Hi everyone! My name is Stuart Prestedge and I am the joint CEO of Softalk. This is my first blog entry so forgive me if I go on J.
Up until recently I’ve been so busy that I’ve not had time to write any of the blog entries that I’ve had in mind but I hope that that will change in the future. Part of the reason for this change is down to a book I have almost finished reading by David Allen called Getting Things Done.
Now I, like most of you I’m sure, am a very busy person – too much to do and not enough time to do it – and, to be honest, I like it that way. It certainly beats twiddling my thumbs. The trouble with being so busy is that it is not always easy to keep your priorities straight – and some things, inevitably, get forgotten about altogether (until it is too late at least). David’s book (GTD) has, I hope, helped me to start changing that. And whatsmore, I have what I believe to be (almost) the perfect tool to put David’s suggested methodology into practice – OfficeTalk.
GTD suggests a five stage process for organizing your life (and this may be just your professional life or your whole life). These stages are collect, process, organize, review and do. I won’t go into too much detail – for that I recommend you shell out the $15 or so and read it youself (I actually live in the UK and accidentally bought from the US Amazon site so had to wait 2 weeks for it to arrive. I couldn’t wait that long so went to the local bookstore and bought another copy – there are plently of people in my company who’ll want to read the other one when it comes).
Anyway, at Softalk, we eat our own dog food so to speak and we rely on OfficeTalk for everthing, but, until reading GTD, I would say even my use of OfficeTalk was not optimal. If you are anything like me, your email inbox is full of messages which you are not quite sure how to reply to or how to handle generally and your task list is incomplete and full of big and little tasks. The big ones - you are not sure where to start and the little ones? Well, they’ll get done if I can find a couple of minutes when there’s nothing more important to do. As a consequence to this situation, I was constantly scanning up and down my emails to find urgent, important or easy messages to tackle (not necessarily in that order I am afraid to admit).
As a person who prides himself on efficiency, I realised that this is a wasteful exercise as I was constantly reevaluating the same emails again and again and as the list grows, items got missed. Additionally, because my task list was incomplete, I had always got things on my mind (big and small), which were always there, making me not quite that 100% efficient person I aspire to be.
Reading GTD, it dawned on me that OfficeTalk is the perfect tool for implementing the five stage process and following the flow diagram David describes for processing and organizing my “stuff”. I realised that my inbox should not be used to store packets of work that I have to do or think about or investigate or delegate but it is perfect for collecting my stuff.
Anyone can dump stuff into my inbox (even spammers get the odd item in there) so why can’t I? So now I use my inbox to collect all my stuff. I email myself anything, big or small, that I need to do, think about, delegate or even dream about doing one day (like skydiving, or integrating mind mapping into OfficeTalk). But the key is that it doesn’t stay there! This, I think is very important! If it did stay there, it would all just get lost again in all the other stuff. This is where the processing and organizing stages come in – and where OfficeTalk comes into its own.
In GTD after collecting all your stuff, and as your stuff is continually collected, it must be processed (which basically means making a few simple decisions about it) and organized (which means putting it into the appropriate place).
The first thing to decide is is the item actionable? If not, it is either trash/rubbish (depending on which side of the pond you live), reference or possibly actionable in the future. I have setup three folders in OfficeTalk to represent these called (with great imagination) _BIN, _REFERENCE and _INCUBATOR. Now I do already have a folder and public folder structure within OfficeTalk, so I will probably file reference material in this folder structure where appropriate, but I have also started using the general _REFERENCE folder for items which do not fit neatly into this existing structure. I plan to just use the OfficeTalk searching and filtering functionality to find items in here just as I currently do in folders with thousands of items in already. This is a “work in progress” so watch this space about any refinements in this and other areas.
Once you have determined this, you have a few choices to make. The first is:- will this action complete the item in question or will there be more to do afterwards (this of course assumes that you have at least some idea of the final outcome of the item)? If the next action will not complete the item then this is considered to be a project. And, low and behold, I can make a project in OfficeTalk, put the next action as a task in the project and assign it to myself. For good measure, I also link the project to the original email, in case I want to jump from one to the other later on.
As OfficeTalk product manager I have also taken the liberty of proposing a new feature of creating a project from an email for discussion at the next product planning meeting (sneaky). After creating the project, I move collected stuff (email) either into my new _PROCESSED mail folder or into my existing folder structure, whichever I feel appropriate. And that’s that one organized and out of my inbox.
If the next action for an item is the only action for that item then the next decision to make is whether it is something I should do and if so is it time specific (i.e. on a certain day or at a specific date/time) or just something to do as soon as possible. If it is something for someone else to do, I have a choice to make about whether I care in any way if the person who should do it actually does do it. If I do care then I actually assign myself a task from the email itself using the handy Assign Task… context menu item and then from my task list assign the task to the appropriate person and move the task into my new _WAITING FOR folder.
If it is something for me and it is to be completed as soon as possible then, again, I simply assign myself the relevant task and move the email into the _PROCESSED folder. If it is a time specific task then currently I simply put an item into my diary and link it to the email before moving it to the _PROCESSED folder. I am toying with the idea of always assigning myself a task from the email and then scheduling that task. Again, watch this space.
Procesing and organizing – easy! Review? Now that’s the thing that I think is key to the whole shooting match. David recommends reviewing your task lists, project lists and incubator as appropriate but says once a week is a good starting point. Personally, it’s early days for me and I’m keeping a close eye on these lists at the moment, but hope to move over to reviewing once a week when I am sure I know what I’m doing.
“Trust your system” (or words to that effect) are what David says – which is another way of saying collect and organize everything and review regularly and at any point in time you can do what you think is the highest priority thing at that time, safe in the knowledge that there is nothing more important you should be doing.
Now, I’ve gone on quite a bit and it’s late (busy day tomorrow surprisingly) and I’m sure I could go on a load more about other great stuff like using OfficeTalk categories to help determine which task you should choose to do at any time but I think that’s enough for now. Except to say I welcome any comments you might have on how you use OfficeTalk (whether or not you’ve read GTD) to become more effective and achieve the elusive goal of stress free productivity.
If you'd like to find out more about GTD, why not check out David's blog (which I've just noticed he's "halting" ).
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