I used to be a major slob! I collected paperwork, piled it into big piles on my desk, in my drawers and if space ran out even on the floor. Usually I knew how to find what I needed pretty easily and fast, but at times it was a real ordeal to find that specific piece of paper. My family still knows me this way, and to be frank sometimes I still work in this fashion…old habits are hard to beat.

At work though, I have turned around completely. It started when I read Getting Things Done and got enthusiastic about the system. I quickly started with step one: Gather the stuff and put it in the inbox. Oh boy, the pile of stuff I compiled onto that tiny inbox…it squeaked under the immense pressure of tasks unfinished. And me too by the way.

The pile of stuff was overwhelming…but the room was tidy! And I liked that. Fast forward in time, and I have adopted many of the habits of GTD. I’m no star in keeping with the system, but the habit of keeping an empty inbox and of archiving instantly are two I cherish. They keep my desk clean (photos at the end of this post) and my work organized. Click to continue »

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my GTD system?

Blog performance
This week was a very successful week. The series on Mastering Productivity generated a tenfold of normal traffic on the day of publication and elevated levels in the following days. I’m grateful that quite a lot of those visitors decided to subscribe to the feed, either by RSS or by email. The numbers this week look great, with an average number of 319 subscribers, but the total mark has even broken the 400 mark on a single day.

Click to continue »

This sketchcast is a 3m15s video about the concept of Effectiveness and Efficiency. In the video I explain using a simple graphical representation the difference between the two and why I focusing on effectiveness needs to be done before focusing on efficiency.

If you want to read more about the subject, I suggest you head over to the cross-blog series on Mastering Productivity.

This article is part of a four-article series, all published today on different blogs. If you find this article useful, check out the other parts:
- Mastering Productivity - Money at Dumb Little Man
- Mastering Productivity - How to be more effective with your time at Zen Habits
- Mastering Productivity - Energy at LifeDev

Productivity is a subject I write about on a regular basis. Lately I have been getting some feedback that I have a different approach to the subject, as compared to other productivity blogs. This made me realize that I have never really explained what I mean when I write or talk about productivity. So it’s about time to get into the details of productivity, and I got so enthusiastic about the subject that it turned into a 4 part series. Best of all, you don’t have to wait for the other parts. They are available as you read this, just on other blogs. So surf to them to read on and while you’re there, do take a look around because they provide a lot of good content. Click to continue »

I have a love/hate relationship with contact information. I use it regularly and think it’s important, yet I can’t get it the way I want it. The solutions don’t satisfy me, but irritate me most of the time. This goes for both the system (I can’t seem to get categories to work for me) and the software (email addresses in Outlook…AARGGH).
I’ve used paper, MS Outlook, several freeware dedicated ’solutions’, Outlook again, my pda. Still I’m not satisfied. I hope your input and your experiences will help inspire me to get it up to speed.

So I’m curious to know what you, the readers, use as a system to store you contact information with. I’m interested both in what software you use and how you manage the contacts in there (categories, tags etc).

Thanks for leaving a suggestion!