Being a full time employee or colledge student it seems very hard to start creating a successful a start-up. But you don’t need to choose between your job or education, you do not need to burn bridges behind you.
You need to become more productive!
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
Peter F. Drucker
Steps I’ll share with you in my post helped me to become more productive and understand my goals. I was master of procrastination, I had «no free time» feeling and wasn’t able to do anything with those issues. Simple task list or calendar usage didn’t help me.
Now I’ve moved everything from my mind on paper based on Getting Things Done (by David Allen) metodology and finally started to do more things during a day.
Here is what I did:
Step 0. Clean your workplace!
Try to keep your work place clean because it helps to stay focused.
Step 1. Write down everything.
Every task that you haven’t finished and you keep in your head is a stress for you.
Write down everything you have in your brain on the paper. All small and big tasks.
Step 2. Review your list.
If you’re a busy person you should have more than 100 tasks to write down.
Some of them are really useless and take lots of you brain energy to store them and time to complete them. Review all taks list and line through your uselss tasks.
Step 3. Create projects.
Сombine the similar tasks into projects. Write the goals you want to achieve in every project and plan of work, based on tasks you’ve got and add other tasks you need to do to achieve your goal in this project.
All your tasks should be connected to projects and goals.
For example: if you had 150 tasks you may have 30-50 projects.
It took me 2 days to write down all my projects on paper.
Step 4. Write plan for the next week.
Now browse your projects and write down day by day plan for the next week by what are going to :
- execute
- delegate - control
It’s really hard to start but if you do it once you’ll see that some tasks are not important at all, some projects are useless, some people do not worth time to spen on them.
What’s next?
Write down all incoming tasks, ideas in one place and then when you’ll have free time for reviewing move them to projects.
You should have one inbox place where you’ll write all your incoming ideas and things to do.
Review/update your projects every week. That will help you to stay focused.
Tips with your mailbox
- Try to read not less then 1 hour. If you could check your mail twice a day that would be perfect.
- If answering on email will take less 2 min do that right now.
- Delete emails that you’ve answered and there is no need to do anything with them anymore
- Systemize your mailbox. Create folders-projects in your mailbox.
- Move answered emails to appropriate folder in your mailbox.
- Try to keep your «inbox» mail folder empty after you check it
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Do you want to share you productivity tips? I would be happy to read you productivity hack and your story.
Tools to use
- Remember the milk
- Paper A4 Copybook
Books to read
- The Personal Efficiency Program by Kerry Glesson
- Making It All Work by David Allen
David Allen is the author of Getting Things Done book. But I suggest to read his new book because it has updated version of Getting Things Done system. - The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris
don’t forget to check out Tim Ferris’s blog
Fun
“Billionaire” by Travie McCoy ft. Bruno Mars
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Photo by Joseph Morris. Used under Creative Commons License.
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