Recently I had the opportunity to do an interview with Mike Vardy, editor of the Work Awesome website, where they share a lot of great information. You may have noticed that we added the WorkAwesome podcast feed to the sidebar a while back, as there are some excellent resources for all of you.

WorkAwesome is a resource for people who love what they do, and want to become awesome at it. It’s a blog for people who want to be awesome at work. It’s also a blog for people who want to be awesome at what they’re passionate about. Whether it’s the music you’re making in your home studio or the freelance business you’ve always wanted to start, or even (of course) your job, we’ve got it.  We’re going to teach our readers about starting things, completing things and trying new things – and be “awesomely productive” when doing so.

In our conversation we talked about how I got into the “biz” of Productivity, recent projects and activities, and more. You can listen at the WorkAwesome site [link]. It’s pretty exciting, I also recommend you check out the podcast of Michael Sliwinski‘s (of Nozbe fame) interview.

[cross-posted at the In Context Blog]

My friend and colleague David Seah has put up a post about the updates to his Concrete Goals Tracker forms. I have found these forms to be incredibly useful and motivational. Check them out here: Concrete Goal Tracker Update.

What is this form all about? Seah describes it on the Concrete Goals Tracker Homepage:

Make Tangible Progress by Focusing on Concrete Results

The Concrete Goals Tracker (or CGT) is a stand-alone weekly focusing aid. Your goal is to amass as many points as you can by framing what you’re doing into a number of pre-defined activities that earn points. The list of activities is carefully structured to support “creating real results over time” by awarding the small support activities frequently for a sense of daily progress. Major activities that result either in attention or revenue are awarded with many more points, to create the carrot-on-a-stick draw.

[...]The idea is to reinforce the mindset needed to recognize what was a productive task and what was not; the list + tracker design helps trigger creativity because people tend to grub for as many points as they can wheedle. Really, in this context, it’s OK!

[...]

It’s a useful form for people who are trying to develop a new business and feel that they are maintaining progress; use the “standard” form, which is designed for people who become more successful the more they can show what they’ve made. The form recognizes a hierarchy of need, from maintaining connections with people to showing people what you’re doing. Music students and solo small business owners like this form for its focus. You can use the “blank” forms to structure your own lists.

This December we are discussing getting organized for the coming year, setting some goals and tracking the things that we accomplished in 2010. One of our readers, Alvina Lopez, has sent a nice note describing how she has changed her To-Do system for increased organization and success:

I am, by habit, a very disorganized person. I have a bad reputation among my friends and family for losing my things, running late for events, and forgetting important deadlines. But, I make up for my administrative faults with my great creativity. Unfortunately, when I tried to use my creativity to help me work full time as a writer, I realized that I had to take a serious look at my organizational methods if I wanted to figure out how to be successful.

I used to manage my tasks with one to-do list. Needless to say, it was a very long to-do list, because I put everything on it that needed to get done: errands, writing projects, dentist appointments; you name it, it was on there. Many of you organizational experts are probably shaking your head at how silly and naïve it was of me to try to organize myself that way. I mean, sure, I meant well. I tried to have a to-do list each day, but that list just ended up growing and growing as I copied over things from the day before.

So what I did is this: I started over. I took a day to brainstorm all of my goals. I brainstormed life goals, career goals, relationship goals, and so on. As I brainstormed them, I created categories and a timeline. The important thing for me was creating those categories and goals and putting them into a master document that I could refer to easily. Once I had these categories listed, figuring out my to-do lists was relatively easy, because I simply had to create lists that fell into each category and that supported each goal.

Not a Moleskine, but a mock-up for illustration

I did this by picking up a notebook, a nice Moleskine that I could keep with me. I sectioned it according to my categories, and then within each section I created subsections: daily to-dos, weekly to-dos. I stopped there because I felt as though my master document of goals could help me with long-term planning better than using paper to rewrite the same things for each month. Each night, I took a few minutes before I went to sleep to plan out the next day based on my goals, and I reviewed what I had accomplished.

So, then, every day I had a document to consult that would give me an idea as to what I needed to do in order to help me reach my goals. By making sure my to-do lists linked with my overall goals, I could remind myself that no matter what kind of work I had done, I had in some way made progress towards my overall goals.

A side effect of this system is that it greatly organized my schedule as well. Because I often work from home, having the book there and the various categories helped me manage my day. I could devote a few hours to one category, such as writing projects, and then once I had done one or two things from the list, I could move on to the administrative category, which would have me sending invoices to clients or bidding on future writing jobs.

Here are two more images of the mock-up.

This guest post is contributed by Alvina Lopez, who writes on the topics of accredited online schools.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez [at] gmail.com.

On Sunday this week a new supervisor started at the restaurant that I manage. She took over the basic supervision of the dining room and I got to spend some time in my office. I had not been able to do any real work in the office since May, and the desk and file cabinet showed the results of this neglect. I thought about posting a set of before-and-after photos of my workspace there, but it was a little too embarrassing…suffice it to say that my assistant manager and I had not been properly using that space at all.

The first thing that I did was to follow my own advice on how to organize your workspace, being very careful to only handle each item or piece of paper once (when possible, some things got shifted around a couple of times). There was a lot of stuff in there that I just did not need, most of it put there by who-knows-who! For a while there were 3 of us working out of that space, and all of us have different styles.

Since your workspace needs to be clean and orderly in order for you to be productive and successful I am looking forward to crossing some things off of my To-Do list this week.

Managing a restaurant is not easy, but it is fulfilling work. I have also learned a few lessons this summer that I think will be helpful to you in your own lives and work, especially if you are in a customer-service-oriented field. In the meantime, check out this thread on using GTD in a non-office setting: GTD in a retail environment . I definitely will be sharing some thoughts on this topic.

This is a guest post by Daryl Furuyama

Hi everyone. This post is not about dictating rules, but about how rules affect the enjoyment of our lives. I love how the posts here at WLC encourage us to examine ourselves. Hopefully this will stimulate some thoughts that you will be excited to share in the forum.

Rules Are Not Bad, They Are Part of Life

We are surrounded by rules, many of which help us. Rules are created to increase order, predictability, and reliability. Driving within the lines on the road helps everyone travel faster and safer. Being aware of the rules of any game enables you to create a strategy to reach your anticipated future.

Without rules, there is no way to tell what you can do or what you can expect. Rules help us concentrate, so we can get somewhere and make progress. Rules become problematic when we become concentrated in an area we do not like.

Sometimes rules hold us back. In order to increase predictability and reliability, rules sometimes make sure that you do not go anywhere. When we are unable to move to where we want to go, we become frustrated and stop enjoying the rules.

The Revolutionary Changes the Game, Not Abolish It

We often do not notice the rules that move us forward because we enjoy the game. However, we do notice the rules that hold us back because they cause friction in our lives. This friction causes us to desire rejecting all rules (especially in the name of freedom).

It is easy to be met with rules we do not like and give up on the game. We become disengaged from our own life and seek an escape. We may imagine being another person or even dream of a better life for ourselves. Dreaming is a wonderful thing, but are we pursuing our dreams or do we keep them off in the distance?

When met with rules we do not like, we look to creativity to turn them into rules we do like. A common rule in Monopoly is collecting a bonus when you land on free parking. It is not an “official” rule, but so many people use it because it makes the game more enjoyable. When we enjoy the game that is our life, we become more engaged and invested in ourselves.

Remember that rules just serve to concentrate you. Changing where you play may lead to increasing your enjoyment. Maybe you do not know what makes your life enjoyable, so you need to define rules. Maybe there are rules holding you back; is there a hidden path around them? Maybe there is no way around and you need to grind; can you create a meta-rule (like “see how many tasks can I finish in an hour”) to make it enjoyable?

Is there a rule that is preventing you from enjoying your life? Maybe some individuals in the forums can offer a creative solution. Or maybe you have already found a creative solution that made your life better and you want to share it with us in the forum.

This is a guest post by Daryl Furuyama, owner of WhiteHatBlackBox, which has been featured in Lifehacker.com for its free paper-based productivity tools.

Part of the idea behind this community is to share thoughts and ideas about the things we do. Today I would like to share my own personal thoughts on my Productivity (yes, with a capital P) practice. Not the nuts-and-bolts of how it works, that is what you can find at my own blog, rather I’d like to share and discuss the “why” and the “what’s in it for me”.

My own personal approach to achieving a productive workflow practice is not to find a way to force my nose down to the grindstone and crank, crank, crank my way through a never-ending list of tasks and obligations. Nor is it my desire to create a series of lists and sub-lists that I can scan for something to work on based upon the time of day and where I happen to be sitting, like some sort of choose your own adventure story.

Rather, my goal is to be able to manage and maintain a capture & filter system that allows me to quickly sort & identify the urgent and the important tasks that will require my full attention. “Cranking Widgets” is no longer the source of any personal satisfaction for me. Instead, I have chosen to lovingly hand-craft the widgets that I choose to make.

Is Everything Work?

In the introduction to his latest book, “Making It All Work“, David Allen writes:

“…any number of techniques and tools are available to help us get organized, manage our time, and be more efficient. What’s missing is a fundamental understanding of, and effective model for, the dynamics of the process as a whole – a way to make it all work.”

The first time that I read this I took it to mean that there is some sort of global system of processes that can me wrapped around every aspect of our lives, not only our work but our home and families as well. The more I thought about this idea, the more it bothered me. This concept, in my own personal opinion, goes against much of what the founders of this very forum wrangled with as we were creating it.

“What is the point?” we asked ourselves and each other, “Why are we doing this?” Part of the answer was “to create a community where people can share ideas”, and another part of the answer had to do with applying creativity to our work and to our lives so that both could be full and rewarding. To be able to avoid having our work encroach on our lives.

It’s About Being Done

As you can see in the tagline at the top of this page, we believe that Life is not about making everything into Work – to be managed and processed, instead we believe that we should be using our powers of creativity and innovation to enhance our life and our work. These two realms may have some overlap but they are distinctly different.

They require different approaches. As anyone who has ever tried to manage a spouse or child as if they were an employee can tell you, using the same approach to both is a difficult proposition.

Getting my Work done, as efficiently and effectively as possible, allows me to close the office door and go into the living room and start on my Life. I practice my productivity principles while I am working so that I can stop working. So that I can live my life without worrying about work.

It’s about being done.

Share your thoughts in the forum [link].

For the past 24 years, I have been volunteering with groups that produce computing standards.� We did good things, albeit slowly.� But that’s the nature of these groups – it’s hard to get good help; it’s even harder to get good free help!� Being a fan of productivity, I usually tried to impose some structure and process on the group in the hopes that it would get things done more predictably.� Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.�� There’s a saying in the computer industry – “Managing programmers is like herding cats”.� It’s more or less accurate.

My epiphany about this sort of work came in 1990, when I was charged with “project managing” a collection of these volunteer groups in a formal way.� Now, in retrospect, that was just insane.� These are creative, passionate people who were trying to do their best to develop “standards” for the computer industry.� Most of them are doing it in their free time. Many with no support from their employers at all!� How can you “manage” a group of people that not only doesn’t report to you, they don’t even get compensated or reviewed based upon their performance?

My answer?� You cannot.� The creative process isn’t one that can be managed. It doesn’t work on a schedule.� You can’t say “today you three people will write a symphony” and expect a result that is anything other than noise.� I expect this is true across the board when working with creative people.� It takes as long as it takes.� We will sell no wine before its time.� Just because a saying is trite doesn’t mean it isn’t true!

So, getting back to my epiphany, I realized that my job as a manager wasn’t to try to ‘herd the cats’ so much as to manage the expectations of the people who were waiting for the output (I will spare you extending the metaphor to what cats might output).� Sure, we had schedules; but those schedules were guidelines, not deadlines.� It is important that in work, and in life, we make room for the creative process.� So I would continually update MY managers with progress reports, and in each report change the targets.� Sometimes they got earlier, usually they got later.� I stopped pressuring the creative people to create on a schedule.� As a result, we delivered better, more mature, well thought out products.

So that’s my message for today.� Whether we are talking about your real job, or your real life, or something you do in your free time that is neither work nor life, don’t forget that if a task requires creativity, it almost never gets done “on time”.� The creative process is one that is impossible to predict.� If your boss tells you to write a paper and have it done in an hour, push back a little.� If you are the boss, don’t set unreasonable constraints on creative tasks.� Even if you are doing something as simple as making a bird house with your child, don’t just set aside an hour.� Do it until you are both happy you created something!� And along the way, revel in the knowledge that you are doing it until you get it right, not just until time ran out.

How do you make time for the creative process?� Let’s talk about it in the forums?

Lately being productive has been a struggle. Maybe it’s because my schedule is much more relaxed than usual during the the summer months, or perhaps it’s because of some added stress coming from various sources…or maybe I’m just being lazy . Whatever the cause, I’ve found that how productive I am over the course of the day really depends on how I start things out.

I’ve noticed that if I shrug off the first few items on my plan for the day, I’m much less like to do any of it. If I just discipline myself enough to do the first few items though, I usually come pretty close to getting everything done. After that initial moment of decision to be productive, motivation just doesn’t seem that hard to come by.

So right now, starting my day out right is the biggest challenge for me. It’s not that I don’t want to get things done…in fact, most of the “tasks” on my list are things I truly enjoy (working on my master’s thesis, for example). It just seems like it takes a lot of effort to actually sit down and get started.

A few things I’ve implemented to help myself get off the ground in the mornings:

� I’ve been trying to establish a very regular routine: Get up, eat breakfast, morning meditation, start my tasks.

� I try to make my first task small and easy to complete.

� I’ve been making my second task my biggest one for the day, usually working on my thesis. Once I’ve completed my goal for the day there, everything else seems a bit more manageable.

How do you make sure you get off to a productive start each day? Share your thoughts and experiences in the forums.

Photo Credit: FreeWine

One Saturday morning in March, I found myself in a hotel room in Birmingham, Alabama. I had an hour to kill while my wife was at a conference, so I brainstormed one-and-a-half dozen blog post ideas and did a lightning-quick but thorough mind-sweep to create a new projects list from scratch.

I did a lot in that one hour.

It made me consider two things: 1) the limited time I had forced me to work quickly. 2) The different environment forced me to focus.

I’d wager that my output was probably due to the time crunch since I had a lot to do and a short time to do it. I blocked out any distractions there were — especially once I turned off the remodeling show on HGTV. But the unique environment made me consider whether it was a factor in my increased productivity. It was a hotel room — a rather nice one at that, in a historic building in Birmingham — but it was free of familiar distraction I have at home or at work. The only things familiar were the clothes in my suitcase.

So I began to wonder how digital nomads to it — how do they stay productive when the environment constantly changes? I wonder if I’d be distracted by the ever-changing scenery, or if that constant change would force me to be disciplined. Chris Brogan likes working in coffee shops and bookstores. They inspire him.

If you’re a nomad, digital or not (in my case I was working entirely with paper, as I didn’t have a laptop), how do you do it? Does the ever-changing environment distract you? Or does it help you be productive? I’m curious to know.

I know it’s absurd, but I think there are times when a long list of todos might motivate more than a short one. Why? Well, if you have a long list, you have more motivation to get everything finished on that list. If it’s short, you might say, “Eh, that won’t take long. I’ll do it later.”

Maybe it’s a form of procrastination, since I don’t think it’ll work in the long run to let your list build up till you have enough stress to go and do it all at once.

On the other hand, as anecdotal evidence, I offer you the friends I had in high school who made their best grades during basketball season. I think the increased workload and limited amount of time to study forced them to be more disciplined.

So what’s the best way to do it? Have a short list with a few things to do, or a long list with a lot of things on it?

Of course, I think the ideal way to handle your list is to keep a short, effective list, with things appropriately delegated or deleted, plus high motivation and discipline to accomplish what needs to be done. Be conscious of your own energy level and tolerance for the right list length. I think it requires a bit of experimentation as only you can know what the right “workload” is for you.

If your list is too short, you’ll get bored. Or you’ll get lazy and not do anything. If it is too long, you’ll get discouraged and give up.

Just remember, if you have to put “shave” on your todo list, you’re probably taking it way too seriously.

So what do you think? Discuss amongst yourselves over in the forum.