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Our Motto:
If working 24 hours a day isn't enough, you have to work nights.
- James Moss, 1985, USNA
Our Challenge: TMI/TMO/TLT/TL$
Too Much Information / Too Many Options / Too Little Time / Too Little Money!
-
Steven W. Gilbert, Founding President, TLT Group
TLT Group - Nonprofit Org Founded 1998
5 comments:
Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow.
HP commissioned a study by the London Institute of Psychiatry to examine information overload with a particular emphasis on the impact of constantly receiving email while working. The conclusions, which have been blogged to death already but I'll replay it here, too, are that email reduces the workeres IQ by more than 10 point - or as the headlines have portrayed it in tabloid style,
IQ Dips More on Email than Pot (taken form Red Herring).
While HP seem to have kept the release of the actual study from the press (now why is that??) they have published the HP Guide to Avoiding Info-Mania
In your copious spare time, download the PDF from InfoMania Guide
A book I've found very useful: David Allen's *Getting Things Done.*
For e-mail, I've developed an elaborate filing system for e-mails that are not actionable but still may be useful for reference, plus a smaller filing system for those that are actionable. The three categories for actionable e-mails are "Urgent Action Items" "Action Items" and "Waiting For." Using this filing system, I keep clearing out my Inbox each time I check e-mail; and when I'm ready to work on the actionable e-mails, I start with "Urgent" and then work on "Action Items."
Also, I set my e-mail to place my own sent mail back in my Inbox, so that I can easily file e-mails from others with my own replies.
Guilt Pile and "Grey Fuzzy" strategy...
If something has been in our refrigreator at home so long that it has fuzzy grey things growing on it, then it's time to throw it out! I don't even need to smell or taste it.
Same idea could be useful to apply more frequently to our "guilt piles."
Do you have a growing "guilt pile"? A pile of stuff where we put the things that we REALLY need to read/do.. as soon as we get a little time...
And how often do we actually get to work on the things in this pile?
How often do we decide that whatever has been there so long can be discarded without further thought...
Maybe we should figure out how to discard things directly without using the intermediary - the guilt pile? Maybe we should feel more relaxed about throwing out the guilt pile!
An approach i'm using is something i learned when i was preparing to study abroad my junior year in college. A friend told me to lay everything out that I thought i needed for the semester on my bed, and then pack only half of that. The same is true for my work. Make a list of things I think I want to get done, and I'll probably only get to half of that. Somewhere in that process I hope to not necessarily lower my expectations for productivity, but more accurately assess how long it takes for me to do things.
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