It has been almost a month since my employer graciously sent me to a Time Management class (April 25th). The class was contracted out through the FranklinCovey folks, and taught by an enthusiastic evangelist about their planner and organization system (aren’t they all?). I am personally convinced that FranklinCovey’s approach is no better nor any worse than any paper based day planner and organizational system, but the techniques are very useful no matter who you get them from nor which product you buy. You can even make your own completely custom planning system with free templates from DIYPlanner if you prefer (and I will augment my FranklinCovey with some DIYPlanner stuff as I customize and tune my own system up).
I have conscientiously applied the techniques from the training to both work and personal life.
The training and techniques are definitely helping me stay focused on the most important near term goals, and I am finding it easy to reject frequent requests for me to do more, but with solid reasons why (eg: “I’m sorry I cannot begin to work on that new project without impacting the three projects you assigned me last night, and by the way the status update on those is….”). People are accepting “No” as a legitimate answer when I have backing details or sound reasoning about why not. So that alone is a huge success.
I am driving tasks to completion more frequently because of greater focus, and that too is a huge success.
The most useful techniques for me have been re-starting the regular use of a task/todo list, and I am using the paper based method taught in class with time activation as the key to making it work. Using the Task/ToDo list, coupled with weekly planning time (Sunday night or Monday morning) in order to plan out the week are big victories because they are helping me finish what I start and get a little more done day to day.
I still don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do, and projects are still slipping, but at least the stuff that slips is the less critical stuff now.
I remain intensely active in many personal activities outside of work as well as being the principal UNIX sysadmin on my team. My work days are filled with UNIX Systems Administration, Integration, Problem Analysis, and Event Management/Resolution. My mornings, evenings and weekends are filled with being the president of an educational non-profit living history company teaching people about life in the middle ages, taking ballroom dance classes and competing in dance events both with my wife and with my professional instructor, volunteering in three political campaigns, staying current on my scuba diving knowledge for dive vacations with a group of friends, being a group leader for my district in Soka Gakkai Buddhism, and designing websites for the dance studio, the buddhist group, and the living history company.
The house is a mess and the garden is full of weeds and I have not been on my recumbent bicycle in way too long, but I am keeping up better than before the April 25th class. So I have to thank both the FranklynCovey folks and my employer for investing in that training. The class pointed out some serious technical flaws in the electronic PDA based to-do list software/procedure, and gave me a new procedure to replace that.
Now I use my PalmOS PDA to track meetings/events/calendar and to store directions and handle my contacts, but I have switched to paper based planner for time activated to-do list and most of my notes (though any really important notes get copied into PDA/Computer later for backup/recovery purposes).
I am still searching for a Task/ToDo List software to replace the essentially useless one that comes with PalmOS PDAs – mostly because I like the backup/recovery features of electronic devices. My wife once lost her DayRunner (fancy Coach leather binder and all the details of her life) while were were on vacation, and we’ve still not recovered some of the data even after more than a decade. Backup of your data is very important.
I found it very helpful to do some additional research after class. Suggested reading and websites:
http://www.diyplanner.com/
http://www.43folders.com/
http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done/
http://davidco.com/
http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/12/building-a-smarter-to-do-list-part-i/
http://www.michaelhyatt.com/workingsmart/getting_things_done/index.html
http://www.douglasjohnston.net/weblog/
On to the next task…
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