May 6th, 2008 | Productivity | 2 Comments
Five time management tips from Jennifer Koretsky.
- Take 15 minutes every single day to plan your schedule. A small investment in planning goes a long way towards reducing stress and overwhelm.
- Always keep a to-do list. Your to-do list is your friend. It helps you keep track of all those tasks that are so easily forgotten.
- Pay attention to your biorhythms. Work with your natural energy levels instead of trying to change them.
- Schedule down time and relaxation. Self-care is one of the first things to be sacrificed when things get busy.
- Don't give up when you get overwhelmed. It's normal to fall off track every now and then. Don't beat yourself up. Do recharge and resume steps 1-4 as soon as possible.
Source: Master the Art of Time Management
Nov 9th, 2007 | Productivity | No Comments
Skoach [a web-based time management software] wraps features like automated scheduling, phone-in task and appointment adding, SMS and email reminders, agenda building, and guided project planning into one centralized and intuitive system. Skoach can even be synchronized with popular business tools like Microsoft Outlook to integrate existing and shared schedules and tasks. Skoach has been tested by beta users, known as “Skoachers,” since spring of 2007.
Source: New Web-Based Time & Task Manager Skoach: Powerful Enough to Manage ADD, Office ADD, and Other Time-Related Obstacles to Success
Oct 17th, 2007 | Productivity | No Comments
Here’s another laundry list of suggestions for increasing productivity. Below are the first three suggestions from the list.
- Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.
- Daily goals. Without a clear focus, it’s too easy to succumb to distractions. Set targets for each day in advance. Decide what you’ll do; then do it.
- Worst first. To defeat procrastination learn to tackle your most unpleasant task first thing in the morning instead of delaying it until later in the day. This small victory will set the tone for a very productive day.
The complete list is here: 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity
And remember: YMMV and DNWFE
Oct 16th, 2007 | Lifestyle, Productivity | 1 Comment
I was quite excited to purchase a copy of Jennifer Koretsky’s Odd One Out. I have been reading her newsletter since 2005 and found that it was easy to read and it always offered useful ideas. So when I got the book I expected some deep, philosophical tome based on years of writing a newsletter. What I found instead was a deceptively simple book. Notice the word “deceptive.” Herein lies the genius of the book (and, I believe, the genius of her newsletters). It deals with very serious problems - such as the feeling of being overwhelmed and issues of time and structure - and it offers solutions using easy to understand language. And in case you missed an important point when reading the book, key phrases are printed in boldface type. That makes it is easy to go back and find something you read a few days earlier and, believe me, you will be going back to this book again and again.
Why do I like this book so much? Part of it is that the theme of the book - that you should learn how to work with your A.D.D. and not against it - resonates with my current situation in life. Jennifer’s suggestions - learn how to de-stress, take time to “recharge” your body, make sleep a priority, do not judge yourself using unrealistic criteria - make sense to me because I’ve been struggling for several years and I’m ready to make important changes. Further, Jennifer’s book corroborates what I had only recently discovered on my own, namely that my A.D.D. will not go away, that it may resurface at inconvenient times and there is nothing I can do about that. That’s just the A.D.D. life.
So if you too have hit the wall with your A.D.D. and are ready to make some changes then take a look at this book. It may turn out to be exactly what you need to finally take control of your A.D.D.
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Oct 10th, 2007 | Productivity | No Comments
Here’s some scientific evidence to back up the claim that A.D.D.ers concentrate better with a bit of noise.
See: White Noise Helps with Concentration
And here’s some additional information on this finding.
The noise is believed to affect the child’s dopamine levels, which affect concentration. In children with ADHD, dopamine levels are low, and the background noise helps raise them. The study’s authors believe this information will help teachers create better learning environments for children with ADHD.
Source: White Noise Helps Kids with ADHD
I had noted this phenomenon in one of my earlier posts: A.D.D. & Music
Oct 5th, 2007 | Productivity | No Comments
The first planner that I used was Lotus Organizer® for Windows 3.1. It used an intuitive “tabbed” metaphor (pretty innovative for its time) and could produce wonderful paper calendars and phone directories and contact histories and more. In fact, I spent so much time putting in data and then printing it out that, well, I never actually got anything done other than using the Organizer. So, despite it’s name I never became organized.
In graduate school I went on to use a Dayrunner®. I spent a lot of time arranging the contents and filling out the different sections. And I had all of the Dayrunner “accessories”: fancy pads, rulers, special note paper, etc. I used it for about three months.
Next came the Palm Pilot®. It was a pretty expensive toy at the time (about $500). It had a cradle for synchronizing the contents with its companion desktop software and you could purchase useful utilities, like Quicken for Palm, for keeping track of expenses. I loved it! And I still have it! It sits in a place of honor. It’s in a drawer where I dump old power transformers, a.k.a., wall warts.
Well, after the Palm Pilot there had to be at least several dozen types of planners from electronic hand held to desktop software to paper based. And then one day she walked into my life: the Moleskine® Large Weekly Planner, a.k.a., “[T]he Legendary Notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, and Chatwin.” When we first met I softly touched her dark cover. Then I slowly removed the elastic band that held her shut, revealing the planner of my dreams: the week on the left side and a blank ruled page on the right.
I’ve been using this planner pretty consistently for over one year. Since I must write everything down, it forces me to slow down and think things through. I can see what’s coming up in the next couple of days and can record random notes - to-do items, etc. - on the opposite page.
I have recently enhanced the usefulness of the planner by using the following notation for each entry. As the author notes, this notation - he calls it “metadata” - is based on the “dash.” The dash represents something that needs to be done. Each variation of the dash denotes what exactly has been done, or rescheduled or delegated. (See below.)
Metadata for your Notes (Original image & description of concept can be found here)
Below is a snippet of my planner with the notation. As an A.D.D.er I find the visual indicators to be quite helpful. I do not have to write down whether something has been rescheduled because a dash with a circle around it tells me that in a split second. The dash notation says succinctly what would take a sentence or two to record.
If you would like to incorporate the “dash” notation in your daily planner, use this link - Metadata Word Doc - to download a printable MS Word version of the dash notation.
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Sep 24th, 2007 | Money, Productivity | 2 Comments
Vacation Panic: a feeling that you have forgotten something very important but you can’t remember what that “something” is. This feeling becomes more intense - and paralyzing - the closer you come to the beginning of your vacation period. It may disappear during the vacation and it definitely reappears the day you return home.
Vacation Panic Warning Signs: Vacation Panic appears in two distinct phases.
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Sep 18th, 2007 | Productivity | No Comments
THE FOLLOWING IS AN UNPAID, UNSOLICITED PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
DO NOT ADJUST YOUR DIAL! STAY TUNED FOR IMPORTANT INFORMATION!
David Allen, a productivity expert, will have a regular column on The Huffington Post. Allen writes,
What I do is based on a radically common sense notion that with a complete and current inventory of all your commitments, organized and reviewed in a systematic way, you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment.
You might want to keep tabs on his column postings - Getting Things Done and his company website David Allen, Getting Things Done and GTD.
Exploring his company site you’ll find some A.D.D. friendly tips and ideas. Some of these tips seem downright ridiculous and it even says so (see Batteries - Rubber band the charged ones and also Stapler - Get one you can bang.) but then there are free articles like “Are You Micro-Managing Your Mind?” and two that I highly recommend - especially since they are A.D.D.-friendly visuals - are Workflow Diagram and, the profoundly named Workflow Diagram - Advanced. You can get the entire bundle of free articles - if you don’t mind giving out your contact information - at this link.
**** END OF UNPAID, UNSOLICITED PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT ****
WE NOW RESUME OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BROADCAST
Sep 11th, 2007 | Productivity | 5 Comments
I thought I had it all together. I put up a new blog that focuses on cooking and for one of the posts I wanted to have pictures (See: Chicken Francese.) In the past, cooking would be a three hour process, two hours of which were dedicated to cleanup. It usually went like this.
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