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.
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