Search Results for: getting things done

163 Getting Things Done Software Options

October 25, 2013 by
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I admit it. Even though I am committed to Evernote as my getting things done software application, I still like looking at other apps. It’s fun. I get ideas. And yes, I get tempted. But I stay with Evernote, even though it is not a GTD app and does have limitations, because it is simple, powerful, and I can make it do what I want it to do. (I also like having all my tasks and projects in the same place as my notes.)

I chose Evernote because everything else I tried was too complicated to learn and/or use, or didn’t “feel” right for me. I found myself spending too much time managing lists instead of getting things done.

Anyway, if you’re still looking for the perfect app, or like me, you enjoy seeing what else is available, you might want to take a look at this directory of 163 Getting Things Done Software options. I found it by reading a post that summarizes ten popular GTD apps. Of the ten, I have the most experience with Toodledo and Nirvana. They’re both worth a look.

Careful, though. No matter what productivity system you use, trying out new apps can become addicting. You can spend hundreds of hours reading reviews, trying features, and moving information. Been there. Done that.

Of course in the end, the best system is the one that works for you. My wife uses pen and paper and gets way more done than I ever have. It took her about ten seconds to set up her system and she spends zero time looking at other apps.

Check out my Evernote for Lawyers ebook.

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My trick for getting things done that I don’t want to do

October 11, 2013 by
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Yesterday, we talked about trusting your gut to choose your most important tasks for the day. But there are always other things we need to do. Small things, unpleasant things, things we may not be excited about, things we strongly dislike.

Want to know my secret for getting things done that I don’t want to do?

I just do them. I don’t think about why I don’t want to do them, or worry about what might happen. I just hold my nose and take the first step. If I have to make a call I don’t want to make, I just start dialing. Before I know it, the call is over.

If you find yourself procrastinating or avoiding something you need to do, just start doing it. Don’t think about it. Don’t write out a plan. Just start.

Okay, easy to say, not always easy to do. Sometimes, you don’t know where to start. Or it’s a big project. Or you need more information.

In that case, I find something I can do now and do that. Even if it’s just writing down an idea of how I might start or what I need to find out. There, I’ve started.

This works most of the time. But not always. I still procrastinate. I might have low energy, I might want to do something else instead, or I might be afraid. When this happens, I tell myself, “Do it anyway.”

  • I don’t have enough time: Do it anyway.
  • I don’t have enough information: Do it anyway.
  • I don’t know what to do: Do it anyway.
  • I don’t know how: Do it anyway.
  • I don’t want to: Do it anyway.

“Do it anyway” is a trigger phrase. I’ve conditioned myself that when I hear those words, I drop shields, get out of my own way, and do it. It’s like a hypnotic command. (No, don’t email me with some crazy idea and tell me to do it anyway. I’ve got to say it to myself.)

It’s close to Nike’s, “Just do it,” but I hear that as a command and I don’t follow orders very well. The word “anyway” acknowledges and validates my resistance. It says, “yes, there are reasons for not doing it but there are more reasons or better reasons for getting it done.”

Sure, it’s a trick. And no, it doesn’t always work. But it works enough of the time, and that’s good enough for me.

The next time you’ve got something on your list you don’t want to do, do it anyway.

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Here’s why you’re NOT getting things done

December 12, 2012 by
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Apparently, there’s an art to creating a to-do list. And because most of us aren’t practitioners of that art, we fail to do the things we put on our lists. So says blogger Janet Choi, who shares some telling statistics from her company’s internal survey in, “How to Master the Art of To-do Lists by Understanding Why They Fail”:

  • 41% of to­-do items were never completed.
  • 50% of completed to-­do items are done within a day.
  • 18% of completed to­-do items are done within an hour.
  • 10% of completed to­-do items are done within a minute.
  • 15% of dones started as to-do items.

“In other words,” she says, “people aren’t that great at completing their to-do tasks; tasks that do get completed are done quickly; and tasks that are reported as done don’t correlate with planned to-do tasks.”

Choi says one of the reasons we aren’t good at getting things done is that we have too many to-do’s on our lists. She might have something there. On my list (in Evernote) I currently have 14 notes tagged “Now” and 385 tagged “Next”. This doesn’t include “Someday” (177) or items tagged “Read/Review” (583). A lot, but I’m not concerned. As long as I get my three or four “MITs” (“Most Important Tasks”) for the day done, I’m good. Choi agrees. She suggests looking at that big list of tasks and choosing, “the most important, pressing or interesting ones to work on, big and small.”

As for why only “15% of dones started as to-do items,” Choi attributes this to our lack of skill (discipline?) in creating task lists, and because of the unpredictability of our daily lives. Stuff happens, emails and phone calls cry out for our attention, things don’t turn out the way we expected. Those may be the reasons, but in my opinion, they aren’t good reasons for not doing important tasks, and those are always planned.

Yes, the unpredictable happens, and we must allow for that in our daily planning. But it should not dominate our day. No more than 25-30% of our time should be left open for the “unplanned,” not 85%. Most of our day should be spent getting important things done, the ones that move us towards our vision of the future we want to create. If you don’t plan your future, you can’t expect to wind up where you want to go.

Choi says we should be more specific in our planning, and I agree. It’s easier to know when something is done if it is well defined from the beginning. This is especially important to remember for those of us who do anything relatively open-ended like research or writing. I remember pulling all-nighters in school and also as a lawyer, writing briefs and preparing for trial, and not knowing when I was done because you can always do more.

Which leads me to my favorite reference in the post, dealing with deadlines. Choi references a behavioral study most of us will recognize as the basis for Parkinson’s Law: “The study found that students who had longer to finish three papers performed worse than those who had externally-imposed or self-imposed deadlines that were evenly spaced and earlier. . . The more time you give yourself to finish something, the less likely it is that you will finish in that time frame.”

How do you know that brief you’re working on is done? When it’s 4:00 pm and it has to filed today by 5.

The Attorney Marketing Formula comes with a bonus module that helps you create a marketing plan that really works. Get it and get ready for the new year.

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The Ten Commandments of “Getting Things Done”

November 30, 2012 by
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Many people refer to David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, as their productivity Bible. Like the real Bible, however, Allen’s book isn’t particularly easy for the uninitiated to digest. It took me several reads and a lot of hi-lighting before the ideas started to sink in.

And yet the principles in Getting Things Done (GTD) aren’t that complicated. In fact, the system is basically your calendar, a few lists, and a process for organizing everything so that you know what to do first and what to do after that. This allows you to be effective (getting the right things done) and efficient (getting things done right).

The sub-title of Getting Things Done is “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” and that is an apt description of the ultimate benefit of mastering GTD.

If you’re trying to learn GTD, or this is your first exposure to it, here is a summary of its key components, the “Ten Commandments of “Getting Things Done”:

  1. Put everything in a “trusted system”. Get it out of your head, off your desk, and into one “Inbox” (or a few), ready to be processed.
  2. Organize your tasks into lists, for example, “Today,” “Next,” “Someday,” “Waiting,” and “Projects”.
  3. A project is anything that requires more than one step (task). Each project should have a list of tasks needed to complete it.
  4. Organize your lists by “context”: Where (@Office, @Home, @Errands), Tool: (@Internet, @Phone), People: (@Debbie, @ABC Board). That way, when you’re @Office, having a meeting with @Debbie, you can zero in on appropriate tasks and not be distracted with @Errands or chores you need to do @Home.
  5. Use your calendar to record future tasks by date (i.e., appointments, start dates, due dates, review dates). The calendar is sacred territory. If it’s on your calendar, you should do it.
  6. Use a tickler system to remind yourself of things you may want to do or review in the future but aren’t due on a specific date (and thus, not on your calendar).
  7. Process your Inbox often: If something is actionable, either Do it (immediately), Delegate it, or Defer it (Calendar, or “Next” list). If it’s not actionable, either Trash it, put it on a list to review in the future (“Someday” or “Tickler”), or file it as Reference material.
  8. Review your lists daily. Decide what to do based on your Time and Energy and the task’s Priority. Don’t prioritize in advance because priorities (and Contexts) change constantly.
  9. Plan every day in advance. Review your plan and your progress once a week at a regular Weekly Review.
  10. As you process your Inbox or review your lists, ask yourself two questions: What’s the successful outcome? And, What’s the next action (logical next step) to make it happen? David Allen says, “These provide fundamental clarity for Getting Things Done, and they lie at the core of most everything I teach.”

This probably represents 90% of the GTD system. There are many nuances and refinements and many of us have modified “pure GTD” to suit our work flow and preferences. You can spend a lifetime tinkering with GTD or, once you have a basic set up, simply get things done.

GTD can be done with pen and paper. There are also many GTD apps for your smart phone or computer. I do all of this in Evernote (plus my calendar). My GTD system is presented in detail in my Evernote for Lawyers ebook.

Do you use GTD? How has it helped you to get things done?

You can use my Evernote GTD system even if you don’t use Evernote. Read Evernote for Lawyers, however, and you’ll want to use Evernote. Even if you’re not a lawyer. 

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Getting things done by letting your “trusted system” remind you

March 26, 2012 by
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Waiting for others to do what they’re supposed to do used to make me anxious. Not anymore. Instead of trusting my memory, scraps of paper, post-it notes, et.al., I record the task in a “trusted system” and let the system remind me. Until it does, I don’t think about it.

A trusted system usually starts with a calendar. Most attorneys routinely calendar due dates, but are sometimes unprepared when the due date “sneaks up on them.” The solution is to add a review date prior to the due date, prompting you to check up on the outstanding task. Or a series of review dates if there is a long time horizon. You can also calendar review dates even when there is no fixed due date.

Another way to handle “waiting” tasks is to keep a separate list of them and review that list on a regular basis, i.e., during a weekly review. Or, instead of keeping everything on one list, you can assign a tag or label to each individual task. During your weekly review, check everything that has the “waiting” tag or label or is in your “waiting” folder.

For your own tasks, you can keep separate lists or folders labeled “Now” or “Next” or “Someday” or use tags for the same purpose.

For my trusted system, I use my calendar (google) for tasks with a due date or a review date, and Evernote for everything else. Anything on the calendar that has an associated note in Evernote is linked to that note with a “note link,” a hyperlink that opens the note in Evernote.

Gmail now allows you to star or label your outgoing emails, which makes tracking replies so much easier. Before you click “send,” add a “waiting” label, for example, to any email where you are waiting for a reply. You can then forget about it until your periodic review.

Getting things out of your head and into a trusted system can help you achieve a “mind like water”. The “open loops” still exist, but you can relax and let your trusted system take care of the remembering and reminding.

—
I’m being interviewed live this Wednesday at 3pm Pacific about using Evernote in a law practice and my Evernote for Lawyers ebook. I hope you can join us. If you can’t make it, you can post your question on my new Evernote for Lawyers ebook fanpage.

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Getting things done when you have “vacation brain”

November 22, 2011 by
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books reading kindleOne of the precepts of the Getting Things Done or GTD methodology is that it’s not necessary to prioritize your Next Actions in advance, nor is it recommended. For one thing, priorities change. What seems important today might be completely unnecessary a week from today.

Also, priorities are contextual. Picking up a new cartridge for your laser printer is something you do while running errands, not at ten o’clock at night.

Priorities, then, should be established during your daily planning, which I contend should take place the night before, and “in the moment”.

To prioritize, review your action lists and determine what you want to do based on three factors: time, energy, and importance (priority).

So today, I may see a task that is important but will take a block of two hours and I don’t have that much time. Or it requires a fair amount of energy and I’m tired. Or I have lots of time but the task under consideration really isn’t that important. These tasks will have to wait.

Some people partially prioritize tasks as they add them to their lists, noting time (how much time they estimate the task will take) and energy (how much they will need, i.e., low, medium, or high). This way, when they don’t have a lot of time or energy, they can scan their lists to find tasks that match.

I usually don’t prioritize in advance. I add a lot of tasks to my list each day and I don’t want to take the time to think about whether something will take ten minutes or twenty minutes or whether I will need high energy or just medium. To some extent, I make these decisions when I review my lists and often, I simply choose what I am inspired to do.

This week is Thanksgiving week in the United States. Some people are working like crazy to clear their desks before the long weekend and some are already in “vacation mode”. If you are in the latter category, at work but finding yourself unable to get much done, go through your lists and look for low time/low energy activities you can do.

If you have “vacation brain” and don’t have a list of low energy tasks to dig through, or your list doesn’t inspire you to take action, check out this list of mindless, but productive tasks that inspired this post.

Or, if you’re like me, you’ll just catch up on your reading.

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[Book Review] Evernote: The Unofficial Guide To Capturing Everything And Getting Things Done

September 23, 2011 by
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If you’re a proponent of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system like I am, you’ve probably tried numerous ways to incorporate it into your work flow, from paper and file folders to web and mobile apps, and everything in between. Many of these are complicated, with lots of bells and whistles and a steep learning curve. Others, like plain paper or a Moleskine notebook are simple but for many of us, too limited.

Enter Evernote.

I’d been using Evernote for a long time, first for collecting information and ideas, eventually, for all of my documents. One day, I decided to see if I could also use it to manage my tasks and projects. Although Evernote isn’t designed as a task management application and it is limited in that realm, I found a way to make it work for me, and today I use it every day for exactly that purpose.

I like having one app for almost everything I do. I like having all of my notes and documents in the same place as my tasks and projects. It’s simple, reliable, and flexible and provides me with a complete system for managing my work and my life.

I went looking for others who use Evernote for Getting Things Done, and my search led me to fellow attorney and blogger, Dan Gold. Dan is a maven in the world of technology and productivity and has tried just about every productivity app under the sun. He used Evernote like I did, for collecting information, but was unable to find the right way to use it for GTD. In his quest to achieve a “mind like water,” he finally found the right combination.

The story of his journey is told in his newly published ebook, “Evernote: The Unofficial Guide To Capturing Everything And Getting Things Done,” (aff. link) now featured in Evernote’s Trunk (store). It’s a great read and provides a much needed lesson for using an extraordinary piece of technology in conjunction with a seminal productivity system, to manage your work and your life.

I read the book and found that to a great extent, Dan’s journey paralleled my own. We both liked the power and ubiquity of Evernote but were frustrated with its limitations as a productivity tool. After trying various apps and workarounds, we eventually found the solution.

In his book, Dan credits my blog post about how I use Evernote for GTD (and another blogger’s post on that subject) with providing some of the missing pieces in his set up. I appreciate his saying so but in reality, Dan had most of the pieces already in place. Like I had, he was adding elements–other apps that integrate with Evernote and a more complex arrangement of notebooks and tags. My post and the other blogger he credits simply showed him that Evernote didn’t need anything else, it could be used “as is” for GTD.

The key is not adding elements but subtracting them. Not using more notebooks to organize everything but fewer, and using enough tags, but not too many, to manage everything.

If you are a newcomer to Evernote or GTD, Dan’s book will sell you on why you need to be using them; it won’t tell you everything you need to know about how. What it will do is show you how you can use them together to create a complete system for getting things done.

“Evernote: The Unofficial Guide To Capturing Everything And Getting Things Done,” is a quick read and available for immediate download for just $5. Dan promises free updates and since Evernote is continually being developed, this makes a great value even greater.

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Getting the right things done

July 28, 2015 by
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Venture capitalist Mark Suster has a rule he lives by that helps him be more productive and successful. The rule: “Do Less. More.” It means doing fewer things overall, and getting the right things done. “Success often comes from doing a few things extraordinarily well and noticeably better than the competition,” he says.

Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle, says, “Everyone can achieve something significant. The key is not effort, but finding the right thing to achieve. You are hugely more productive at some things than at others, but dilute the effectiveness of this by doing too many things where your comparative skill is nowhere near as good.”

Koch also says, “Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”

So, what do you do better than most? What should you focus on? I asked this question in an earlier post:

Look at your practice and tell me what you see.

  • Practice areas: Are you a Jack or Jill of all trades or a master of one? Are you good at many things or outstanding at one or two?
  • Clients: Do you target anyone who needs what you do or a very specifically defined “ideal client” who can hire you more often, pay higher fees, and refer others like themselves who can do the same?
  • Services: Do you offer low fee/low margin services because they contribute something to overhead or do you keep your overhead low and maximize profits?
  • Fees: Do you trade your time for dollars or do you get paid commensurate with the value you deliver?
  • Marketing: Do you do too many things that produce no results, or modest results, or one or two things that bring in the bulk of your new business?
  • Time: Do you do too much yourself, or do you delegate as much as possible and do “only that which only you can do”?
  • Work: Do you do everything from scratch or do you save time, reduce errors, and increase speed by using forms, checklists, and templates?

Leverage is the key to the 80/20 principle. It is the key to getting more done with less effort and to earning more without working more.

Take some time to examine your practice, and yourself. Make a short list of the things you do better than most and focus on them. Eliminate or delegate the rest.

Do Less. More.

This will help with getting the right things done

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Filed Under: Law office management, Leverage, Marketing legal services, Marketing Plan, Productivity, success Tagged With: , , ,

Are you getting the RIGHT things done?

November 4, 2011 by
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three most important tasks for todayPeter Drucker once said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Far more important than “doing things right,” he said, is “doing the right things”.

Every day, I review my task lists and choose the three “most important tasks” for the day. My most important tasks are those which advance my most important objectives. My “MITs” go at the top of my list and I make an effort to do them before I do anything else. If I get these three things done, I consider it a good day.

Three is a good number, but sometimes there are only two. There are days when a fourth MIT slips through and makes it to my list, but I try to focus on no more than three.

Three MITs keeps me from getting overwhelmed by a longer list and gives me a sense of accomplishment. When I get my three MITs done, I then take care of less important tasks. Or, if it’s early in the day and I feel like it, I might add another MIT to the list.

At times, you may find it difficult to choose three MITs. You may have ten things that MUST get done today. No problem. Of the ten, which three are the MOST IMPORTANT? Make those your MITs and do them first.

Each day, you will have MITs and you will have other tasks. The other tasks may be important and need to be done. They may even be urgent. I’m not telling you to ignore these other tasks. Do them, but whenever possible, do them after you do your MITs.

The GTD methodology helps me to get things done. A daily list of MITs helps me to get the right things done.

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3 things you should do every day

September 19, 2022 by
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Every day, there are 3 things you should do.

The first is client work, obviously. Get the work done, the bills billed, the clients happy, and the bills paid.

The second thing is running the joint. Yes, marketing and management of your practice.

That’s true even if you work for a firm. You still want to bring in new business, build your brand or reputation, and do things that help you grow your practice and career.

It includes things like creating content, building relationships with influential people in your niche, strengthening relationships with your clients to foster repeat business and referrals, supervising and training your team, and improving your systems and workflows.

Third on the list, but no less important, is to work on yourself. We’re talking about personal and professional development. The stuff that makes everything else work.

It means improving your legal knowledge and your writing, speaking, and interpersonal skills. It means getting better at communicating, negotiating, and leading and managing people. And keeping up with technology.

So, 3 things every day.

Think of these 3 areas as legs on a stool. You need all 3 or the stool won’t stand.

How should you allocate your time? One third each? Not practical. Some days, you have nothing but client work and no time to do anything else. Some days you have other priorities.

But if you’re a rule-of-thumb type of person, that rule should be to do something in each area every day.

Even if that means making one call on your lunch hour or reading a couple of pages before you go to sleep.

Keep your hand in all 3 areas and do your best to not let a day go by without all 3.

Create recurring tasks in your task manager or calendar or habit tracker. Make this a habit.

Don’t let your stool get out of balance.

How to get more referrals from your clients

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Filed Under: Law office management, Marketing legal services, Personal development
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