Mind matters

If you’re like me, you are probably having difficulty remembering all your friends birthdays, and if you’re even more like me, you value the reaction of people whos birthday you remember. It’s a way for me to show them that I care by remembering days that hold importance to their lifes. But beware! Not all are happy to be reminded of the fact that they’re getting older!

For a while I solved this by creating a database and connecting it to a daily scheduler that every day went through the database and sent me an email of all the birthdays I wanted to keep track of that were upcoming the next week.

The only drawback was that it was hard to get a view of the coming birthdays, like if I wanted to view who had birthdays on a specifik week, or two weeks into the future.

Today I’ve solved it by putting all the people whos birtdays I want to track into my Outlook calendar. I’ve created reocurring day-events, with a year as the interval. I’ve also attatched an alarm to each event that goes off 2 days before the birthday, if I happen to miss it in my calendar. In the created day-event I also record what year the person was born, that way I know how old they’ll be too

Do you have any way of tracking your friends birthdays? If you do, I invite you to share it with me, so I can see if there’s even better ways of doing it!

Technorati Tags: Outlook, Birthdays

Another tip to increase your productivity around your computer, or to meet your need for order, is to create a file archive. I’ve done this by creating a folder called ‘File archive’ and in that I’ve created the following folders:

A-B-C-D
E-F-G-H
I-J-K-L
M-N-O-P
Q-R-S-T
U-V-W-Y
X-Å-Ä-Ö

In these folders I’ve created subfolders, when necessary, or just placed the files according to their filenames right in the folder. The flatter the structure, the better. I try to avoid to add a third layer if possible.

Apart from the obvious advantage of easily finding my files, I also make sure that all the files I work with are collected in one place, which makes taking backup of them a piece of cake! I don’t have to worry about taking backup of everything on my computer everytime, I just backup the information I cannot re-create easily.

This tip is “stolen” from Getting Things Done, as many of my other productivity tips

Technorati Tags: Getting Things Done, File archive

Okay, I’ve been leading different types of groups for a long time now, and there is one tip that I can share that increases productivity. It’s to go through all the engagements people have taken upon themselves to do during the meeting. This way you make sure everyone understands what they have agreed to do, and nothing slips through.

As the leader of the board for the aikido section of Linköpings budoklubb, I’ve introduced this system. I do this by doing a round at the end of the meeting where each people tell what todos they’ve accumulated. During the meeting I always write down who agreed to do what, so that I can check that all todos get noted by the ones that are supposed to do them.

But only going through them is not enough I’ve discovered. I also need to maintain a list of these todos. Today I do it by entering all the agreed todos on a webpage that all the members of the board can access. It’s entirely feasible that someone else does it, like the secretary. For the aikido section I enter the information in this format:

* [name] Agreed todo (startdate)

If the todo gets done, I add (startade — enddate) and move it to a Done Items list on the webpage.

The best thing about this is that all the todos that you have agreed to do something about are collected in a single place, and you also get a history of things that you have done. Which is excellent when the time comes to write your report, be it a monthly/weekly/yearly report or any other kind of report where you wish to tell about what you and your group have been doing.

As a bonus you also get a view of how much people have taken on themselves to do and can do workload balancing if necessary, or to remind someone about their todos.

Time to share some of the things I’ve implemented in my daily life to make it run more smoothly!

There’s this book by David Allen that’s called Getting Things Done, which introduces a system that takes care of reminding and storing all your todo and projects. It’s awesome, and I’ve only managed to implement some pieces of the system, since I’m pretty lazy

But here is a thing I’ve used for a couple of years now:

Create a @Waiting_For mailbox in your mail reader! Whenever you send an email to someone to which you want a reply, store a copy of that mail in this folder, that way you have a placeholder that will remind you that you’re waiting for a reply from someone. I store only project related things here, not private mail that is used only for connecting with others.

It works wonders for me! I go through the mailbox at irregular intervals and see what it is I’m still waiting for, and if sufficient time has elapsed, I send a reminder. It’s also a way to keep a placeholder for a project I’m currently doing, to remind me there are things to be done on it.

Currently my waiting-for contains 12 emails on such variety of projects as ‘DVD-burner to the dojo computer’, ‘Creating a link on the main page of the budo club for the party committe’ and ‘Having another person get ahold of a word document with Aikido’s beginners book’.

It took a couple of months before I realised how useful the mailbox was, and now I can’t live without it. I recommend to try it out, if you don’t have a similar system already, and report back how it works for you!

Technorati Tags: Getting Things Done, Productivity, Email

I’ve reached 0 messages in my mail inbox! WEEEHAAAA! :pom: :pom: :pom:

It has been an arduous task, but I’ve finally done it! I had to sacrifice some goats and paint some IKEA furniture pink, but the result was worth it! O heavens. Now I just have to make sure noone ever emails me and I’m free from email the rest of my life!