There are many very specific ways of analyzing ideas and information. While you’re working, there are three main areas of focus you bounce between – giving more or less of your focus to each “type” of work, while simultaneously reprioritizing what you still need to do, weighing that against what you are doing right now.
The three kinds of work we’re all engaged in:
Thinking
Managing
Doing
At the TASK/TO DO level of work (the focus of this post), there are many schools of thought as to the best way to organize and prioritize. Those of us who have studied the history of time management have heard of many different ways:
By time block
By context
By tool necessary
By priority
By date
...and probably many others.
I believe that at some level, most people do some kind of combination of many types of categorization of their tasks. Probably the most COMMON type is what I call EXCLUSION. That is where you make a to do list, and just leave stuff off the list!
For a multitude of reasons, people don’t want to see, think about, be reminded of or give any of their attention to the myriad of things they are not going to do.
Question: Does excluding things, leaving them off the list, but bouncing around in your mind, make you more efficient? And, if so, are you being most effective [that is, working on the most important thing at any given moment] throughout the day?
Over the past few years of researching and working one on one with some extremely busy and time-bound people, I have found that there are specific methods to organize yourself and your work reminders for maximum productivity. Want to know the secrets we speak and write about? Here are two, with a bit of commentary aside each one:
Allow yourself the gift of writing everything you think of on a piece of paper (or, as the case may be for many of you reading this, pieces of paper!). It is statistically significant that we have many thousands of thoughts pass through our minds, day in and day out. By identifying them, you can begin to see which ones will need more or less of your direct attention.
Track your use of your time. For a week, place your attention on HOW you use your time and WHAT you do with your time. Before you get deeply engaged (or too attached) to “just changing to something more productive,” we highly recommend you take a look at what you are doing already. The most objective way to do this is to set up a video camera and record yourself working for 60 or 90 minutes. Then, at the end of that time, you can go back and actually see how much time you spent on each e-mail, how effectively you use your computer keyboard and software programs and, what kind of time you are using on the phone.
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