About 18 months ago I accidently began a process that has profoundly changed my life.
I had grown to generally consider myself as detail oriented and productive. Over 2 years ago now I had really begun harnessing the power of audiobooks and RSS to increase my reading capability. I signed up for sites like Life Hacker and Engadget and others that could provide sources of good information on technology and things to make my life in the technology world easier. I thought I was doing really well but I still had problems like:
- OTJ Stress
- The constant feeling I was forgetting something
- Inability to concentrate
- Periods of low energy where I wasted time browsing the internet or similar tasks
- Occasional oversights letting things fall through the cracks
- Difficulty starting new (often big) projects
I just thought of that as normal, as a sort of concrete reality of our times.
Then I started noticing a trend on the sites I was reading.
I kept seeing all these recounts of people building personal productivity systems using something called GTD. They were talking in weird languages about @computer, and @@agenda contexts and how to create 17 complex task categories and even how to hack a moleskine. Gross.
I thought it was all quite silly, frankly.
Then one day I decided to download an audiobook called Getting Things Done by David Allen just to see what the fuss was about. Within 2 months I had my own system in place and for the last year I’ve been refining it. Almost immediately I noticed huge reductions in my stress and my ability to concentrate increased. Within 3 months I noticed I was accomplishing a lot more than I ever thought I could. After a year I don’t know what I’d do without it.
So if you’re an SE and you’ve felt like I did or say things like:
- I don’t have enough time to…
- I forgot to follow up with my client about…
- I can’t handle the stress of 3 reps or 200 accounts or my 10M quota or…
you have an opportunity in front of you to rid yourself of those thoughts.
This post is a long time in the making and is a result of countless hours spent learning and refining a process for complete self management. It wasn’t quick, nor easy to achieve, but I think that’s the reason so few cross the dip
So, enough with the build up. This post will detail the journey I followed and provide very crisp instructions for implementing a similar system.
Warning: It’s long and even has a homework assignment.
GTD
Getting Things Done is a set of operating principles designed around “stree free productivity” by author David Allen. In my view, the cornerstone of it’s success is that it describes the “what” to be done, but leaves the “how” to the reader. Because figuring out your own implementation is it’s own journey, users naturally are proud of their investment and personalize that success making them want to share it with others. No two systems are identical. My goal in this article is to help encourge SEs by providing a jumpstart for the profession based on my successes and failures to date.
While you may get some useful tricks from my setup, you won’t understand what I’m talking about without first doing some other reading. For an excellent primer, you can read the review/cliffnotes of GTD done by my friend Trent over at The Simple Dollar. At some point you will want to read Getting Things Done and Making Things Work for yourself.
For the unindoctrinated, here is the most concise summary of what GTD addresses using Allen’s own praphrasing.
People keep stuff in their head. They don’t decide what they need to do about stuff they know they need to do something about. They don’t organize action reminders and support materials in functional categories. They don’t maintain and review a complete and objective inventory of their commitments. Then they waste energy and burn out, allowing their busy-ness to be driven by what’s latest and loudest, hoping it’s the right thing to do but never feeling the relief that it is.
Though I have generalized my system to support the core needs of an SE, here were my goals and set of assumptions
- Have a sales-related position where you interact with a
variety of accounts - Need access everywhere (home, on the road, from any
internet connect, and cell phone) - You use Outlook and have a cell capable of
syncing with it - You are able to mix work/personal tasks in the same system
- Prefer electronic to paper for most things
- Keep number of tools to a minimum
- Minimize number of software customizations
The remainder of this paper will be organized based on the 5 step system. These 5 steps address each of the major issues outlined by Allen above:
- Collect – How you capture all the stuff on your plate
- Process – The method by which you address everything you’ve captured
- Organize – As you process, how do you organize all of the committments and supporting material
- Review – The maintenance of your system and processes
- Do – The method by which you tackle your committments
I will cover each one in a separate post, probably 1 per week. In the meantime, check the cliffnotes at The Simple Dollar above or grab the books.
EDIT:
Here are the remainder of posts in order:
I also created a product list of all the products I’m using, hopefully it ends up saving you some time.
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