horrible at estimating, but as we continue to practice, we get better at it. You will build an intuition for how long something will take which in turn makes you even better at managing your time. A simple notation to use is to follow the task name with (x minutes) – e.g., “Email Thanh about TPS reports (5 minutes)”.

61

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management 8. HAVE YOUR NEXT ACTIONS READY

Popularized in the book Getting Things Done®, next actions are tasks that are need to be done to move a project forward. You can also look it at it from another perspective: what is the bottleneck of a given project? By removing the bottleneck, your project isn’t stalled anymore and you can start working towards completing it. If you ever feel like you have some free time and you don’t know what you could be doing next, that’s a red flag. You either are overwhelmed by the amount of things you have on your list, or you haven’t set up your to-do list properly. If the latter is the case, get out your next actions list and start working on them.

9. REVIEW ONCE A WEEK

Reviewing your to-do list is the process of going over each and every project and making sure everything is in order. To keep your to-do list in order, you need to at least review it once a week. Just like you should go see a dentist every six months for a checkup, the same idea applies to your to-do list but on a weekly basis. If you tend to procrastinate on your weekly reviews, that’s a sign that you have too many projects going on. A review shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

10. HAVE REFERENCE INFORMATION READY

To avoid procrastination you want to make it as easy as possible to get started on things (that’s why we recommend the habit of clearing to neutral – see the chapter on Clear to Neutral). Any friction can to lead to procrastination. For example, if you need to call your local grocery store but you don’t have the phone number within reach, you will have to first search for it. This extra step, or barrier to what you want to achieve, is a waste of time and if you’re not in the right mood or state of mind you will procrastinate. If you need to call someone, have the phone number as part of your action item. For example, instead of writing “Call grocery store and ask for availability of Dutch peanut butter” you would write down “Call grocery store (123-5555555) and ask for availability of Dutch peanut butter”. If you need to go to a

62

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management store, have its address attached to the notes of the task. If you need to access a document, attach the document to the task (or reference it). Make it easy for yourself to get things done right away so you don’t waste time looking up reference materials.

63

Chapter 02: Simple Task Management ACTION STEPS At this point you should have a good idea of how important task lists are and how to construct and use one. Here’s what you do: 1. Do a brain dump of everything in your head – any stray ideas, things you need to remember to do or otherwise. Collect it all onto paper. 2. You may also want to do the same with any post-it notes that you may have and any other physical reminders too. Steps 1 and 2 help you get all the important things you need to do in one place, which makes them much easier to handle. 3. Pick your task management system of choice. Pen & paper works well. So does a simple text or Word document (our recommended starting point). If you want to get fancy, go with Things or Remember The Milk. 4. Input the items collected in steps 1 and 2 into your task management system. 5. Follow the details outlined in this chapter to sort into your different projects, categories or areas. Set appropriate due dates. 6. At this point everything should be set up and ready to use – you simply need to reference your task list as you go about working. 7. Follow the 10 tips outlined in the latter half of this chapter for keeping your task management system clean and functional.

64

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List HOW TO USE YOUR CALENDAR

The simple calendar is an almighty tool that tends to get swept away underneath all the flashy task managers, productivity systems and context-specific smartphones apps that we have nowadays. The shocking truth is that most business professionals simply don’t know how to take advantage of their calendar applications – despite them being pretty much default on every platform in use (desktop, phone), and very easy to set up. We’ll be making the assumption that you will use your calendar between your desktop and phone – some sync solutions will be mentioned below.

SOFTWARE AND SYNC

In Apple’s ecosystem we highly suggest you stick with iCloud, which will pull data from your Mac to your iPhone to your iPad pretty much seamlessly. It does get the occasional hiccup maybe once or twice a year, but it’s otherwise hassle-free. We don’t use Windows or Android (much), but from talking with users on those platforms syncing seems to be a patchwork of solutions. The easiest solution it would seem is to use Google Calendar and their sync solution, which goes something like this: • Outlook syncs to Google Calendar (on desktop). • Google Calendar syncs to calendar app (on phone).

66

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List As a bonus mention for Apple users, while the default Calendar applications are pretty good, we like: • BusyCal for the desktop (easier to use than the standard calendar app). • WeekCal for the iPhone and iPad (best calendar app on iOS by far).

WHAT GOES IN YOUR CALENDAR

Anything that you have to do at a specific time is an appointment that should go in your calendar. You can contrast this with tasks, which are things that can be done at any time. Most people are familiar with what should go in their calendar: • The time you’re at work. • Meetings at work. • Social engagements. • Reserved time for things you are working on (“time blocking”). • Deadlines of important projects and commitments. • Exercise/gym time. This can be extended further to include things like: • Scheduled meal times (especially if you’re on a specialized nutrition plan). • Morning/Evening rituals (see next chapter). It seems that most people tend to think about what goes in their calendars as “official” and something that they try to stick to. You can use this to your advantage and schedule in time to work on important projects in your life.

STRUCTURING YOUR CALENDAR

A really common question that we get is how rigidly or in how much detail should people structure their calendars. What this comes down to is your life, your lifestyle and what you have going on. Some people find it highly beneficial to have meal times, their morning ritual and work times in their calendar. Other people will probably hate having those things in there as a reminder of what they should be doing. Be sure not to go crazy with chunking down time – we recommend 1 hour, or

67

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List maybe 30 minutes max as the smallest unit of time you have in your calendar. Any more than that and the amount of micromanagement and modeswitching makes it counterproductive. Here’s what we found: most people adhere too rigidly, or too loosely to their calendar. The best approach is to respect your calendar, and to see it as your vision of an “ideal day”, and to put in your best effort to follow it – but to also recognize that sometimes things crop up and you need to be flexible. Simply put: try your best to follow it, and don’t beat yourself up if you don’t 100%. With that in mind, here are some structures you can put in place to turn your level of adherence into feedback: • Decide what meetings or appointments you won’t be flexible on – e.g., meetings at work, particular social engagements, scheduled morning/ evening rituals. • When you do deviate from your preset schedule, make a note in your journal. If it happens a lot, that is a sign that your schedule needs to change. A quick bonus tip is to use all-day events to highlight significant periods across a number of days, for example: • When an important business contact is in town. • When you are away on a conference.

STRATEGIC USE OF REMINDERS

One of the best uses for your calendar is to set strategic reminders for yourself. Most people already have alerts turned on for their desktop and phone-based calendars, and you can use this to your advantage by setting yourself alerts for things you want to remember throughout the day. Here’s how it’s done: 1. Set up a 5-minute appointment at the time you want to be reminded of

68

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List something. 2. Input what you need to be reminded of in the appointment title. 3. Set the alert to “on date of event” or “at start of event”.

69

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List This is incredibly, incredibly useful and can be used to remind you of things like: • When you need to drop off/pick up your laundry. • Meal and supplement times, especially if you’re on a complex nutritional plan. • Important time-blocked events, like when you should be doing some mind-expanding reading or working on an important side-project. Why not set task alerts via something like OmniFocus or any other task manager? Because you can’t define which specific tasks have alerts, and if you’re a complex (or efficient) task organizer, you probably have 10-20 things due the next day, and alerts for all of them going off is not that helpful. Remember to also use alerts for “normal” appointments like social engagements to help you get there on time. It still amazes me the number of people who cannot estimate transit time and set themselves a reminder to leave home/work the required 15/30/60 minutes beforehand to make it to an event on time.

MAKING IT WORK WITH EVERYTHING ELSE So where does your calendar fit in your workflow?

Remember that tasks go into a dedicated task manager or todo list – not your calendar. And despite various software companies’ attempts, don’t try to combine the two (more on that in the next section). You should look at your calendar in the morning to see the pace and rhythm of your day, then as you need to, refer to it throughout the day. As with your tasks, also take a look at the end of the day and work out what you’ve done (or not), and see what you’re doing to do tomorrow.

70

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List HOW TO USE A CALENDAR AND TO-DO LIST WITH EACH OTHER

A lot of people use their calendar as their daily to-do list. Most of us learned it ad-hoc that we put the things we need to do in our calendar, but we think that’s a bad approach to planning. We want to show you how to use your calendar more efficiently together with your to-do list. Each has its own functions and responsibilities, but they can work great in harmony once you know how.

TASK MANAGEMENT 101

Earlier in this chapter we covered basic ground on how to use a calendar. We will recap some of the basics of task management here but we recommend that you read the chapter on Simple Task Management for further details. In short, I want you to view your tasks on your to-do list as things you need to do that have no strict deadline. In other words, your tasks have no specific date or time attached. Nowadays we have so many things on our plate that there is no way we can do them all. Especially things that we cannot do within the next week(s) or month(s) but we still need to do the at some point. Where do you keep this information? That’s right, on your to-do list. The key to managing your to-do list is that you have to review it at least once

71

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List a week. That’s when you go over your to-do list, and see which tasks need attention, which can be deleted, and which tasks can be added to projects. Maintaining your to-do list is very important because you will use this information for planning your days and weeks ahead. Again, if this is all new to you I highly suggest reading the chapter on Simple Task Management.

CALENDAR + TO-DO LIST

Now that we have covered how to use a calendar and to-do list, it’s time to show you how powerful they can be together. The starting point of planning is knowing what commitments you have already. Once you know that, that’s when you can see which tasks on your to-do lists can taken care of on which days. For example, when you’re planning and you notice that on a Tuesday you have a lot of meetings and appointments, then you know planning a lot of tasks on Tuesday is a bad idea. Whereas if you notice that on a Wednesday you don’t have a lot of items on your calendar, you could schedule that you work on specific tasks that day.

Calendar planning workflow

72

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List This is how using a to-do list and calendar together can be very powerful. You can plan how much you want to get done on specific days. Make sure you review every week your to-do list and calendar. Start looking first on your calendar how busy you are and supplement days with tasks that you have on your to-do lists.

GETTING STARTED WITH THE RIGHT TOOLS

Using a calendar and to-do list together is a great idea but it takes a little bit of practice. Doing this syncing between calendar and to-do list on paper can be very tedious with a wall calendar. That’s why we recommend you use software as your solution. There are many calendars and to-do lists / task managers that can mesh together really well. We tend to be a bit biased because we love OmniFocus (OS X) and Calendar (built in OS X) so with that endorsement out of the way, here are some other recommendations. CALENDARS

• Google Calendar (web) • Microsoft Outlook (Windows) • BusyCal (OS X) TO-DO LISTS / TASK MANAGERS

• Remember the Milk (web) • Microsoft Outlook (Windows) • Things (OS X) To get your feet wet on the Mac, you should try out Things in harmony with Calendar.

73


For beginners on a Mac, we recommend using Things with Calendar

For Windows users, Microsoft Outlook is the most popular option. It has a built in to-do list manager and calendar. Plus it handles all your email too so these options can all work great together. The learning curve is pretty simple and Microsoft has a simple training course for managing Outlook with email, calendar, and to-do list.

Microsoft Outlook has a built in calendar and to-do list. Great for people who also use it as their primary email client and don’t want to get too fancy. In case you want to manage your email better, read the chapter on Email Management. Regardless of which operating system or email client you use, the chapter also explains how to use email, to-do lists, and calendars together. In case you don’t want to tie yourself to an operating system, there are great web based solutions too. Google Calendar is one of the best online calendar applications out there. For task managers, Remember the Milk is the most popular. These two work together well too. That means you can access your to-do list and calendar from any computer or

74

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List device, as long as you have an internet connection. Sign up for RTM and it will show you how you can sync it with your Google Calendar.

For a web based solution, Remember the Milk and Google Calendar is a great one

Now I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this lethal combination before, but for the advanced readers on Macs you should try OmniFocus and Calendar together. They work really well together, especially when you put certain contexts on your Calendar. A better approach is if you have your Calendar synced with iCloud so you can access and manage your calendar anywhere.

If you want to reach Asian Efficiency level, you need to have OmniFocus and BusyCal

Yours truly uses OmniFocus and BusyCal (Calendar on steroids) together with Google Calendar. I love the interface and features of BusyCal over Calendar’s. It’s similar, simpler, and faster. Plus it can sync with Google Calendar which I use a lot in combination with other Google services.

75

Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List ACTION STEPS 1. Open up your calendar app. 2. Start planning your “ideal day” for the upcoming week/month/year. 3. Schedule it in. 4. Set strategic reminders. 5. Pick a task manager that complements your calendar. 6. Sync up your task manager and calendar.

76


77

Chapter 04: Rituals

Chapter 04: Rituals INTRODUCING RITUALS

Rituals are sets of habit that frame each day. At their simplest, they are a checklist of things you do every morning (morning ritual), during the day (daytime ritual) and before you go to sleep (evening ritual). This chapter will look at all three rituals, and provide guidance for how to assemble your own and then how to tweak them and make them stick. We will also be covering some of the common problems that people have when implementing rituals, such as length, boundaries and activity choice. Note: The term ritual can be used interchangeably with “routine” or “process”.

79

Chapter 04: Rituals MORNING RITUAL

Let’s start off with morning rituals. The eventual aim of your morning ritual is to get to the point where you can do it on complete autopilot – you wake up and your body and mind just start moving in the right direction through the steps of the ritual until you find yourself working productively. While all rituals are important, your morning ritual is the most important ritual as it sets the foundation of managing your energy for the day. If done correctly and consistently, it will help you pace yourself for the remainder of the day, and help you avoid that early-morning crash that most people seem to have. In short, it makes the rest of your day much easier.

80

Chapter 04: Rituals ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS

Here are the essential components of your morning ritual. 1. WATER

Drink 500ml-1L of water immediately upon waking (16-32 ounces for US readers). What this does is rehydrate your body and provide fluids for all your internal organs, signaling to them that your sleep cycle has ended and that the day is about to begin. You’ve just gone 7-9 hours without any fluid intake, so water is critically important as the first thing you do every morning. If you like a bit of a kick/shock in the morning, you can make it cold water from the fridge. 2. MOVEMENT

One aspect of morning rituals that Thanh developed was the idea of adding some sort of physical movement to the morning ritual, to signal to your body that yes, you are up and that the day is about to begin. He prefers some light stretching and a couple of pushups. Anything that is light, or would otherwise serve as a warmup to exercise will do – sun salutations, 5 minutes at low speed on the treadmill, joint rotations etc. 5 minutes is more than enough.

81

Chapter 04: Rituals 3. BATHROOM/HYGIENE

This should be pretty self-explanatory: keep good hygiene. Brush your teeth, wash your face, use the toilet, shower. Note that it doesn’t matter if you shower in the morning or not. Also note that movement/bathroom are interchangeable. 4. MAKE BED, GET CHANGED

Making your bed and changing into your day clothes should be pretty straightforward. It also nicely signals your brain that you’re shifting into a daytime activity mode, and no longer sleeping. 5. GOALS AND OUTCOMES

You want to make sure that you set your goals/outcomes for the day as part of your morning ritual. You can do this is your task management system, in a journal entry or just on a piece of paper. We haven’t covered setting long-term goals in this primer, but you can read up on them here if you want. The best way to set your outcomes for the day is to reference:

82

Chapter 04: Rituals • Your long-term goals • Your schedule for the day • Your tasks for the day Based on these, you will know what you have to do during the day and roughly what your day will look like. If you set your outcomes the night before (recommended), you can simply review them at this point in the ritual. 6. MOST IMPORTANT TASK

The idea of doing your most important task of the day first will be covered extensively in the chapter on Eat That Frog, but for now, know that it will always be the last step in your morning ritual.

OPTIONAL COMPONENTS

As we have taught more and more people the power of morning rituals, we have discovered that some of what we thought were “essential” components really aren’t all that essential after all. And, we learned about some of the new things that other people have added to their rituals to make them even more effective. STEAM

If you happen to live somewhere that the air quality is not all that great, or if you just like having better breathing capacity, you can breathe in some steam

83

Chapter 04: Rituals every morning. This can be as simple as boiling some hot water and pouring it into a bowl, then putting a small towel over your head and breathing in the steam for 30-60 seconds. Or, you can get one of these steam machines.

Steam machine

BREAKFAST

We used to believe that eating a solid breakfast was essential to starting the day productively – further testing has shown that this is not true.

84

Chapter 04: Rituals Thanh prefers a protein-rich breakfast with fruits, while other people prefer a green drink or shakes in the morning. Some people prefer no breakfast at all (like me). Our only advice here is that if you are eating breakfast, keep it light – avoid the heavy carbohydrates that are likely to rob you of mental clarity as you digest them. This will largely depend on your health and fitness goals and the systems you have running there, but experiment a bit and go with what works for you. Exception: if you work out/exercise in the morning, be sure to take something (food/supplements) before doing so. Please consult your physician/trainer for professional advice. COFFEE AND TEA

While we are not huge fans of coffee here at Asian Efficiency we do recognize its power – it’s a great thermogenic when you’re on a diet, and we have found that some people absolutely, must have their morning coffee or nothing else happens that day. Our first suggestion would be to gradually learn to wean yourself off coffee, or switching over to something like tea (green or black) instead. Barring that, having a morning cup of coffee/tea as part of your morning ritual isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though we would leave it as the last step before starting your most important task of the day (we’ll get to that in a second). SOCIAL FIX

85

Chapter 04: Rituals

“Social” refers to the checking of text messages, email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other social networking feeds you are part of. We highly, highly recommend that you leave this until after your morning ritual is done, particularly after your most important task of the day is done. However, as with coffee, we recognize that some people simply cannot live without their “social fix” in the morning. A great time to check all this is over breakfast, or when you’re on the toilet. Scrolling through your news feed doesn’t require all that much effort and concentration, so this is your chance to multitask while doing something else too (and don’t multitask for the rest of the day). Exception: if your work requires you to critically check email (e.g., you run a web hosting company), then check it as your most important task of the day. OTHER OPTIONAL COMPONENTS

There are other optional components that can be added to a morning ritual, such as exercise/working out, meditation or say syncing your phone and laptop. We haven’t included detailed listings of these here as they are not all that common and we would be here for a very long time if we had to list everything that everyone does in the morning. Our suggestion is to start with the essentials listed above, then add optional components in one at a time, and see if they make you more productive. You’ll see some further examples of these in the example rituals just below.

EXAMPLE MORNING RITUALS GENERIC MORNING RITUAL

Here is an example morning ritual for someone who say, works at an office and has a commute. Note that the order of the steps is important, and that the optional components are simply woven in amongst the rest. An (e) indicates an

86

Chapter 04: Rituals essential component, an (o) indicates an optional component. 1. Water (e). 2. Movement – standing stretches, align back/posture against wall (e). 3. Use bathroom (e). 4. Make bed, change clothes (e). 5. Eat Breakfast – check Facebook, Twitter and Instagram over breakfast (o). 6. Commute to work. 7. Morning coffee (o). 8. Review goals and outcomes (e). 9. Most important task of the day (e). NO COMMUTE MORNING RITUAL

Thanh’s morning ritual is similar to the generic example given above, except he doesn’t have a commute. 1. Water – 16 ounce bottle on the bed-stand, to make sure he doesn’t forget (e). 2. Stretching and 10 pushups (e). 3. Use bathroom – wash face (e). 4. Breakfast – protein rich and fruits (o). 5. Gym or Reading, depending on day (o). 6. Eat breakfast – check social feeds (o). 7. Use bathroom – brush teeth, use toilet etc (e). 8. Make bed, change clothes (e). 9. Review goals and outcomes in task manager (e). 10. Meditation (o). 11. Most important task of the day (e). NO BREAKFAST MORNING RITUAL

Aaron doesn’t eat breakfast in the morning. Apart from that, everything else is pretty similar to the essential + optional pieces above. On a normal day: 1. Use bathroom – use toilet (e). 2. Track weight and body-fat – first thing to keep consistency (o). 3. Water – 500ml (e).

87

Chapter 04: Rituals 4. Movement – light standing stretches (e). 5. Use bathroom – brush teeth, wash face (e). 6. Make bed, change clothes (e). 7. Breathe steam for 60 seconds (o). 8. Make tea – boil water or set tea machine (o). 9. Review goals and outcomes in journal (e). 10. Grab tea (o). 11. Most important task of the day (e). This ritual takes approximately 30 minutes to complete.

COMMON QUESTIONS AND ISSUES

WHEN DOES MY MORNING RITUAL START AND END?

The start of our morning ritual is your 500ml of water. The ritual ends when you begin your most important task for the day. HOW LONG IS MY MORNING RITUAL SUPPOSED TO BE?

Ideally, morning rituals are supposed to be short and efficient – no more than an hour. If you workout in the mornings, you can think of that as “separate” from your morning ritual – a break from which you come back from to continue the rest of your morning ritual. It usually takes a bit of practice to get your morning ritual down and routine, but with consistency it becomes second nature. WHAT ABOUT IF I NEED TO COMMUTE TO WORK AND/OR I EXERCISE IN THE MORNING?

As mentioned, don’t count them as time towards your morning ritual. Simply slot them in where necessary – a suggestion would be after getting changed into your day clothes, and before you set/review your goals and outcomes. WHAT HAPPENS IF I MISS A DAY?

Try not to. If you do, don’t worry about it and simply go back to your morning ritual for the next day. WHAT HAPPENS IF I HAD A LATE NIGHT THE DAY BEFORE?

88

Chapter 04: Rituals It doesn’t matter if you wake up at 6am or 2pm – do your morning ritual regardless. You want to keep the habit consistent to really reap the benefits it provides. WHAT HAPPENS IF I’M TRAVELING?

Still do your morning ritual, in the timezone of your destination. There will be some “lost time” if you have a long trip (e.g., Asia to North America) but you can still make it work, by doing your morning ritual at the start of your trip on the day of travel, then doing it again on the next morning in your destination timezone. HOW DO I MAKE THIS A HABIT?

It takes about 30 days to form and solidify a habit. The more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. And once you’re used to it, you can start swapping in and out optional components and see which make you even more productive.

ACTION STEPS FOR MORNING RITUALS 1. Take the essential components from above and write them down as a checklist. 2. Slot in any optional components that you already have or feel you need. 3. Take this new and combined list, and post it somewhere you will see it every morning – in the bathroom, on your dresser, or in your task manager on your phone. 4. As of tomorrow, follow the checklist as your new morning ritual.

89

Chapter 04: Rituals DAYTIME RITUAL

The term “daytime ritual” describes what you do during the day. It is basically what you do at work/school/during the day, and there is (obviously) a lot of variation from person to person. All the other chapters in this book are designed to help you with your daytime productivity – specifically, Beating Procrastination, Eat That Frog, Clear to Neutral and Putting it Together will all assist you in making your daytime hours much more productive. What you will find is that your daytime hours are better governed by a series of habits rather than a linear, set ritual.

90

Chapter 04: Rituals EVENING RITUAL

While your morning ritual starts your day, your evening ritual is the last piece of your day, and effectively finishes it. These are the last few things that you do before you fall asleep, and are designed to set you up for a great night of sleep. Unlike morning rituals, all the components within an evening ritual are interchangeable – there is no recommended order of steps (except sleep, which is the last step). Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

EVENING RITUAL COMPONENTS SOCIAL CLEARING

This is a fancy way of saying check your email, your Facebook, your phone, your twitter and anything else that people use to communicate with you, and then turn them off or put them on silent. Consider it the last time you’ll be checking all these devices for the day. If you use an alarm to wake up in the morning, now is the time to set it. GOALS, OUTCOMES AND REVIEW

It is basically checking your daily outcomes against what you had planned in the morning, and doing some quick analysis. It provides a closure to the productive aspects of your day. You should also plan your outcomes for the next day (tomorrow) and if you have one, add relevant items to your accomplishment list.

91

Chapter 04: Rituals We have a more in-depth look at this here. STRAY THOUGHTS

Grab a notebook and write down everything that’s leftover on your mind – essentially, clear your thoughts in preparation for sleep. We personally find that physical pen and paper works better than typing into a computer or tablet. EAT SOMETHING LIGHT

Eating something light (like nuts and yoghurt) seems to help with energy levels in the morning. You’ll have to experiment with this one – it works differently with different people. BATHROOM

A hot (or cold) bath or shower as one of your last activities during the day helps calm you down and puts you in the right frame of mind for relaxing and sleeping. The important thing here is a drop in core body temperature, not so much if the water is hot or cold. VISUALIZATION EXERCISES

You can either do visualization exercises before going to sleep, or as you’re going to sleep (i.e., after lights out). The options for visualization exercise are endless: you can do breakdowns of your business or life, your goals, your outcomes, you can picture your best self, you can picture your self sleeping and so on. Anywhere from 5-30 minutes is fine, depending on what you’re comfortable with. LIGHT STRETCHING

Some light stretching before sleep tricks your body into thinking that it’s already relaxed and resting. READ FICTION

Remember when you were a kid and you used to read or have someone read to you before going to sleep? It’s little wonder that children tend to sleep really well. Nothing disconnects you better than going off to the fictional world of your choice and leaving all the thoughts, ideas, worries and responsibilities of the real world behind. 15-30 minutes should be more than enough.

92

Chapter 04: Rituals Note: this means reading. No TV. No video games. No web browsing. And don’t read anything that overstimulates you either. Doing this reading on your tablet is fine.

93

Chapter 04: Rituals SLEEP

If you’ve done everything above, sleep should come pretty naturally at the end of your evening ritual.

EXAMPLE EVENING RITUAL

Here’s an example order for an evening ritual, assembled from the components above: 1. Shower. 2. Eat something light while doing social clearing. 3. Review goals and outcomes, set for tomorrow. 4. Light stretching. 5. Read fiction for 15 minutes. 6. Write down any last-minute stray thoughts. 7. Sleep – lights out, do visualization as falling asleep.

COMMON QUESTIONS AND ISSUES

I’M STILL HAVING TROUBLE SETTLING DOWN AT THE END OF THE DAY. ANY TIPS?

Don’t stop moving morning to night. The more you do during the day, the more energy you expend and the more you’ll have a natural tendency to fall asleep at the end of the day. If you can fit in some daily or regular exercise, that’s even better. WHAT ABOUT SLEEP ITSELF?

Give yourself enough time to sleep. For most people, this is about 7 to 9 hours. Any less and you’re really damaging your daytime productivity (no matter what the sleephackers say). More is usually better than less, and realize that if you’re slightly hyperactive, you’ll need more sleep than other people. Check out our product on Better Sleep for more information on how to get more and higher quality sleep. WHAT ABOUT SLEEPING IN ON WEEKENDS?

It’s fine to sleep in on weekends. Mostly because we don’t get enough sleep during the week, and sleep debt is cumulative. Use your weekends to pay it off. Remember that nobody’s sleeping schedule is perfect, it’s all give-and-

94

Chapter 04: Rituals take.

95

Chapter 04: Rituals ACTION STEPS FOR EVENING RITUALS 1. Take the components above and assemble your own evening ritual. It will likely somewhat follow what you do naturally already. 2. Take this checklist and put it on your bedstand or somewhere you can see it before you go to sleep. 3. Allow plenty of time for your evening ritual – usually 30-60 minutes before sleep is about right.

96

Chapter 04: Rituals IN CLOSING We’ve now looked at your morning, daily and evening rituals – the 3 sequences that help to define and structure your day for optimal productivity. We strongly suggest starting with the example frameworks we’ve provided for each ritual, and doing your own fine-tuning over time for the best results. Remember, it takes approximately 30 days for a ritual to really “stick” and to see the full benefits from it. That may seem like a long time, but in reality, you are already doing some form of morning, daily or evening ritual every day, so the effort required is minimal (while the potential for productivity gains is immense).

97

Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral

Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral THE ONE HABIT THAT STOPS YOU FROM PROCRASTINATING

We often procrastinate because there is this one hidden thing holding us back. It is this one thing that makes you procrastinate and most people are not even aware what this is, but if you eliminate it you can say goodbye to procrastination forever.

FRICTION

A lot of times we procrastinate because we have to jump through a lot of hurdles before we can do the thing we actually want to do. For example, let’s say you need to prepare dinner. So you need your dishes, cutlery, pots and pans. But what if they are still in the sink from the time you used them for lunch? That means before you can actually start cooking, you need to wash them first. YUCK. To put it in other words, before you can do your main activity (cooking), you have to do all these others things (cleaning) before you can get to your main

99

Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral activity. Can you see how that friction, washing the dishes, can prevent you from preparing dinner? Can you see how you might procrastinate on cooking? If you make it hard for yourself to get started, that’s when you will most likely procrastinate. Imagine you finished some work at your desk and you went out for lunch. Lunch time is over and you need to go back to do some other work at your desk. Do you really want to go work at your desk when you see it’s such a mess?

Now imagine you actually cleaned your desk and now you need to do some work on your computer. Do you easily get distracted when your desktop looks something like this?

Hold on, I need to write an important document without getting distracted...

100

Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral

101

Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral All these little starting points where you have friction are very common. When you encounter one after the other, it can be very demotivating to get work done. You have to do a lot of other things, before you do what you really need to do. Or you do get work done but you get easily distracted. Now this is a problem….but there is a solution to this.

CLEAR TO NEUTRAL

Now this is where, as we at Asian Efficiency like to call it, the habit of Clearing To Neutral (CTN) comes in. The main idea behind CTN is that you set yourself up for success. What that means is that any time you finish your activity, you do a little routine where you set it up so that the next time you start there is no friction. In other words, you set up your environment for next time. Our friend Eben Pagan uses the analogy of cleaning a grill. In restaurants, the process of cleaning the grill is very important. It ensures the grill will last longer, the food will taste better, and you prevent any bacteria from growing. Before the restaurant closes, the cooks always clean the grill so the next day when they come in it is ready for use. This is exactly the idea behind Clearing To Neutral and how you need to set yourself up. The reason we call it CTN is because whenever you finish an activity, you need to move everything so everything is in neutral position. When something is neutral, it is stale and you can do anything you want to it. Now this is why the habit of clearing to neutral is so important: it prevents you from procrastinating in the future. By making sure you clean up your environment and toolkit, you ensure that the next time you need to use them there will be no friction at all. In other words, you make it easy for your “future self” to get started. So you might think: “So, what you are basically saying is that you need to be clean and tidy.” Yes and no. Obviously that helps, but you need to take it one step further. See CTN as a post-activity habit. After you have done your main activity, do your post-activity work (clear to neutral). This means you set everything up so it is ready for the next time. In the earlier examples, how could you apply the habit of clearing to neutral? When you finished cooking for lunch, you wash your dishes right away.

102

Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral That messy desk? When you finish the paperwork, you clear your desk. That desktop with all those windows open? Whenever you finish your task, clear to neutral by closing all the windows so you only see your desktop background.

MORE EXAMPLES

The clear to neutral habit can be applied in many different areas of your life. While the examples earlier are very common, so are these: • Getting enough sleep: energize yourself so you set yourself up for the next day. • Close relationship loops: do you have unresolved issues with people, especially people you see on a regular basis? Close them so there is absolutely no friction when you two need to work together. • Clear your desk: whenever you finish a task or you call it a day, clear your desk. • Wash your dishes as soon you finish eating: don’t let dishes linger around for too long. The longer it is in the sink, the dirtier it will get. • Close all programs: as you as you finish your work on your computer, close all windows so you only see your desktop background. • Post-morning ritual: whenever you finish your morning ritual, set everything up for the next morning. Note: this applies on a larger scale too, like in clearing the small tasks on your to-do list. Sometimes the simple presence of these 2-5 minute tasks is enough to make you procrastinate on doing bigger and more important things. The concept of clear to neutral can be applied to any rituals or habits you have. By mere definition of the word “habit”, you do something repeatedly. See if you can add a clear to neutral action in your current habits, so the next time you start your ritual or do your habit, you do it without any friction. Your future self will be thankful for the extra one or two minutes you spent clearing to neutral. I know this sounds too simple. Maybe it is too simple. But those extra one or two minutes of clearing to neutral can make a HUGE difference to your productivity. Just imagine how different your life might be when you barely procrastinate...

103

Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral ACTION STEPS 1. Make a list of your current habits. 2. See if you can add a clear to neutral action at the end of each habit.

104

Chapter 06: Eat That Frog

Chapter 06: Eat That Frog DO YOUR MOST IMPORTANT TASKS IN THE MORNING

One of my favorite books on productivity is Eat That Frog (review) by self-help guru Brian Tracy. The main idea behind the book is that if you do your most important task (MIT) first thing in the morning, the rest of the day is going to be easy in comparison. In the book, Brian Tracy calls it “eating your frog” and he got that from the saying, “If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long!” Your frog is the most important task. Once you get that out of the way, the other tasks are going to be easy to finish. Plus you set the tone for the rest of the day that work will get done. Now he mentions it in the context of beating procrastination. I like that approach a lot, and many, many people have used this method with success. By doing the task that you will most likely procrastinate on first, it is relatively simple to do the other tasks because they aren’t as bad in comparison to that task you first did. But I want to take this method to the next level by saying that the first thing you should be working on, is the task that will get you closer to achieving your big goal. Brian Tracy briefly mentions this in the book, but from my experience, the concept is better geared towards achieving goals than simply trying to beat procrastination.

106

Chapter 06: Eat That Frog THE HABIT OF MOST IMPORTANT TASKS FIRST

It is a very simple habit, but extremely powerful if done every day. By working on your biggest opportunity first every single day, it is inevitable that you will achieve the success you desire. Especially if you can commit your focus and energy on your most important tasks, you will get success a lot faster than you might imagine. This is a habit that a lot of successful people have and a common theme among people we consider successful. It is easier for most people to get work done in the morning for several reasons: • You have the most energy in that period of time (especially if you have had a good night of sleep). • There are few or no distractions. • You are more focused. By making it the first thing you do every day, you also take away the pressure of having to complete it later in the day. It can be every stressful when you realize at the end of the day that you still have to do X, Y and Z. Thus by completing them in the morning, especially when you have the energy and focus, you will prevent that stress on yourself. The problem most people have with frog eating is identifying what they should be working on. To get that handled, you should get started on goal setting. If you work in an office environment, ask your manager or boss what your main focus should be. We define productivity as “the time you spend on working towards your goals”. Thus in order to be productive, you have to actively spend time on working towards whatever you want to achieve in the future. You can also look at it this way: you want the highest return on investment on your focus, energy, and work. By getting the most leverage at the most productive time of the day, on your most important tasks, you are being the definition of productive.

I DON’T HAVE TIME IN THE MORNING!

I understand this dilemma. You wake up every day at 7 and you show up at work at 9. Where are you supposed to find time to work on your personal

107

Chapter 06: Eat That Frog projects? Simple: you wake up earlier. Plenty of people have done this with success including those of us at Asian Efficiency. Even waking up just one hour earlier can get you very far. Remember, compounding results eventually add up to be a lot over time. Like Einstein said, “the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” When you wake up earlier and work on your most important tasks, you can achieve your big (and scary) goals faster than you can you imagine. The key to waking up early is figuring our your sleeping schedule. How many hours of sleep do you need? Schedule your bedtime around that time as we have detailed in Better Sleep. Let’s say right now you go to bed around midnight, wake up at 7 and show up at work a 9. Try to wake up at 6 without compromising the hours of sleep you need, which means you need to be in bed by 11pm.

TRANSITION TO OFFICE LIFE

The idea of frog eating can of course, also be applied at your job and in the office. As soon as you walk into work, start working on your most important tasks first. This isn’t just for your personal life. Even if you have eaten the frog of your personal projects, it is now time to do the same thing for your work. I used to have a 10-6 office job, and I would wake up every day at 6am to start working on my personal projects. From my experience I would be too tired at the end of the day to work on personal projects (plus often I had social obligations), so I made a commitment to work on those in the morning. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and I hope you will make the same one.

108

Chapter 06: Eat That Frog

My frog eating schedule for personal and office job

I would wake up at 6am, have a quick breakfast and then work on my personal goals till about 7:30am. Between 9-11am I would work on my biggest opportunities within my office role. In the morning I would go to the gym because I wanted to get in shape and when I got back I would work on some personal projects, like Asian Efficiency and other projects. By the time I showed up at work, I had already felt like I’d done a great deal of work. The trend would be set forth by making sure I did the frog eating for my role at the office, so the first two hours I would focus on my biggest opportunities.

109

Chapter 06: Eat That Frog ACTION STEPS Here is how you can use this technique right now. 1. Write down a list of tasks you are going to do tomorrow that will get you closer to your goals (do it for your personal life first and repeat later for your job). You can ask yourself these questions: ––What are my highest value activities? ––What can I and only I do that if done well will make a real difference? ––What is the most valuable use of my time right now? 2. The answer to the last question is your biggest frog. That will be the first task you are going to do tomorrow. 3. Set yourself for the next day for completing that task. Plan how you are going to complete that task tomorrow morning. Get all the necessary tools ready and in place. For some that means getting up earlier or getting in the office earlier. Do it if you think that will increase the likelihood of having no distractions so you can focus on your most important tasks. 4. At the end of your work day, repeat step #1. Every single (work)day. It takes less than 5 minutes to do the above steps every day, but it can dramatically change your life.

110

Chapter 07: Beat Procrastination

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination BEATING PROCRASTINATION

One of the more common complaints of the modern day is “how do I stop procrastinating?”. It seems that the influx of modern luxuries and conveniences has turned us into a society of people who have a really hard time doing “work”. I would argue that it’s partially that, but it’s also partially that our work today, especially knowledge work, is so far removed from tangible real-world results and consequences that it takes more willpower to get ourselves to do it. We’re going to introduce here 2 simple techniques for short-circuiting procrastination, and one more nuanced technique for reducing the occurrence of procrastination in your life. The 2 techniques are Solar Flaring and the Timeboxing, which can be used together quite effectively. Hero Mode is the longer-term solution which requires you to do a bit of tracking to get set up, but once you know your “Hero Mode hours”, procrastination becomes a thing of the past.

112

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination HERO MODE: PRODUCTIVITY SUPER POWERS

In the real world, people cannot perform at their best 24/7. We are not machines that can systematically perform at the same rate – we are human. We go through emotions, have moods, and there are many other factors that affect our productivity. The way to reach peak performance is by listening to your body and creating a schedule based on your body’s state. When you do this that’s when your productivity super powers come alive and when you play, as we call it, at Hero Mode.

BODY RHYTHMS 101

Before we delve into how you can get to the level of Hero Mode (we got the name from our friend Kevin Pearn), you first have to understand a couple of concepts about your body’s natural rhythms. As you know, everyone has 24 hours each day, but our bodies also go through a 24 hour cycle each day called a circadian rhythm (“your internal clock”). This is where the body sleeps, releases hormones, processes food, etc. Pretty much anything your body does on a daily basis. If you ever had jet lag and woken up at times when you’re supposed to be asleep at your new location, that’s your circadian rhythm doing its own thing. Whereas once a day your body goes through a circadian rhythm, your body also goes through multiple cycles called an ultradian rhythm. Every 90 to 120 minutes or so your body goes through an ultradian rhythm. This is what causes you to have different periods of alertness and drowsiness throughout

113

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination the day. Each ultradian cycle starts off with alertness but after 90 minutes or so, this starts to fade away and your body wants to rest and take a break. This is when you start to get hungry, you yawn, you’re most likely to procrastinate, you find it difficult to concentrate and you want to stretch your body. This is also around this time when you are most likely to make mistakes. Why am I telling you all this? The ebbs and flows of energy we experience throughout the day are directly tied to your ultradian rhythms. We are not machines that can perform at full capacity 24/7. We can focus for a period of time, but then we also need to take a break and eat before we can go back to engage at whatever we want to do. Expert Ernest Rossi explains it very nicely here why adhering to your natural body’s rhythm is so important: The basic idea is that every hour and a half or so you need to take a rest break – if you don’t you may be well on your way to the Ultradian Stress Syndrome: you get tired and lose your mental focus, you tend to make mistakes, get irritable and have accidents. If you continue to ignore your need to take a break you can experience more and more stress until you actually get sick.

PLAYING AT HERO MODE

The key to high level performance and peak productivity is to align your work with your ultradian rhythms. That is when you play at Hero Mode. This is when you are so focused with the work in front of that you forget what time it is and you’re “in the zone.” We all have had these Hero Mode moments, and I’m confident that those happened during times of the day when you were naturally alert or focused. The great thing is, you can reach this state consistently by aligning your most important tasks with the times of the day when your body is ready for the heavy lifting. It is important to know your own periods of when you are most alert and when you’re most dull, because this lets you plan properly. When you align your most important tasks with the times of the day when you are most alert, you will get more work done and do it more effectively. We can go against our own natural rhythms, but this requires a lot of willpower and releases stress hormones – something that should be only used

114

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination at in emergencies or life-or-death situations. Rather than going against the current, go with the flow. In other words, organize your day based on your ultradian rhythms. For example, a lot of people are the most alert in the morning. If you are one of those people, like yours truly, you should plan your day so that your highest priority tasks are scheduled in the morning. In the afternoon is typically when your body’s circadian and ultradian cycles reach their lowest point. This when you’re most likely to be drowsy and low on energy. Like we say in Better Sleep, we are hardwired to take a nap around that time. Now that you know the importance of your own rhythms, it’s time to start planning your perfect day. The first thing you need to do is to identify your most productive hours in a day. In other words, what times of the day are you most creative, focused, or alert.

BUILD YOUR PERFECT SCHEDULE

After you have identified the periods of the day when you’re most alert and focused, it’s time to build your perfect schedule. If you remember, the previous chapter talked about a habit called Eating Your Frog, where you tackle your most important task as the first thing every day. Now let’s take that to the next level. When you start your day and have prioritized which tasks you want to do that day (however you like), arrange your schedule so your most important tasks are scheduled during your Hero Mode hours. On the flip side, also put your low value tasks at times when you’re not that focused or energized. When you reach the end of your cycle, that’s when you need to take a break. Look for signs around the 90 minute mark when you start to feel like doing something else or when you just aren’t as focused anymore. You don’t have to adhere rigidly to 90 or 120 minutes, but look for cues around that time when you aren’t as focused. That’s when you know you’re reaching the end of your ultradian cycle and once you’re reaching that point, we highly suggest you do one of the following things: • Clear to Neutral. • Hydrate yourself with a glass of water (or two).

115

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination • Have a small meal of around 300 calories (avoid stuffing yourself with a lot of carbohydrates, they make you feel lazy and bloated). • Disengage from your workplace. Go somewhere else so your brain changes “frequency” to a different environment so you disengage from your work. Then go back to your workplace and play at Hero Mode again. The alignment of your highest value tasks during the times of the day when you are the most alert, energized, or creative, is really a game-changer for a lot of people. You may already do this naturally to some extent, but I’m confident you can do it even better and step it up a notch. If you are someone who flames out fast and you maybe just have one or two periods of hero mode moments in a day, the first thing you want to look at is the following points: • Are you getting enough sleep? • Are you eating (just) enough food and drinking enough water? • Do you exercise? Regular exercise will increase your effectiveness but also the number of Hero Mode moments you have in a day.

AN EXAMPLE FROM THANH’S LIFE

This is a graph where you can see Thanh’s ultradian rhythms. This is from Thanh’s time tracking data.

To give you an idea of how to apply Hero Mode, here’s an example from

116

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination Thanh’s own data. The graph above shows you when Thanh’s body is naturally most alert. As you can see, Thanh is a gent of extremes; he’s most alert in the morning and late at night. That’s when you’ll see him play at hero mode. The times in between he’s mediocre. Sure, he can do multiplications like 3.5 * 3.5 in his head, but anything between 3pm and 6pm really shouldn’t be focused work. The graph below is annotated for when he is bringing out his productivity super powers.

The peaks show you when Thanh plays at hero mode and the valleys is when he does low-value things or have breaks.

Thanh usually wakes up at 7am and then does his morning ritual. After his morning ritual, that’s when he’ll start doing his most important task of the day (which he planned the night before). After lunch at around noon, he will hammer out one more big task (so he has completed three major tasks already, see the peaks) and then he’s taking it easy. He knows that in the afternoon he will have a hard time focusing for long periods, so that is the time when he will work on his low energy or low value tasks of the day. When dinner time hits, he’s had his dessert, and a little bit of relaxing, and that’s when he usually feels like doing focused work again. At around 11pm he will go to bed and then a new cycle begins.

ACTION STEPS FOR IMPLEMENTING HERO MODE 1. Build your perfect schedule based on your body’s natural peak times.

117

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination 2. Schedule your highest value activities for when you play at Hero Mode.

118

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination SOLAR FLARING TO OVERCOME PROCRASTINATION

There are two, out of many, ways you can overcome procrastination. You can jump right into the task, or you can ease yourself into it. The first method requires commitment and willpower to do, but there will be times when you will be lacking them. That’s when easing yourself into work can help you beat procrastination and that’s what we call Solar Flaring at Asian Efficiency. Solar Flaring is a simple concept for beating procrastination. It is a term coined by a couple of our friends, Jim and Nick, and the idea is:

Start off with something very small and an easy thing to do, and use that forward momentum to get more work done. Why did they call it solar flaring? Well, for one, they like to give names to concepts that are related to astronomical phenomena. Second, a solar flare is a sudden burst of energy on the surface of the Sun. They start off really small but turn into massive explosions. With the same concept in mind, you can apply this to beating procrastination. You start off with something small, perhaps you do something for five minutes, and before you know it, you go from laziness to “work mode”. This concept is so simple, but devastatingly effective. You are essentially tricking yourself into “work mode” and you can apply this to any type of work or task that you’re procrastinating on. All you have to do is to say to yourself that you’re going to do something for

119

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination only a couple minutes. How hard is that? In reality, even when you are lazy and you are procrastinating, doing something for only a couple minutes is pretty easy to do. It is just another creative way to overcome procrastination.

REAL WORLD APPLICATION

It is not complicated to “trick yourself” into doing a small task. A simple way to do this is through positive self-talk using the word “just”. The implication of the word “just” says to yourself that you will not do anything more than what you just told yourself. Saying to yourself, “I will just….” is all you need to do to get yourself started. Here are a couple examples how you can use solar flaring. EXERCISING

• Just put your iPod on and play some of your favorite exercise music. • Just change into your gym clothes. • Just 5 minutes on the cardio machine. E-MAIL

• Just write out the sender’s email address, subject line, and a couple bullet points of things you want to write. • Just clear 2 emails only. • Just check up on emails you have to follow up on soon. CLEANING LIVING ROOM

• Just put the cups and dishes in the sink. • Just put the litter in the bin. • Just put the trash near the door on the way out. WRITING

• Just create the Word document and save it into the right folder. • Just write the outline of the document. • Just write the introductory paragraph.

CAVEAT

While solar flaring is a great way to get yourself into the zone for getting work done, it can also be used in a negative way. For example, “just do this (insert any excess activity)” can turn into hours of wasted time. Just playing that game on the PS3 can turn into hours of gaming. Or just going out for one hour

120

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination for a drink with friends can turn into long hours deep into the night resulting in a hangover the next day. We have all been guilty of those. So be cautious how you use solar flaring.

ACTION STEPS FOR USING SOLAR FLARING The next time you feel like procrastinating, keep the solar flaring technique in mind. “Just” do one small thing and before you know it, you are getting a lot of work done.

121

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination TIMEBOXING

Timeboxing is one of the more popular techniques for beating procrastination. It is incredibly useful for “getting things going”, and can be used in conjunction with Solar Flaring which you just learned about. Note: The 25-minute variation of timeboxing is popularly known as the Pomodoro Technique. The basic premise of timeboxing is to firewall your attention for a small amount of time and mentally recharge after each interval of work. By completing small chunks of work, you will build momentum so that you will feel more productive which in itself leads to getting more work done. This productivity tip works great for people who have to work at a desk, but with some adjustment you can also use it in different settings. Timeboxing at its simplest, is about managing tasks in 25 minute intervals. All you need is a timer for this technique to work. Here are the steps: 1. Identify what the task at hand is. 2. Set your timer to 25 minutes. 3. Work on the task until the timebox is over. 4. Take a 5 minute break. 5. For every four timeboxes, take a longer break (15-30 minutes). By completing each timebox, you will feel more productive. 25 minutes is not too long and not too short to feel like you are working towards completing a task. By completing a timebox, you feel more productive and happier, and

122

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination build momentum that will help you get even more things done. It’s really that simple. Let’s take a look at each step and see how it all ties together.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY WHAT THE TASK AT HAND IS

The first step is identifying which task(s) you want to complete. If you are using a to-do list or task manager, go through your items and decide which tasks you want to complete. If you are not using a to-do list, grab a piece of paper and a pen. Write down all the tasks you want to complete today. Seriously, write them down. A good idea is to prioritize your to-do list. Ask yourself, “What are my 3 most important tasks?” List them in that order. This is an important tactic to always tackle your most important tasks first as we discussed in the Eat That Frog chapter.

STEP 2: SET YOUR TIMER TO 25 MINUTES

The next thing you need is a timer. You can use an egg or physical time or a digital timer on your computer. It doesn’t really matter which one you use. Here are some links to timer software you can use: • Vitamin-R (Mac) • Focus Booster (Mac/Windows/Linux/web)

STEP 3: WORK ON THE TASK UNTIL THE TIMEBOX IS OVER

Now that you have your list of tasks and a timer, it is time to start working on your tasks. Start your timer (make sure it’s set to 25 minutes) and then start working on your task. As you are working, don’t focus on the timer. Use your attention for the task in front of you. Here are some important guidelines behind timeboxing: • You can only work at the task at hand. No other tasks are allowed during your timebox. • When your timebox ends, you stop right away. Even if you think you only need a few more minutes, stop. • When you didn’t finish your work in a timebox, move it to your next timebox session. • When you finish your tasks before the deadline, don’t stop. Review your

123

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination completed work till the timer ends. Always finish the 25 minutes.

STEP 4: TAKE A 5 MINUTE BREAK

Once your timebox has ended, you take a 5 minute break. It is important that you disengage from work for a little bit to mentally recharge. This is really important, especially for people with short attention spans. Some things you can do on your little breaks are stretching, refilling your drink or using the bathroom. Getting away from your desk is a good idea because it makes disengaging a lot easier (not to mention the health benefits). Once your 5 minute break is over, either move on to the next task or finish your previous task.

STEP 5: FOR EVERY FOUR TIMEBOXES TAKE A LONGER BREAK

This step is really important. Make sure that every 4 timeboxes (so after 4 * (25+5) = 2 hours) you take a longer break. Do something else that is totally unrelated to your task. A good idea is to get something to eat to fuel yourself. Some things we like to do are to take a little walk, or to have a meal.

CAVEATS

Timeboxing is not a solution for everyone nor for every task. It’s a great technique for people who work in office settings and sit behind a desk a lot. People with short attention spans love this technique. However, we wouldn’t advise using this for running errands or for people who do work that require long sessions of focus (e.g., coding). It is a great way to beat procrastination at the start of your day. If you begin your day right, it is much easier to get things done later in the day. Some people use Timeboxing to get started and once they have that momentum going, they just free flow the rest of the day. Use this technique to your own liking, because in the end, all that matters is that you are getting work done.

COMBINE WITH SOLAR FLARING

Combining timeboxing with Solar Flaring is simply a matter of telling yourself “I’ll just do one timebox…” and then starting it. Then your momentum gets going, and your productivity will skyrocket.

124

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination TIMEBOXING TECHNIQUE ACTION STEPS Getting started with something is usually the largest hurdle for most people. First, implementing timeboxing requires that you are organized with your tasks, or you’re at least enough to know what you need to be working on. We highly recommend you use a to-do list manager. It does not have to be a software program, pen and paper work fine too (covered in the chapter on Simple Task Management). The next step is to get yourself a timer and start working on your tasks. Once you are comfortable with the 25-minute rhythm of a basic timebox, you can experiment with longer work-rest intervals, like 50 minutes work-10 minutes rest.

125

Chapter 07: Beating Procrastination BEATING PROCRASTINATION ACTION STEPS This chapter should have provided you with 2 very simple and effective ways to beat procrastination: Solar Flaring, and Timeboxing. Start with these as a base, and then start collecting your data for Hero Mode. Once you have that in place too – you’ll be unstoppable when it come to self-generating the momentum needed to destroy procrastination and get things done.

126

Chapter 09: Going Paperless

Chapter 09: Going Paperless THE SIMPLE GUIDE TO GOING PAPERLESS

We have noticed a trend in the number of people that go paperless – the journey of getting rid of as much paper as you can and substituting it with digital copies. Going paperless is one of the best things you do – it will save you paper, money and a lot of time. The transition might seem daunting but it’s actually fairly easy. I’ll share a story how I accidentally went paperless and how I got rid of my favorite magazines and substituted them for digital copies. I hope that this will inspire you to considering going paperless too.

GOING PAPERLESS WITH YOUR SMARTPHONE AND EVERNOTE

A couple years ago, the lease on my apartment was about to end and I didn’t have any plans to renew it. Instead, I decided to live in Europe and Asia for a couple of years and then return to LA. As I was cleaning my apartment, I realized I needed to keep all these important paper documents (tax papers, bank statements, transcripts, etc) but I had no physical space to store them. I had to figure out a way to keep these documents, but I didn’t want to bring them with me. Plus I needed to have all my important documents easily

128

Chapter 09: Going Paperless accessible while I was abroad. What to do? iPhone and Evernote to the rescue! Out of necessity I found a cheap and quick solution to my problem: I used my iPhone to scan all the documents and Evernote as my storage medium. This is a great solution when you don’t have access to any scanner but you still want/ need to keep paper documents in digital format. There are many advantages for going paperless and having everything stored in digital format: • No papers to store and carry around • No more clutter around the room • Save money • Going green and saving the environment • Access anywhere, anytime This is especially useful for people who travel a lot and need to be able to access their documents on-the-go (like yours truly). The great thing about using Evernote as storage medium is that it has the ability to read text in scanned documents. This is huge and what made me choose it over using Dropbox or Google Docs. While I love both Dropbox and Google docs, you can’t search for text within scanned images. Evernote supports OCR scanning so it can recognize text within images and makes it accessible for search. If you have a premium Evernote account, it can also search within PDF files for you. Disclaimer: I will recommend that using a full fledge desktop scanner, or a mobile scanner such as the Fujitsu Scansnap, is a better alternative than the iPhone. It’s more accurate and will give you higher resolution copies. It’s also much easier and faster, but the big advantage of your iPhone is that you can do it anywhere and you don’t have to buy extra equipment. This chapter will show you how can do all this with the iPhone. If you’re an Android user, we recommend CamScanner. In this chapter I will use Evernote (free account will do, although I have premium) and an iPhone. For the iPhone, you need to purchase the app JotNot Scanner Pro because it will act as our scanner. You can buy it for $0.99 in the App store.

129

Chapter 09: Going Paperless Note: technically you can use the built-in scanner that comes with the Evernote app on iOS or Android. It’s a great feature but if you also want to scan documents and store them outside Evernote, then having a separate app is necessary. On the iOS, I’ve tried different apps like Docscanner and Scanner Pro. These are also great apps but they use PDF as primary format, which make them not searchable within Evernote unless you have the premium account. Although I think Scanner Pro is the best app (most features and very customizable), JotNot is easier to use, cheaper, and natively stores files in image formats which make them searchable in Evernote. Since Evernote is supported on all major platforms (OS X, Windows, iOS and Android) you will be able to access your information anywhere, anytime and with any device. What’s not to like about that?

SETUP IPHONE AND EVERNOTE

Assuming you have created an Evernote account (free account is good enough), the first thing you need to do is create a new notebook called “Documents”. Here’s how you do it (my screenshots show the Mac OS X version, it looks a little different on Windows). 1. Go to File > New Notebook (or press Shift+Command+N).

130


Create a new notebook in Evernote

2. Name your notebook “Documents”. In this chapter I will be using the following a printed document as illustration. This is the first page of a book summary I made on The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (which is a great book). I took a picture of it below with my iPhone:

131


One page out of a book summary of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

132

Chapter 09: Going Paperless WORKFLOW

Now that you have a foundation set up, it’s time to get into the actual workflow. It’s really simple going paperless with your iPhone and Evernote. 1. First start up Jot Not Scanner.

Start JotNot Scanner Pro on your iPhone

133

Chapter 09: Going Paperless 2. You’ll be greeted by this screen:

Welcome screen of JotNot Scanner Pro on iPhone

134

Chapter 09: Going Paperless 3. Tap on the gear icon, select Evernote and link your Evernote account.

135

Chapter 09: Going Paperless 4. After filling in your Evernote username and password, it’s time to scan some documents. There are two ways to go about it; you either take a picture or use a picture from your camera roll. In this chapter I’ll use a picture of my camera roll; it’s the one you saw earlier. It really doesn’t matter if you take a picture or use one from your camera roll. What does matter is how you take the picture. When you take a picture, the best way is by standing in a room with plenty of (sun)light and hold your camera perpendicular to the paper. 5. In the next screen you can now drag the corners of the image to ensure that only the paper gets scanned. Most of the time you can skip this but occasionally you will have to adjust the corners. Then tap on Process in the top right corner.

Dragging corners on JotNot Scanner Pro on iPhone

136

Chapter 09: Going Paperless 6. You’re almost done. You get a preview to see how your scan turned out. The next step is to upload it to Evernote by tapping on the arrow at the bottom.

JotNot Scanner Pro preview screen on iPhone

137

Chapter 09: Going Paperless 7. Now select your Evernote account, pick which pages you want to store (usually all of them), fill in a title, select the “Documents” notebook and you’re all set.

Share to Evernote

Using a Desktop Scanner: if you’re using a Desktop scanner, you will want to use the scanning application that comes with the scanner – this is usually provided by the manufacturer (Canon, Epson, HP etc) and varies from scanner to scanner. Mac users can also use Image Capture which comes bundled with OS X. This software will usually let you output to a .jpg or .pdf format, both which are fine for dragging-and-dropping straight into Evernote. Done! You now have gone paperless with your iPhone and Evernote!

138

Chapter 09: Going Paperless All this will make searching and accessing your documents so much easier and faster. Plus you can access them anywhere, anytime with your iPhone. Follow the same steps for all your documents and you will have now a secure backup and easily accessible digital filing system.

139

Chapter 09: Going Paperless GOING PAPERLESS WITH YOUR MAGAZINES Now that you’re set up with your new paperless workflow, it’s time to take the next step with your magazines. If you like reading magazines like I do, the next step is to switch from paper magazines to digital magazines. When I was a teenager I was hooked on the weekly edition of The Economist. As the years went by and I started to subscribe to more magazines, my resentment towards magazines also grew. I loved consuming interesting content but my room would be cluttered with all these magazines and I hated it. It would grow into a love/hate relationship – on one hand I loved reading but on the other hand I hated the clutter. So I searched for a solution. As I shifted towards a paperless lifestyle, I found the perfect solution for this – Zinio. Zinio is an online service where you can subscribe to all major magazines and read them on your phone, desktop or tablet. Reading magazines on your tablet is one of the best things you can do if you’re interested in going paperless with your magazines. You just download their app, login and it will download all the magazines you’re subscribed to. As I started to use Zinio I discovered other hidden advantages of this services. Some of the main advantages of Zinio include: • No more paper magazines cluttered in my apartment (yay!) • All major magazines are available (even from other countries) • Discover more magazines you might be interested in that you wouldn’t know about otherwise (with their huge selection there is something for everyone) • Cheaper prices (you save a lot of money compared to retail prices) • Easy billing management (all in one place) • You can buy backlogs of magazines (great for specialized and niche magazines) • Available on iOS, Android and desktop • Save the environment (going green) Having your billing centralized is a big plus for me. When I had paper subscriptions I would never know when I had to renew or how much it would

140

Chapter 09: Going Paperless be, but with Zinio I can just login and have an overview of when my renewal date is and for how much.

READING EXPERIENCE

Here’s how Zinio looks on an iPad

The Zinio app makes the reading experience fantastic – especially on an iPad. It’s better than reading a regular PDF where you just swipe pages. You have interactive links so it’s easy to browse around. You just tap and you’ll instantly be on the right page. Also, at the bottom of your screen you can see thumbnails of pages that make it very easy to browse.

MY SUBSCRIPTIONS

If you’re curious what I read, here’s a list of my subscriptions: • Macworld • Harvard Business Review • The Economist

141

Chapter 09: Going Paperless • Forbes • Smart Money • Travel + Leisure • Esquire • Men’s Fitness As you can see, I read a lot. Unlike most books, you don’t have to read everything in a magazine. It’s easy to skip around and you just read whatever you feel like. This is perfect for reading on a plane, train and those times in the bathroom (admit it, I know you do too!) Note: if you’re looking for books, check our list of recommended books.

GETTING ZINIO

If you want to start going digital and paperless with your magazine subscriptions, I highly recommend Zinio. I’ve tried iBooks, Newsstand and Amazon but their selection is not as good as Zinio’s. The fact that the prices are cheaper on Zinio is a plus (although I would have paid full price just for the convenience) and another reason to make the leap. Click here to sign up for Zinio.

142

Chapter 09: Going Paperless ACTION STEPS This chapter showed you how you can go paperless with just your iPhone and Evernote. The process of going paperless is not as difficult as it might seem and you don’t compromise anything. On the contrary, you will be much more effective managing your documents and files. Plus, if you go paperless with your magazines too you’ll have less clutter in your life. Here’s what to do next: 1. Sign up for Evernote. 2. Start scanning papers with your smartphone or scanner. 3. Import them into Evernote. 4. Transition from paper magazines to digital magazines by using Zinio.

143

Chapter 10: Organizing Your Files, Folders and Documents

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents ORGANIZING YOUR FILES, FOLDERS AND DOCUMENTS

One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of being organized is getting your computer files organized. It’s something that’s easy to take for granted, especially when you forget that most people don’t use their computers like us crazy systems-people do. Let’s look at some good practices for keeping your files and documents neat, in folders and easy searchable and accessible. The idea of organizing files and documents goes back to the good-old-days of filing cabinets and paper. Hopefully, the last chapter on Going Paperless has started putting you in the mindset of making everything digital. The advantage of the original paper-based cabinets was that you really had to think about where to put documents so that they could be easily located when they were needed. With computers, we have somewhat lost this artform and exchanged it for an all-in-one search function instead. Our personal test for organization is this: you should be able to find the majority of your documents without using Spotlight or Windows Search. If you can’t, you’ve got some housecleaning to do. Note: we’ll be talking about folders and directories on your hard disk in this chapter. You could easily replicate the directory structures into a filing application like DevonThink, or wiki/notebook-style applications like Evernote and VoodooPad.

145

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents

146

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents We’ll do our best to cover both OS X and Windows in this chapter. For the most part, the user directory structure is the same as is where you should store your files.

SOME SIMPLE RULES

Let’s start with some simple rules for managing your files and folders. 1. DON’T PUT FILES ON THE DESKTOP

Your desktop is supposed to be clean and display that gorgeous highresolution wallpaper you’ve got going on. It should contain your trash/recycle bin, and that’s about it. On very rare exceptions you’re allowed to put a text file or two on your desktop if you’re referring to it regularly and don’t need to file it just yet. 2. LIMIT FOLDER CREATION

When you’re creating folders, think minimal. Most files and documents can fit somewhere in your hierarchy if you’ve done a good job of initially mapping it out. In general, only create new folders (especially top-level folders in /documents) if you find yourself repeatedly coming back to save similar files in the same place, only to find that it doesn’t exist yet. 3. GET USED TO THINKING IN HIERARCHIES

Thinking in hierarchies is a learned skill. It takes time to get used to. If you want to manage your files and documents effectively, you’ll have to learn it. To borrow a bit of pop-psychology, there are 3 main things you have to know: chunking up, chunking down, and chunking sideways. Start with the assumption that everything fits into a category or hierarchy of similar things. For example, let’s take Apple products.

147

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents

Chunking Down, Up and Sideways with Apple Products

At the top, we have a category that encompasses all Apple products. Now let’s chunk down (move down one hierarchy level). Now we have multiple categories: portable computers, desktop computers, mobile devices, music devices, software. Let’s chunk down again into mobile devices – you have the iPhone and the iPad. But if we chunk up from the iPhone, we can see that it could fit into both categories of “mobile devices” and “music devices”. This is entirely possible with most real-world hierarchies – things can fit in more than one place. Now what if we chunk sideways from the iPhone? We end up with an iPad. Chunking sideways describes moving amongst the members of an existing hierarchical level. Applied to your files and documents, the general rule is that they should always sit with other files of the same, equivalent hierarchical level. For example, application installers can sit in the same folder. Dated to-do lists can sit in the same folder. Personal letters to friends can sit in the same folder. PDF scans of receipts by month can sit in the same folder. 4. /ARCHIVE IS YOUR FRIEND

One thing we’ve adopted at Asian Efficiency is the idea of having a /archive

148

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents folder within a lot of our folders. We have hundreds of folders related to posts for our site. Each content piece gets its own folder for holding images, research, text and media related to that content piece. When you have a couple of hundred or so of these, it gets hard to find what you’re currently working on. So our solution has been that whenever a post or content piece goes live, we move the related folder into /archive. This way, all the pieces we’re currently working on can be easily found, and any older pieces that we want to refer to down the line can also be found be going into /archive.

DROPBOX

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of directory organization, I want to give a mention to Dropbox. It is an absolutely amazing tool for backing up your documents and using them between different devices and computers. It’s also great for sharing documents with others. If you use Dropbox and have a paid account with storage (highly recommended), whatever directory structures we mention below can sit directly in your /Dropbox folder rather than your /Documents folder. We’ll clarify below as necessary.

DOCUMENTS

Let’s take a look at your personal documents. Regardless of if you use Windows or Mac, you will likely use the /username/ Documents folder on your computer to hold your personal documents. If you happen to do both work and personal tasks on your computer (like a lot of people do today), then you should really create two folders to separate out your personal and business items. If you’re using Dropbox, it looks like this: • /Dropbox/Business • /Dropbox/Documents If you’re not using Dropbox, you can similarly do:

149

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents • /Documents/Business • /Documents/Personal You could also do: • /Business • /Documents With both folders sitting directly under /username – as long as you pick one method and stick to it, it will work. If you’re interested, at Asian Efficiency our team shares a Dropbox folder for most of our files, so we each have: • /Dropbox/Asian Efficiency • /Dropbox/Documents Now how you actually divide up your personal documents is largely a matter of how you mentally divide up your life. A very basic split would be: health, finances, relationships. These would then have subfolders, for example: • /Documents/health/dentist • /Documents/health/doctor • /Documents/finances/insurance • /Documents/finances/Chase You could also do a more granular split, like: • /Documents/finances • /Documents/social • /Documents/play • /Documents/mind • /Documents/health The general rule to follow is to pick a folder structure that matches how you mentally organize things. If you’ve already implemented the chapter on Simple Task Management, it’s not a bad idea to mimic the structure that you use for that – just don’t go about creating a /today or /inbox folder. Remember that files and documents are supposed to be for “permanent” storage with files not moving around too often, as opposed to fleeting items like tasks.

150

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents As an example, here’s the split of documents that Aaron uses: • /bills – All regular bills, dated with company names and year/month. • /book summaries – Book summaries, subfolders for type (business, health etc) • /fashion – Notes, documents and media related to fashion and style. • /finances – Subfolders for banks, countries, types (insurance vs banking vs investments), financial planning stuff. • /health – Subfolders for dentist, doctor, gym, insurance, physical therapy, test results. • /housing – By city. • /identity documents – Scans of commonly used identity documents, like passports, driver’s licenses etc. • /life management – Documents related to goals, stories, motivation. • /personal – Various letters and documents (sorted into subfolders), notes on hobbies (e.g., board game tactics), miscellany. • /processes and scripts – Various scripts or directions for things that I commonly do. Think of them as recipes for things that are not food. • /receipts – All receipts scanned and named with date and vendor. • /recipes – Kitchen recipes in text files. • /roadmaps – Roadmaps for goals, system maps for areas of life. • /profile photos – Some profile photos for uploading to various social media sites etc. • /TED – TED notes. • /travel – By year and destination. Includes itineraries, confirmation printouts etc.

BUSINESS DOCUMENTS

Similar to your personal documents, your business documents and how they are organized will largely depend on your occupation, company and job position. If you are in a large corporate-sized outfit, you will likely be working from a shared drive, in which case the directory structure will usually be pretty good, and will usually be pre-set, so you don’t have to worry about it too much. If you decide to store some documents locally or if you’re not working from a

151

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents shared drive, it largely comes down to what you do. For example, say you’re a business analyst doing project work. Your directory structure likely looks something like this: • /project name 1 • /project name 2 • /project name 3 • /todo lists • /archive Each project would then have subfolders related to logical units of organization, like the type of working being done, stakeholders or who you’re reporting to. /todo lists is for holding your text-based todo lists, and /archive is where you would move your completed projects when they’re done. In contrast, say you’re an online marketer working from your laptop on the beaches of Bali. You may have something more like this set up: • /finances • /legal • /marketing • /products • /projects • /planning • /systems • /technology This is actually pretty similar to what we have set up at Asian Efficiency. How you organize your business-related directories basically comes down to how you decide to divide up your business or job into logical units. An easy way to do this is to grab a sheet of paper or a whiteboard, and map out your company/enterprise in details, based on what it is you do day-to-day. Then group related activities into logical groupings – think of it as an organization chart for your job/company, minus the positions.

152

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents FOLDER OVERVIEW

The last part of directory organization that we want to cover is what files should go where on your computer. DESKTOP

As mentioned before, your desktop is a place to display cool wallpaper. It is NOT a place to store random files, documents and anything you can’t be bothered filing away somewhere. If you’re on a Mac, your screen captures appear here as do your disk drives. If you’re on Windows, you may wish to keep a small (emphasis on small) of shortcuts to programs you use regularly, as Windows is lacking a Dock. DOCK / START MENU

For Mac, put apps that you use on a daily basis in your Dock. This is not necessarily the ones that appear by default in OS X. You can also space out your Dock using any number of Dock-adjusting applications. We personally use Cocktail (it also does some system maintenance stuff). For Windows, feel free to bunch your different applications into folders by category (say productivity, office, system etc), or you could just leave it – the click-and-type search functionality within the Windows 7 start menu is actually quite solid. HARD DRIVE VS USER FOLDER

It’s important to make a distinction between your hard drive, which is systemwide and applicable to all users, and your user folder. In the case of Mac, your drive by default is /Macintosh HD and for Windows it will be C:\. You should only keep files here if you have a single-user computer, or if you want all users on your computer to have access to them. In general, keep your documents and files in a subdirectory within your user directory (/Users/username on Mac and C:\Users\username on Windows)

153

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents USER FOLDER

Both Windows and OS X have a user folder system so everything below applies to both (except maybe Applications). We don’t personally use Windows all that much, so there may be some variation there. The user folder looks something like /Users/aaron, and contains multiple other folders: • Applications: this should be empty unless you have user-specific apps. The places link in your Finder window usually links to /Macintosh HD/ Applications. • Desktop: see above. • Documents: by default, this is where your documents will go. Various applications (particularly those by Microsoft and Adobe) also like to create various folders here. • Downloads: Downloads is usually where various browsers save files for you. Think of this as your “inbox” for incoming files – files should start here, but they should not stay here. You may want to create a small folder structure here of to differentiate various types of files, e.g., /apps for application packages/installers and /system for storing your Windows drivers. • Dropbox: if you’re using Dropbox, treat this folder the same as your documents folder. The thing to remember is that some of your Dropbox folders will be shared with other people if you set them up that way, and having a lot of them can clutter up your document tree. We suggest creating a Documents folder within your /Dropbox folder for your personal documents and starting your personal document hierarchy there. • Movies: iMovie may create some files here. • Music: iTunes and Garageband may create some files here. This is likely where you also store your music files. • Pictures: iPhoto will store you library here by default. • Public: Use this folder to share files with other users on your computer.

154

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents BUT WHERE DOES THIS GO?

Occasionally you have a file that can fit in multiple folders or is about 2 different topics. For example, a scan of a receipt from your gym could really fit in /health/gym or /receipts. The question you want to ask yourself is this:

“Where would I naturally look if I had to find this again?” The answer to that is then where you file that particular document. Remember – this system is for you, not for general public use. It is designed to make your files, folders and documents easy to find when you need them – there are no extra points for technical perfection here!

BROWSING VS SEARCHING

There is a big difference between browsing and searching. If you say, work in a library and have to catalog hundreds of thousands of items, then yes, you need a tagging or keyword system that allows for searching. For the purposes of your personal documents however, this should really not be necessary. If you feel like you absolutely need a tagging or keyword system you can definitely design one – but then you have to consistently maintain it, make sure that you don’t create duplicate tags or keywords and so on. And we’re aiming for simplicity here, so the less maintenance the system requires, the better.

155

Chapter 10: Files, Folders and Documents ACTION STEPS We hope you’ve picked up some ideas from this chapter that will help you better organize your documents and files. As long as you follow the rules in the beginning and set up an effective hierarchy, file and directory organization is a breeze. Here are your action steps: 1. Sign up for a Dropbox account if you don’t already have one. 2. Decide on how you will separate your business and personal documents, a /Documents/Business and /Documents/Personal or as /Business / Documents. 3. Write down a basic split of your personal documents. You can use your existing folder structures or examples of documents you will be storing to help with this. You should have a list of high-level folders at the completion of this step. 4. Create the folders. 5. Move your existing files into those folders. Create new folders if necessary and if you come across files that don’t fit properly into the split defined in Step 3. 6. Repeat Steps 3-5 with your business documents. 7. Keep the simple rules outlined at the beginning of the chapter and the principles provided in the Folder Overview section in mind as you continue to use your newly organized folder and directory structure.

156

Chapter 11: Time Tracking

Chapter 11: Time Tracking BASICS OF TIME TRACKING

“If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” – Lord Kelvin There is a precept that what you can measure, you can improve. And with the abundance of tracking technology available to us today, it can be easy to be overwhelmed by the number of things you have to keep track of. We’ve talked about managing your schedule, your email, your tasks and your days, and the last thing we want is for you to have to track and manage yet another aspect of your busy life. With that in mind, there is only one metric that truly matters when it comes to productivity: your time.

TIME IS THE ONLY METRIC THAT MATTERS

Time is the one resource that everyone has the same amount of. And so, how you decide to and how you actually spend it is of vital importance and should be of significant interest to you. You get 24 drops of time each day. Do you want to waste, spend, drink or invest them?

WHY TRACK TIME?

It should be said upfront that the only real reason why you should track your time, is that if you can measure it, you can improve on it. Is it absolutely necessary to track your time to become super-productive? No. Will doing it make you significantly more productive? Absolutely. We’ve placed this chapter near the end of the book because it is an advanced topic and worth

158

Chapter 11: Time Tracking implementing if and when you have covered all prior chapters.

TRACKING TOOLS

There are a multitude of time tracking applications available on the market. The underlying system by which you track time is exactly the same regardless of which application you decide to use. Understanding the structure of how you go about tracking time is far more important than any one application. Whatever solution you use, we recommend tracking on your phone, as you likely have it with you all the time, therefore can easily switch between different activities. We recommend using: • ATimeLogger (iOS): our personal favorite for tracking time on an iPhone. • Toggl (cross-platform): the app that started us on this strange path of time tracking, available on Android, iPhone, desktop and web flavors. The guide below will assume that you are able to download and install the application yourself. First we are going to cover how to set up the underlying structure of your time tracking (what categories you will track), then show you how to set up each of the recommended application alternatives, show you how to actually use the system and lastly, how to review/analyze the data you collect.

STRUCTURING YOUR TIME TRACKING

The first thing you want to do is work out what it is you want to track and measure. This is highly personal. It will largely depend on how you structure your personal projects, your work, your task manager and your life in general. Below is a standard and simplified template that you can take and expand on. As an example: • Reading & Learning. • Eating. • Work. • Downtime. • Time Wasters.

159

Chapter 11: Time Tracking • Life Management. • Neutral. • Personal Projects. • Sleep. • Social. • Travel. Let’s look at each of these in detail. READING & LEARNING

This is any time spent reading, taking notes, watching educational videos or in general, absorbing information of any sort. EATING

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, supper, afternoon tea, snacks, coffee breaks, etc. If you are a smoker I would put cigarette breaks in here or under “Time Wasters” if you want the extra motivation to quit. WORK

This is time spent in the office or working on office projects. Some people have very distinct individual items based on mental contexts for this (e.g., writer, blogger, coder), but if you work a 9-5 you can lump it all together under “work”. DOWNTIME

Downtime describes any time that you spend doing recovery activities. This can include things like watching TV, or getting your daily dose of Facebook/ Twitter. You may find that you don’t need a downtime category at all, especially if what you do here is covered by other categories. TIME WASTERS

Any time that is not productive (remember, we define productivity as time spent directed towards your goals). As a personal example, for me, this is largely activities that I want to do less of, and doing anything that I shouldn’t have to do (unexpected things that crop up and have to be taken care of). LIFE MANAGEMENT

You should only allow four items in here: your morning ritual, your evening

160

Chapter 11: Time Tracking ritual, your daily actions and any time spent organizing your schedule/task manager or doing reviews. NEUTRAL

Things you have to do every day that are not inherently productive but more along the lines of essential. For example, using the bathroom, taking a shower or doing your laundry (though we could argue that one under “Excess” too). PERSONAL PROJECTS

Any time spent towards personal projects. This can range from planning a vacation to handling financial affairs. SLEEP

Self explanatory: Sleep and naps. When you nap, start the timer. Stop it when you wake up. Same goes for sleep. Once you have enough data, you can optimize your sleep. SOCIAL

Any time purposely set aside for spending with family or friends falls into this category. Not “unplanned” time (which should fall under “Excess”), but purposefully-assigned blocks of time for socializing with other human beings. Examples: dinner with friends, dates, time with children. A NOTE ON SUB-CATEGORIES

It should be noted that the above categories are a template and starting point for your own categories. Depending on your time tracking application, you can set a deeper level of granularity with additional categories or even subcategories. For example, Social time can be further divided into Friends, Family and Dates/Partner. Or Downtime can be divided into specific activities, like TV, Facebook/Social, Video Games, Just Relaxing etc. There are no right or wrong categories to choose from – make them specific to your situation and what you do. Feel free to use the above as starting guidelines and then adapt to make them relevant for you. WHAT ABOUT THAT TIME I…

161

Chapter 11: Time Tracking Sometimes an activity will have more than one productive purpose. For example, having dinner with friends could fall under “Eating” or “Social” in the setup above. As to which you assign the activity is largely a matter of preference and what you want to track. Personally, I would want to optimize the amount of time I spend eating, so if I’m eating alone it falls under “eating”. If I’m out with friends and catching up and socializing, it falls under “social”. There are also other activities that will encompass a range of other activities. For example, when you go on vacation or when you’re spending time with friends. The two options here are to either: 1. Change item every time an activity switches, which can be annoying. 2. Create a large activity item that encompasses the smaller activities. On a night out with friends we may: 1) get drinks, 2) go to a lounge, 3) spend time in a taxi, 4) spend time at a fine drinking establishment, 5) eat food on the way home. I would classify this as just “going out” and file it under Social. As you’ll see when we discuss how to use the collected metrics to optimize your time, the actual individual line items don’t matter as much. On occasion you will come across Time Wasters or “necessary evils” in life. Visiting a doctor, helping a family member out in an emergency, needing to deal with your taxes etc… How you classify these is really dependent on what you want to do with these activities. Our opinion is this: if it is an activity that has arisen out of someone else doing something (i.e., you didn’t create the circumstances intentionally), file it under Time Wasters. Why? Because then you become motivated to find a permanent solution to the problem, and to make sure it never occurs again. Now if it is something that you have to do (e.g., file taxes) that should be considered that a Personal Project and logged accordingly. Now we will show you the “how to” part of time tracking by using aTimeLogger 2, Toggl and Microsoft Excel.

162

Chapter 11: Time Tracking SETTING UP TIME TRACKING: ATIMELOGGER 2 (IPHONE) ATimeLogger 2 is a simple and effective time tracker for iOS.

When you open aTimeLogger 2 for the first time, you are greeted with this screen.

We suggest that you turn groups on. This will let you use subcategories for time tracking – e.g., splitting out Facebook, friends, family etc for Social time. Go to Settings (the last button that looks like 3 dots) > Settings > Advanced and turn Groups to On.

163


You’ll also want to turn the activity status change warning off. Under the same settings screen, select Warnings and turn the “Activity status change” option off:

You’ll also want to set the minimum activity duration to “None”. From the same settings screen, go to Activities and select the “Min. activity duration” option and set it to none.

164


165

Chapter 11: Time Tracking If you tap on the third icon over (it looks like a list), you get this screen:

Even though you may use some of these categories, the first thing we recommend is deleting all the existing categories. This is done by tapping on the category, tapping on edit, then hitting delete.

166

Chapter 11: Time Tracking You will now have a blank Activity Type screen.

Start inputting your categories. You do this by selecting the plus button:

167

Chapter 11: Time Tracking Then select “group” and create all your top-level categories first.

Groups are differentiated by a little numeric tag in the top-right corner of the group:

168

Chapter 11: Time Tracking You then want to go into the group by tapping on it, and selected the “Items +” button and creating subcategories (“Activity Types”):

Note that in aTimeLogger 2 you cannot log a “group”, you can only log an “Activity Type” – so if you need a generic category, say “Sleep” you may want to make than an Activity Type rather than a group, or in the case of say “Eating”, you may want to create an Activity Type within the “Eating” group called “General Eating”. You can actually have groups within groups but we don’t recommend it.

169


Continue to set up all your categories and subcategories until you are done. You then want to rearrange the order of categories and subcategories for easy tap access on the main logging screen. For Groups, you do this is the Activity Type screen, by tapping the top-left button and rearranging:

For Activity Type (subcategories), you must go into each group and do the

170

Chapter 11: Time Tracking same there under the “items” list.

And that’s all there is to setting up aTimeLogger 2!

SETTING UP TIME TRACKING: TOGGL (ANDROID, MOBILE WEB)

Toggl is an application that was introduced to us by some friends of ours, who used it for measuring billable hours and project work. We’ve since repurposed it for a more personal use. The setup and application is incredibly simple. You open an account:

171


Sign up for an account

You then set up your projects (categories) under Projects:

Found under “Projects”. Set up projects as you see fit.

And… that’s it. You’ll set up subcategories as individual activities in each project via the mobile application. Toggl has applications for iOS and the Android platform (you don’t need to use their web application).

172

Chapter 11: Time Tracking SETTING UP TIME TRACKING THE MANUAL WAY: MICROSOFT EXCEL OK, so you don’t want to use an application... 1) Reconsider, 2) Here’s an alternative. Start an Excel spreadsheet with five columns: 1. Item. 2. Category. 3. Start time. 4. End time. 5. Total time. And throughout the day, log your items, categories, start and end times. The downside of this approach is that you have to calculate the time you spend on each item manually later on (or use some Excel formula wizardry – included below), but it is an application-free alternative. In fact, we have some templates for you to download. They are included in the package that contained this document, in the /time-tracking folder. There are two versions – an Excel version for when you’re at your computer, and an PDF version if you want to print it out and write things down manually.

REAL WORLD TIME TRACKING (OR, HOW TO ACTUALLY TRACK TIME) Time Tracking is mostly used in business environments or by freelance workers to bill by the minute (or hour). You start the clock when you begin working, and you stop it when you’re done. To track your personal time, things work a little differently. When you track your personal time, you want to be running a timer all the time. Yes, that’s right. ALL THE TIME. Every minute, of every day, for however long you decide to continue measuring your time… you will have a timer running.

173

Chapter 11: Time Tracking Now here’s how it works. 1. You start your day with an activity. If you’ve implemented the ideas in this book, then it will be your Morning Ritual.

2. Say you then eat breakfast – you would then switch to that.

174

Chapter 11: Time Tracking 3. When you then start doing your most important task for the day (likely work), switch to that.

4. And this continues on for the rest of the day. Every activity change warrants a switch. Most time tracking applications will allow for multiple activities to be tracked at the same time. This may be useful in a business context, but for your personal time tracking, you only want to track one thing at a time. Very simply, you should NOT be multitasking, and tracking one activity at a time helps enforce this. And also means that you know exactly where every minute of each hour in your day is going. A NOTE ABOUT TOGGL

Toggl doesn’t use sub-categories the way the other applications do – it uses item names within projects. Think of the projects as categories, and item names as sub-categories. So if you have an activity that happens multiple times a day (e.g., using the bathroom), start the time, stop it when that activity stops, and if you do it again that same day, come back to it and continue the same timer.

175

Chapter 11: Time Tracking The subcategory goes in the “What are you working on” section of each item in Toggl. The category is selected in the “Project” section of each item in Toggl.

176

Chapter 11: Time Tracking EXTRACTING YOUR DATA: ATIMELOGGER 2 Extracting your data from aTimeLogger is simple. You go to Settings, then Reports.

You select a date range (usually by week, month or 3 months), then tap on “Create Report”.

177

Chapter 11: Time Tracking You can then use the “Export” button to export this as a CSV or HTML file and email it to yourself or store it to iCloud documents.

178

Chapter 11: Time Tracking EXTRACTING YOUR DATA: TOGGL

Extracting your data from Toggl is best done through their web interface. Log in, then navigate to Reports > Summary. Select a date range and you’ll be presented with something that looks a bit like this:

You can then use the Export button to extract this data in CSV format.

REVIEWING YOUR DATA REGULARLY

179

Chapter 11: Time Tracking We recommend that you review your time data on a weekly basis. Daily is too much, and weekly is sufficient to make adjustments to your day-to-day. It’s usually easier to view as summary of your data within your tracking application (aTimeLogger 2 or Toggl), but if you’re handy with Excel you can use the exported CSV files too. Either way, take a look at the raw minutes and hours that you have spent in each category and ask yourself: should the time I spend in this category go up or down for next week? It’s really that simple.

“This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.” – Tyler Durden, Fight Club ANALYZING AND USING YOUR DATA TO MAKE CHANGES

Going one level deeper from just reviewing your data, is analyzing it and using it to make your life more productive. Time tracking data by itself is not that complicated. It basically tells you “over this period of time, I spent so-and-so hours and minutes doing X, and so-and-so hours and minutes doing Y”. The logical follow-up to this should be “hmmm, I’m spending too little time on X and too much time on Y”, or something similar. While everyone’s data will be different, once you have your own time tracking data you should consider: 1. Doing an analysis of averages, seeing roughly how many hours you spend working each week. 2. Ask what activities you actually spend more time on than working each week (>40 hours). 3. Calling yourself out on BS. Do you spend 5+ hours a week watching TV? Playing video games? Partying? Know what is draining your time, factor in the recovery time and make adjustments. 4. See how much you actually stick to your schedule (if you have one). 5. Rework your schedule. Just like your finances, know where you’re

180

Chapter 11: Time Tracking spending too much, too little, and what you’re willing to spend time on (or not). 6. Create time. Yes, it sounds ridiculous. But knowing exactly how much time you spend on different things each week let’s you know where to subtract time spent, and how to allocate it productively instead. 7. Working out where your most productive hours are (see Hero Mode). A lot of interesting things happen when you start tracking your time. You’ll start to realize how much time is wasted on non-meaningful activities like refreshing your Facebook feed or replying to chain emails. You’ll start to notice how much time you actually spend standing in queues and lines, or waiting for people to show up to appointments. Overall, it will make you more aware of your time, how much of it actually gets “lost” to what seem like notime-needed activities and how much of it you productively use. And this in turn, makes your more productive.

181

Chapter 11: Time Tracking ACTION STEPS 1. Decide that you’re going to start tracking your time, for say 3 consecutive months. 2. Decide on what categories and sub-categories you will pick, and know what sort of activities fall into each. 3. Set up your chosen application with all the categories. 4. Start tracking your time. 5. Review your time on a weekly basis and make adjustments to spend less or more time in each category as a result. 6. After 3 months, analyze your aggregate data and ask the hard questions. This is the time to make significant adjustments to your schedule or lifestyle to make yourself more productive. 7. Rinse and repeat.

182

Chapter 12: Putting It Together (Case Study)

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) PUTTING IT TOGETHER

You have learned about a lot of different productivity concepts, techniques and ideas over the course of this book. Now it’s time to show you have to fit them all together, and how to make them work for you. We originally wrote the below case study as part of some consulting work we did for small business owners – people with way too many things to do, and too little time to do it in. Time-saving concepts often sound great on paper, but we found that making them survive contact with the real world is something different. The simple fact is that most people are too busy doing other things to have time to work on their productivity. We’ve adapted the case study to make it applicable to a broader audience, and it should show you how to put together everything you have learned in this book. It answers the ever-important question of:

How do I increase my productivity and efficiency – without creating major disruptions in the other parts of my life?

184

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) PRINCIPLES OF PRODUCTIVITY

The general principles of productivity are the same, whether applied to an individual or a company. Let’s look at how some of what you’ve learned fits together with everything else. TOUCH IT ONCE

The touch it once concept is the notion that each piece of paper, each activity, email or task should only have to be handled once. Realistically, twice if you have to assign it to someone or if you need to file it for actioning later. But the concept still holds. The simplest application is this: avoid filing things “for later” into an overflowing physical in-tray. Deal with them as they arise, and either: 1. Do it. 2. File it away for actioning at a specific time. 3. Delegate them to someone on the team. NO APPOINTMENTS (NO MEETINGS, ONLY WORKSHOPS)

Appointments are the bane of your existence. Whenever possible, try not to set appointments – it is much more effective to be working on what you feel like working on (or what is the most important) than to be jammed up in set appointment times and meetings. Of course, in the real world, there will be set times when you have to be at a certain place or on a certain call – and there’s not very much you can do about that. What you can do, is try to avoid committing to regularly-scheduled appointments (like meeting) and treating appointments as extraordinary events in your calendar.

185

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) In a business setting, don’t hold meetings. Meetings are the biggest time wasters in the business world. The allure of a meeting is that it feels like you’re getting work done… when really, it’s just a big session of brouhaha. You discuss ideas, draw pretty flowcharts… and walk away with everyone “informed” and some “meeting minutes” that no one ever looks at again. Instead, hold workshops. Workshops are essentially super-powered meetings. They start on time. They have a specific purpose in mind (“create a solution for claiming unpaid invoices”), and they have a time limit. It’s fine if the solution isn’t completed by the end time. You can always schedule another workshop. If you absolutely must have regularly-scheduled traditional-style meetings, borrow a page from military field command – hold them standing up. You’ll waste a lot less time. NO MULTITASKING

This should be obvious, but people ignore this principle all the time. Multitasking is doing two or more things at once, or within close chronological proximity (i.e., within a few minutes of each other). A really common example is typing a document, chatting someone over Skype, and then answering the phone when it rings. Or compiling a spreadsheet, then stopping when someone appears at your door. Killing multitasking completely will yield unheard-of productivity increases everywhere. At a personal level, you’ll get all the different parts of your life squared away effortlessly – and all of a sudden have all this unexplained free time. In a business, the productivity gains are similar. Even if you have walk-in clients, it’s worth asking people to wait (for a reasonable amount of time). It makes your time seem more valuable (because it is), and it allows you to take what you’re currently working on, tidy it up and clear to neutral, so that you can easily restart it at a later time, and then talk to the client. EAT THAT FROG

We talked about this in the Eat That Frog chapter. A quick reminder: do your most important task first, especially if it’s the one you really don’t want to

186

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) do. This could be running an errand or working out. At work, this could be accounting, reviewing legal papers, or firing that one employee who’s causing trouble. Do it first, and the rest of your day/week/month will be much better.

187

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) UPTIME, DOWNTIME, FULL ENGAGEMENT

When you’re at work, you’re in uptime. You are fully engaged in what you are doing. With the exception of real-life emergencies, you do not break this state. You keep at it, and you keep on working. When you’re off work, you’re in downtime (normally). Do your best not to think about work, or to take work calls. Really try to engage in your time off – it’s recharging your concentration and motivation and self-control levels, which you’ll need at optimum for when you’re back in the office. NO NEWS MEDIA AT WORK

This is a pet peeve of mine. I hate – absolutely hate – when people forward non-work-related emails to my work address. Like pictures of the royal wedding. Like pictures of cute kittens. Like pictures of (insert today’s internet meme here). Your work time is your work time – it’s not time to be reading the paper, Cosmo/GQ or looking at YouTube videos. That’s all for downtime (and even then, we would suggest minimizing the presence of news media in your personal life too). You should be able to work out the exceptions – like if you’re in publishing, you have to read certain periodicals and blogs. Business people should also read their industry’s trade periodical.

HEALTH AND FITNESS

If there’s one thing that will increase the productivity levels more than you thought possible, it’s your health and fitness (if you run a business, this applies to everyone on your team too).

188

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) Simply put: Happy + Healthy = Productive If no one around you is into health and fitness, you must lead by example. This doesn’t have to be complicated – some exercise or physical activity suited to your age and physical condition, a proper diet and some rituals to put it all together. For business, think of other high-performance organizations, like sports teams or the military. They spend most of their time training and practicing for a game or operation. In the business world, you have to do the same – the game or mission is your work, that is when you perform. And one of the largest factors for success is your health and fitness. Also, remember to get at least 6 hours of sleep a day. Preferably 8. If you’re having trouble with this, we have a foundation-level product called Better Sleep that can help you out.

RITUALS

We’ve talked extensively about rituals already. Your morning ritual, your evening ritual and what you do during the day all come together to either keep you in peak productivity or to offset you from it. One additional ritual to pay attention to is the habit of Clearing to Neutral, especially when you are leaving work. Essentially, you want to review what you completed during the day, plan what you’re going to do the next day, and lay out all the materials and resources that you will need for a running start the next morning.

189

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) EMAIL MANAGEMENT

The chapter on Simple Email Management contains everything you need to know about managing email in your personal and professional life. However, we recognize that email solutions are often not one-size-fits-all, so here are some additional ideas to help for when you get overwhelming amounts of email (e.g., you use email to manage a business team, or you just get a lot of email in general): • Separate personal and business email accounts. This should be obvious. • Check email twice a day – once at noon, and once before you finish up work for the day. If you don’t think this is enough, put in 2 more checks at even intervals (for example, 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm). • Don’t leave Outlook/Apple Mail open during the day. Close it when you’re not using it. Turn off any new mail notifications or reminders. • Any incoming email should either: ––Be replied to or actioned if it will take less than 2 minutes. ––Filed if it doesn’t require actioning or follow up. ––Left in the inbox for later, if it involves someone having to get back to you on something, or if it’s something that will take more than 2 minutes to action. You’ll notice that the last point is a slight deviation from what we talked about in the email management chapter. If you can implement Inbox Zero and make it work for, you, that is great. But we also recognize that a lot of people

190

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) struggle with the idea of an empty inbox (they’re used to using their inbox as a holding folder), so this slight variation accommodates for that while still helping you stay on top of email.

INSTANT MESSAGING

If you use IM (Skype, iMessage, AIM) for work, create a separate account where the contact list is entirely work related. Or, use a dedicated business solution like HipChat. You can leave the application running, but set it to NOT notify you when you have an incoming message. This is usually the Do Not Disturb or Busy status. Treat IM like email – deal with it in batches, at specific times.

THE PHONE

Put your cell phone/mobile on silent, but within visual range. If you work in an office, never take phone calls immediately – train a receptionist to take messages, and set aside time to return calls in batches.

DOOR POLICY AND INTERRUPTIONS

Regardless of if you work in an office or from home, enforce a no open door policy. People (or team members or family members) who want to see you should make an appointment. There is nothing worse than trying to solve the crisis-of-the-day than trying to solve the crisis-of-the-day while being constantly interrupted by someone wandering in to ask questions that they could look up on Google.

191

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) The only time anyone should interrupt you is in an emergency – if the building is on fire, and even then, only if you need to evacuate.

GETTING WORK DONE

In concert with a closed door policy, create your own interruption-free time by using timeblocks/timeboxes. This is essentially an appointment you make with yourself, where you work on one specific task or project.

This is what a timebox looks like

The Pomodoro Technique is perfect to use in concert with timeboxes. Set it for a 50 minute work period with a 10 minute break, where you physically get out of your computer and move around. Whether it’s wandering over to the kitchen to get some water, or popping downstairs for some fresh air, you must leave your desk during the break.

TASK MANAGEMENT

The chapter on Simple Task Management should have provided you with an outline of how to manage your tasks simply and effectively. As a refresher: What you do is create a simple task list on paper or in a Word document, which then carries forward day-to-day. From this list, pick the 3 most important things for the day, do a quick analysis of which is a priority, and do that first. At the end of the day, carry all remaining tasks to the next day. Any information or notes should be at the bottom of the list.

192

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY

Technology (in particular, ubiquitous personal technology) should be approached with the mindset of “what makes me more productive”, not “what is the latest and coolest”. For business technology, we suggest thinking “developing world”: what is the simplest, most reliable and cheapest solution that works. As an example, yes, online storage and redundant RAID arrays are nice and fancy, but a $100 USB hard disk works just as well for file backups. Also, some advice from one of our mentors: if it costs you less than $500 and makes you more productive, buy it.

193

Chapter 12: Putting it Together (Case Study) IMPLEMENTATION AND ACTION STEPS Everything that you’ve read in this chapter is not hard to implement. The hardest will be the principles and mindsets at the beginning. Everything else, is something you can do right away – how you handle your email, turning off your IM client during the day, timeboxing your day. The thing about habits is the more you do them, the easier they become. It will be difficult at first, but the payoff from implementing more efficient practices is far greater in the mid-to-long term. These are things that can be taught to people around you, be they friends, family, employees or team members. And the best way of teaching is through leading by example – show them how you are effective, and they will naturally follow. If you’re reading this you’re already ahead of 95% of people when it comes to productivity – and if you’ve made it this far, you’re likely quite determined and disciplined to become more productive. And really, that’s all you need to implement this!

194

In Closing

In Closing IN CLOSING Congratulations on making it all the way through the Asian Efficiency Primer. When we were compiling this Primer our aim was to be comprehensive, and touch on all the main topics that sit under the “personal productivity” umbrella, rather than going deep on just one area (e.g., task management), which is what most introductory books on productivity try to do. As you implement the ideas in this Primer, you’ll discover that you will develop rock-solid foundations in personal productivity. There is more than enough contained in what you have learned to help make you more productive almost right away, and also enough to help you find your own nuances and ways of doing things over time. A common question is: where to next? As we’ve mentioned, with a solid foundation, the rest is about gaining insight into specific topics (like email or procrastination) and developing techniques and methodologies that are custom-tailored to your personality and life. We usually recommend that once people have gone through the Primer, they should continue with the Productivity Blueprint, which does a deep dive into procrastination, focus, distractions and email management. All the best with your productivity!

- The Asian Efficiency Team Hong Kong SAR

196

In Closing

197

Glossary

Glossary 2-minute rule: if the task can be completed within 2 minutes, do it right away. Otherwise, organize it and work on it another time. Areas of responsibility: a top-level grouping of goals, tasks and outcomes. Clear to neutral: the habit of resetting your environment so it’s ready for use for next time. Dropbox: a popular online storage service. Eat that frog: the habit of working on your most important task first thing in the morning. Derived from the book Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. Evernote: a popular note taking program. Getting Things Done: a productivity methodology by David Allen Co. Hero mode: working on your most important tasks when your body is the most energetic and your mind is the most focused. Inbox zero: the habit of getting your inbox to zero before you finish your day. Mind mapping: a way of visually taking notes and capturing information surrounding one core concept. Most important task: your task that has highest leverage/value that you must complete that day. Multitasking: doing multiple things at the same time: a habit we discourage. Next action: the next available step to move a project forward. Personal technology: the use of technology to make your life simpler, easier and more productive. Pomodoro Technique: time-boxing technique that works in 25 minutes chunks. Ritual: deliberate set of actions in sequence. Solar flaring: the idea of building small momentum to push yourself forward to complete a task. Sex transmutation: channeling your sexual desires and thoughts into physical

199

Glossary expression for a greater purpose. Zinio: an online service that allows you to subscribe to your favorite magazines.

200

About Asian Efficiency

About Asian Efficiency ABOUT ASIAN EFFICIENCY

Asian Efficiency stands for simplicity and action. We give people the ability to control their lives, to handle their daily information bombardment and to juggle it alongside things to do, commitments, responsibilities and a busy schedule - all in a seamless manner. Our mission is to make the world a better and more efficient place. We produce and publish high-quality ideas and solutions to help you become a better, faster and more efficient high-achiever. We believe in experimenting with the limits of human potential, in intelligently using new personal technologies and about keeping things simple - and efficient. Everyone at Asian Efficiency lives and breathes personal development and growth, and is passionate about helping others become the best they can be. We are also productivity nerds, Apple enthusiasts and generally love working out how to do things better. One day we would like to see Asian Efficiency make an impact on the global productivity index, and by buying this primer, you’ve helped contribute a bit towards that - thank you. You can find out more about Asian Efficiency at: • www.asianefficiency.com - our company blog where we talk about the latest (and best) productivity tips and tricks. • store.asianefficiency.com - our company store, where you can purchase our products. We highly value all our customers - so expect lots of goodies your way very soon! • twitter.com/asianefficiency - our Twitter account where we give away daily tips about productivity, and we generally get to know our followers. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason (testimonials are nice!), send an email to: [email protected] or log into our Customer Area at customer.asianefficiency.com.

202

Asian Efficiency

Recommend Documents