Learning efficiency/productivity
I have three efficiency tips. One is to tell people what your goals are, another is to maintian a todo list, and the third is to remember to eat breakfast. Obviously, I still have a lot of room for improvement, so I’m going to read Getting Things Done and see what other good tips I can find there.
It was hard to resist using the title "Getting Getting Things Done read" for this entry, but I wouldn’t want to give too much prominence to a book that can’t be freely copied. At the same time, I do what to say what my goal is – that way I have to do it. That tip got me started in the campaign against software patents. I knew nothing about the subject, so I told people I would give a talk about it at an event – then I couldn’t avoid getting that work done.
When I’ve read the book, I’ll blog about what I’ve learned. Hopefully I’ll have found some useful free software for implementing the methods in the book. Many free software packages for the book can be found on Wikipedia’s Comparison of GTD software article.
The tip about lists works for three reasons. One is they stop you from forgetting things, a second is that they remind you of more options so there will usually be something you feel like doing, and the third is that they free up your brain from trying to remember these things. Human brains stopped being for that as soon as writing became easy. So I start each day by reading yesterday’s list and making a new list with whatever I haven’t finished.
Oh, and breakfast. Without a proper breakfast, after an hour or two my concentration has deteriorated noticeably.
In the mean time, by coicidence, I got this link passed to me recently:
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
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