Entries from February 2008 ↓
February 7th, 2008 — Getting results, Motivation
Why defining your life projects?
The answer is simple – clear project definition sets boundaries and helps streamlining goals setting, task management toward the goals, and resources allocation for the tasks.
Your Life Projects
Define your life projects you want to develop yourself and achieve results. Mine are customers, family, finances, professional development, soft skill development, blogging, and few more. Everything that falls beyond these categories (life projects) does not deserve your attention, energy, and time.
Life Projects Design
Imagine swimming lanes. They are your categories, the life projects you run, ehm.. you swim. Your goal is to get to the end of each swimming lane. To do so you must allocate resources – time to be on either lane, energy your invest while swimming. You perform different tasks while swimming – you breath, you use different styles and strokes to move forward toward the goal. Once resources are exhausted you move to another swimming lane, using different strokes, moving yourself to another goal. Lanes are easy to switch, you do not waste your resources for the switching.
Using swimming analogy the design can be summarized as follows:
- Lanes encompass course of action toward clear goals.
- Lanes are easy to switch – no resource loss is allowed.
- Resources are allocated to each lane.
- Each lane contains definite set of tasks.
Life Projects Implementation Using Outlook 2007
I use Outlook 2007 to manage my life projects. Here is my simple implementation. Fire up Outlook 2007. In the menu bar choose "Actions" -> "Categories" -> "All Categories…". Delete all default categories and create your own using “New” or “Rename” buttons on the right.
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Create Outlook 2007 folder and name it "Projects". Configure it to arrange items by Category. This is your life projects pipeline. Each action item in the folder is labeled with proper category. The action item can be an email, self post (Ctrl + Shift + S), or a blog post. Time will be proactively allocated to each category and each task will be prioritized according to the goals we set. You may want to refer to my post "Keep Your Inbox Clean , Stay Focused And Productive – My 4 Simple Rules" to improve your inbox management.
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Now you can clearly see your life projects, your swimming lanes. Use Up and Down arrows to easily switch between them. Use Left and Right arrows to expand and collapse each category.
In the upcoming posts I will be showing how to proactively allocate time, the main resource, to each category. My post Time Boxing Is The Biggest Secret For Achieving Results shows few examples of why allocating time proactively is productive technique.
February 5th, 2008 — Getting results
How do they get started when building a house? How do they get started when building a software?
They start with building a blueprint, the architecture.
Here is my take on high level architecture for personal achievement.
Life projects
Define your life projects you want to develop yourself and achieve results. Mine are customers, family, finances, professional development, soft skill development, blogging, and few more. Everything that falls beyond these categories (life projects) does not deserve your attention, energy, and time.
Goals
Each life project must have specific achievable goals. Customer X is highly satisfied, customer Y received all deliverables on time, get home at 5 o’clock 3 times a week, write 4 posts a week. Something that can be achieved and most important – measurable.
Time allocation
Allocate proactively time for each of your life projects. “If I only had time…” never works. Never! Make sure you have time for your life projects. Allocate it proactively daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. I only mastered daily, weekly, and monthly time allocation. Working now on yearly and life time allocation now.
Pipeline management
Streamline task pipeline management in each life project. Reduce friction to set a task, find it, and prioritize it. The most important is being goal oriented rather task oriented. Do your feel the difference? Doing a lot does not mean achieving a lot.
Prioritization
To be goal oriented one needs simple prioritization system. Prioritizing one goal over another, or prioritizing one task over another. Focus your energy on highest ROI.
“Architecture is the art of how to waste space.” - Philip Johnson
Life Architecture is the art of spending your life time - Alik Levin.
What do they do when the architecture is done?
They build the design that describes how to implement the architecture. That is exactly what I am going to describe in my next posts.
February 2nd, 2008 — Getting results, Time Management
Traffic jams can be productive too. No kidding.
This post does not encourage doing distracting activites during driving but offers suggestions to utilize traffic jams times.
Working online and liberation is the ultimate goal to hit for any blogger. Until then we are bound to drive our cars and getting stuck in horrible traffic jams. Here are few practices to make traffic jams more productive then just listening to radio and hearing even more useless news.
Work
I make phone calls to key colleagues. Sync on status and action items. I am constantly get surprised how helpful it is. People tend to assume rather ask specific questions and sync. Short phone call clarify misunderstandings and makes everyone on the same page.
I make phone calls to my manager too – surprisingly he gets stuck in traffic jams just like me :). Short updates on status with key customers seem to be helpful for him. He usually focuses me on what’s more important for him.
Same with reports – short daily sync phone calls clarify the picture and help focus on what’s important.
All done from my car with 1 Km/h speed.
Family
Me and my wife have an agreement to not call each other when at work, unless it is really urgent. That is why I answer my wife’s calls even when on the most important meeting with most important customer.
On other hand it is super nice to chat with my precious. Traffic jams to the rescue! “You gotta gotta gotta try a little tenderness!!”
Or “I just call to say I love you”.
Blogging
After I made all phone calls I am still in that traffic jam… Millions of thoughts run through my mind – they are all can be cool topic for blogging. How do I write it down while driving? I can’t. My friend, J.D. Meier, uses speech recognition devices. This is what I am going to try next.
Hey, look! Just arrived to my office!
"I’m the worst person to be stuck with in a traffic jam.” - Larry King
