Personal effectiveness

I was thinking about time management, personal effectiveness etc and how we figure out ways to keep up. I am not claiming to be an expert, but wanted to share few things that worked for me. Would like to know any better tips and techniques that have worked for others.

I think at this stage, as professionals, we are expected to take care of our responsibilities, we can’t have (mostly don’t want to also) someone to followup and not supposed to make up excuses for missing something that we were supposed to do.  In short, it is assumed that we are effective in what we do.

There are a lot of advice out there such as Get Things Done (GTD) etc. I have tried many things – outlook tasks, followup with red/green/yellow/orange flags, to do lists in notepad, excel, notes (on paper or otherwise) etc etc. I think the key is to find a routine that works in which we can fairly stay on top.

Some of what worked for me –

1. Use a Daily planner / diary:- I don’t do hourly planning for a day, which is too cumbersome. But most of the days I put down my tasks at the beginning of the day. Crossing off the task completed at end of day is a good feeling..
1. Start your work day the night before for better productivity. Write down at EOD what you need to do tomorrow. By morning you may get late, and by the time you get to office and go through you mails, you will not even get time to plan for the day and directly plunge in to something that is urgent and the day goes by.
2. Extending above – plan for the week on the Sunday – that gives you a head start by Monday morning. Day planners has a page for the weekend – put important things to do for the week there.
3. If I need to followup on something on a later date (like something is supposed to be completed on say 18^th December, go put an entry for 18^th to make sure I followup).
4. Nowadays, I try to identify most important tasks for the day – just so that if I manage to complete those, then I am good for the day.
2. Important Not Urgent vs Not Important Urgent – This tip from 7 habits of highly effective people is worthwhile. To earn our salary, we keep ourselves busy – but some of the tasks could be not important enough that we do it. But something that is important, but nobody is screaming right now to complete it (long term) needs to get our attention and time. My way of thinking is, if we don’t do those long term action items (such as learn the basics of a technology we are working on, put a knowledge management process for the team, or adopt a testing automation tool), something is bound to break probably weeks or months down the line.
1. This needs long term action item lists. As of now, I keep them in Outlook Drafts – just because Outlook is something that is always open.
2. Being too busy :- in spite of all of this, if we remain too busy for too long, that shows something is wrong – planning mistake, not delegating etc. One of the advice I had received was that it is okay to take time for thinking and we are valuable because we think.
3. Knowing right priorities to spend time :- I think we need to know largely the tasks groups / priorities in which we should be spending time. Like 70% coding, 20% communication and 10% learning for a developer (just random to show an example) or 33% project/requirements/design, 33% operations/quality/KM and 33% people development for a PM or 40% incident management, 40% problem management and 20% automation for a support analyst etc.
4. Managing email – for us, most action items come through email. I have seen people with so many mails open at a time, with hundreds of unread emails, missing to respond on things that were important etc. For me, a clean mailbox gives peace of mind and sense of control.
1. I generally try to follow Inbox Zero. Process the email completely – open every mail, respond to those that need quick responses that can be done in a minute, keep notes on something that needs followup or action later, delegate what is needed, delete the rest. Do this 2-3 times a day. One more reference – http://www.slideshare.net/merlinmann/inbox-zero-actionbased-email.
2. Put rules to move things such as alerts, program logs, mails to DLs etc. Check that in whatever frequency it requires. I have seen people with cluttered mailboxes, not differentiating mails addressed to them directly and the mails to the DLs they are part of, with many unread in between.
3. Also, it doesn’t mean checking mail as soon as it arrives and keep interrupting the task we do. I have switched off email notification popups, taskbar icons on new mail, sound etc. But still need to reduce the impulse of checking mail often.
4. Organize the messages by conversations. Other tip that works with latest Outlook versions is to “Cleanup folder” – it cleans up conversations, keeping the latest in the thread. Especially checking mail after a period, first cleanup conversations, pickup the latest thread and go through – reduces mail volume as well as time to go through.