Messing with Other People’s Time Management

I write a lot about how to be more productive, but what if that really isn’t your thing? What if you don’t like productivity? What if your goal in life is to ruin productivity for other people.

In an effort to expand our readership to people striving for unproductivity, here are six things you can do to guarantee that your co-workers get as little done as possible. Productivity501 takes no responsibility for the results of actually implementing any of these ideas.

1. Randomly put entries on their calendar like: “1:30 meeting with John White Important!” or “Call Sally 535-321-1242″. Place them far enough in the future that they won’t suspect you did it.
2. Write in fake delegated tasks and followup reminders: “Ask Joe for status of XYZ presentation.”
3. Setup their copy of MS Word to autocorrect their boss’s name with “The Silly Clown” or “The Surpreme Ruler of Canterbury”
4. Switch their phone display to Hebrew.
5. There are still a number of “Fax Back” services out there where you call in, select the documents you want and then give the system your fax number. Call in an use their desk phone or cell phone number.
6. Put an ad on Craig’s List saying that you have 4 Superbowl, Hannah Montana, or Blueman Group tickets that you aren’t going to be able to use and you’ll give them away free to whoever tells you the funniest joke on the phone. List their work number.

Procrastination Prevention Course - Now Live!

Previously I announced that we were testing the Procrastination Prevention Course. I took the feedback from the testing group and made some changes. The course is now live.

If you have trouble with procrastination, you need to go through this course. It is designed to give you some simple strategies for preventing procrastination. Each day you get a short email with a simple assignment to help you practice breaking the procrastination habit.

The funny thing about a procrastination course is that the people who most need it are the ones most likely to put it off. If you are reading this and thinking “Maybe I’ll do that some day” I strongly recommend that you sign up for it right now. Don’t procrastinate on learning not to procrastinate.

The course is designed to take as little of your time as possible. It will only take you 45 to 90 seconds to read the daily email. The goal is to get you focusing on forming good habits in completing your daily tasks. You can sign up using the form below or from the courses page.

 

Procrastination Prevention Course
Email:
Name:

 
If you are reading this in an email or in a feed reader and you don’t see the form above, please visit the site directly to sign up. If you know anyone who is struggling with procrastination, please forward this information along to them.

 

The Promise of Sleep — Book

Sometimes we focus on the wrong things.  For example, it is easy to focus on trying to do more during the day while short changing our sleep at night.  This book looks at how and why we sleep.

It is based on a lot of sleep research, but the writing style is very accessible and makes for an interesting read.

For example, the author explores the right balance of sleep to let you fall asleep quickly and wake up without feeling worn out.  He talks about situations where people sleep too much and then suffer from insomnia until their body gets tired enough to fall asleep again.

One of the more interesting concepts in the book is the idea of a “sleep debt”.  This theory basically says that you “owe” your body a certain amount of sleep each night. If you get behind you have to pay it back later on.

Another part of the book that I found very interesting was the discussion of how sleep researches study sleep.  I hadn’t realized how much effort was going into to studying something that we mostly take for granted.

This book gave me a lot of insight into how to best manage my sleep and you can glean a lot of tips on how to be more productive in your waking hours by managing your sleeping time effectively.

Reader Question - Uncompleted Tasks

I’ve been an avid enthusiast (not to say follower) of GTD and productivity blogs in general. (This one has long been chief on that list; keep up the good material without diluting it.) Currently I just started a new role at work where I have a bit more responsibility.To keep track, I’ve been using tasks–via Outlook 2007 and Remember the Milk. Both are great ways to quickly catalog things to be done.

However, the other side of my job is that I can get “interrupted” with urgent things that legitimately take precedence over my (usually) non-urgent tasks. So days can go by without me getting any tasks completed. This feels pretty crummy.

What do I do with that? Any mentality tips you can offer to help me go home at night feeling a little more satisfied with my progress?

Best regards,
Andrew Conkling

I would suggest that you divide your todo list into two types of tasks each day.  One group of tasks are the ones that you home to accomplish for the day.  The other group is much shorter and contains the three things that you are committing to get done for that day.  These three tasks shouldn’t be a full 8 hours of work.  In fact they may only take 1 or 2 hours of uninterrupted focus to complete.

The idea is to give yourself  a certain number of things that you are promising yourself to complete that represent the most important things you need to accomplish for the day.  If possible arrange your day so you can work on these items first.  That might starting work a bit earlier, or simply closing your office door from 8 to 10.  You also might consider doing these tasks before answering emails or checking voicemail.

Personally I am on a constant mission to do less.  I don’t think I’m made to handle 20 or 30 tasks in a day.  Even if I have a bunch of stuff to do, I’d rather give myself 2 or 3 tasks that will have the biggest impact and focus on whether or not I get those items done. With the other stuff I look for ways to delegate, automate, do less frequently, or stop doing all together.  I’m not saying you can get rid of all the other tasks, but by clearly defining what is most important you can end your day knowing that you did the vital stuff–even if you were interrupted for the rest of the day.

One of the problems with GTD (in my opinion) is that it encourages people to try to do more.  The people I know who are most effective are usually the ones that are only doing a few things.  They have figured out where they add the most value and concentrate on that.

On Fridays we publish questions from our readers. If you have a question you’d like to see answer here, please send it to questions@productivity501.com.