Saying No: How Successful People Stay Productive.

It’s really easy to add things to a to-do list. Because it’s so simple, these lists tend to grow and grow. Even worse they encourage us to say yes to almost everything because, well, we can just add it to our list. This means we’re not discriminating and we’re not as conscious about controlling our time as we should be. As Steve Jobs said, it’s easy to say yes but the real value comes from saying no.

GTD by dave Allen is the system and process I use to organise myself thanks to Steve Cree, but often the wheels fall off, and here’s a simple way to keep going when things get out of control.

Leo Babauta has a book called ‘The Power of Less’. The central idea of the book is to work out your goals, set limitations so that you do less but do what’s important. The book aims to help you discern what is essential and what to get rid of by getting you to think about your life goals. One useful exercise it had was to make a list of EVERYTHING I do (it was huge) then go back and highlight what were the most important things.

Chapter 8 is called ‘Simple Tasks’ To put flesh on that idea “do less, but do what’s important” he suggests at the start of every day you CHOOSE YOUR THREE MOST IMPORTANT TASKS and do them before you do anything else. When life is falling apart and I start living in a reactive way, I go back to this as a basic discipline.

It’s simple but powerful. I normally get my three MIT’s done by lunch and do more after, but it’s a great sense of accomplishment to set three important things and get them done. He suggests that you make at lease one of the three things be a ‘big picture’ thing, that is helping you move forward in a particular area, so that your 3 MIT’s are not just 3 urgent or menial tasks, but the three most important things that you can do that day.

So today my three MIT’s are – a private time of prayer and bible reading, writing a letter and doing the church bulletin, which I’ve finished so now I can get even more done. On a different day it might be sermon preparation so it takes all morning to get one done.

There were some other good ideas in the book…

Make SMALL changes (p42) – eg Start with 5-10 minutes of exercise not 1 hour, wake up 10 minutes earlier, clean one desk not your whole study.

EMAIL: Let it be your slave not your master. Turn off auto check and check it just once or twice a day (10am and 4pm). Empty your inbox. Don’t check it first thing in the morning so that it sets your agenda.

An A-Z general reference file for everything.

I can’t believe how nice this looks. I truly do have a new relationship with my filing system.

Dave Allen’s 3 tab manila folders not available in Australia. Nor are the file systems with no hangers. I tried a few different combo’s to get the manilla files to sit above the suspension files. In the end I found that these 5 tab dividers sit in the Officeworks suspension files which are a bit shorter that all the other brands, so the folders poke out the top nicely. I followed GTD method of 1 folder per hanger and labelled with brother labeller. The best manilla folders I found were I forget the brand – either Avery or Marbig – the ones from Corporate Express.

The best folders for GTD are these cheapo Officeworks ones that are 1cm shorter than all the other brands. This works in my favour as the manilla tabs now poke out the top.

Well pretty much every tool and supply I have is where it doesn’t belong. So I made a place for everything that didn’t have a place. I have moved all this stuff out of my study into this new storage cupboard I built complete with Sam’s Warehouse plastic bins all labelled with my new Brother labeller.

I have read the book and decided:

1. His principles are great.

2. The practical stuff is what I am so bad at so I am going to follow it EXACTLY to the letter, then after I have the system going, I can tweak things.

We cleaned out the study, it now looks like this:

I really should have taken a before shot to see the difference!

Here is my new current projects file system:

And my MASSIVE overflowing ‘in’ tray, which will get processed in step 2, now looks like this – it’s 0.5m high!

Actually, it’s much bigger than that – my inbox overflows into the carport.

Big job ahead of us to work out what to do with all this stuff! Nowhere to put the car now.