Have some of you trained yourselves to be substantially more strategic, or goal-achieving, than you started out?
At my organization, the leaders regularly (every 3-12 months) get together and say “what have we been doing? Is it the most useful thing? If not (as has always been the case when we’ve done this) why not? how can we do better”. We always find ourselves having made substantial errors, and over our 2+ years have found that our activities are slowly getting more focused on what matters—although still much less than we’d like.
Personally, the standard goal-setting / time-management techniques don’t work great for me, but they are better than nothing. At least yearly, I explicitly review my life goals and annual sub-goals, which has some effectiveness. I keep them printed out on my laptop, which has had no effect. I have been experimenting lately with tracking time spent on each project (the Pomodoro Technique), which has been going quite well—it is harder to deny that you aren’t working on the right thing when the timer is staring you in the face saying “I am off because you are not working on one of your projects, you must work on one of your projects to turn me on”. I am training myself to intuit that if the timer isn’t on (like now), I’m not really working.
I am starting to feel the potential for good side-effects, like if the timer is not on, why do low-value work-ish type work rather than relax & have fun & re-generate energy to do high-value work?
Anyway, your question basically embraces all of time-management, GTD, and motivation, so it’s a huge topic, with many techniques out there and many books written on it. Hard to answer briefly. But I agree it is a crucial skill set for rationalists (how to identify and work effectively towards your goals), and well worth putting a lot of time and study into. I would love to participate in such a training group.
Some book recommendations: “Eat That Frog!”, “Getting Things Done” (flawed in many ways, but with enough useful info to be worth reading), “The Four-Hour Workweek” (large parts are irrelevant, yet a few, like those on work efficiency, are outstanding.
Thanks for mentioning “Eat That Frog”. I’m skimming through a PDF version and so far it seems to be an excellent book. I’m ordering a paperback from Amazon.
It has little to contribute about what to work on when and how to make that happen. I’m somewhat ADHD, so my problems are filtering my mass of ideas, and focusing on the ones that are most important, not most shiny. Tracking all my to-dos just results in my having lots of long lists of things I will never do. GTD has a teeny bit of this with their 50,000 foot through 10,000 foot review, but it mostly ignores the question of “how do I decide what to do, what to defer, and what do dump?”, and to me that’s the crux.
Contrast with something like “Eat That Frog!” which is about repeating again and again the simple message that if you focus your time working on the most useful task for your most important project, you will be much more productive. (Plus various heuristics for identifying such projects, such tasks, and building up the habit). It’s a very simple message, yet following it, for me, yields much greater productivity returns than GTD.
I agree with all of this.
At my organization, the leaders regularly (every 3-12 months) get together and say “what have we been doing? Is it the most useful thing? If not (as has always been the case when we’ve done this) why not? how can we do better”. We always find ourselves having made substantial errors, and over our 2+ years have found that our activities are slowly getting more focused on what matters—although still much less than we’d like.
Personally, the standard goal-setting / time-management techniques don’t work great for me, but they are better than nothing. At least yearly, I explicitly review my life goals and annual sub-goals, which has some effectiveness. I keep them printed out on my laptop, which has had no effect. I have been experimenting lately with tracking time spent on each project (the Pomodoro Technique), which has been going quite well—it is harder to deny that you aren’t working on the right thing when the timer is staring you in the face saying “I am off because you are not working on one of your projects, you must work on one of your projects to turn me on”. I am training myself to intuit that if the timer isn’t on (like now), I’m not really working.
I am starting to feel the potential for good side-effects, like if the timer is not on, why do low-value work-ish type work rather than relax & have fun & re-generate energy to do high-value work?
Anyway, your question basically embraces all of time-management, GTD, and motivation, so it’s a huge topic, with many techniques out there and many books written on it. Hard to answer briefly. But I agree it is a crucial skill set for rationalists (how to identify and work effectively towards your goals), and well worth putting a lot of time and study into. I would love to participate in such a training group.
Some book recommendations: “Eat That Frog!”, “Getting Things Done” (flawed in many ways, but with enough useful info to be worth reading), “The Four-Hour Workweek” (large parts are irrelevant, yet a few, like those on work efficiency, are outstanding.
Thanks for mentioning “Eat That Frog”. I’m skimming through a PDF version and so far it seems to be an excellent book. I’m ordering a paperback from Amazon.
http://www.mymmu.net/ebook/Brian_tracy/Brian_Tracy_Eat_That_Frog.pdf
I was going to ask what your biggest complaints with Getting Things Done were, but then I saw that you have a “gtd” tag on your blog.
It has little to contribute about what to work on when and how to make that happen. I’m somewhat ADHD, so my problems are filtering my mass of ideas, and focusing on the ones that are most important, not most shiny. Tracking all my to-dos just results in my having lots of long lists of things I will never do. GTD has a teeny bit of this with their 50,000 foot through 10,000 foot review, but it mostly ignores the question of “how do I decide what to do, what to defer, and what do dump?”, and to me that’s the crux.
Contrast with something like “Eat That Frog!” which is about repeating again and again the simple message that if you focus your time working on the most useful task for your most important project, you will be much more productive. (Plus various heuristics for identifying such projects, such tasks, and building up the habit). It’s a very simple message, yet following it, for me, yields much greater productivity returns than GTD.