Thought I would share a few tips with everyone that might help you to wrap up your digital world for 2018 and get prepared for 2019.
Hello Control Your Day Crew!
First off I am sorry it has been so long since I updated my blog, I have been busy with a few big projects. A number of you have asked if I am going to publish a new version of Control Your Day, I do have some great new ideas to share, I just have to get through a couple other projects and then I can work on CYD Version 2.0. Please drop me a line with any ideas or suggestions you have, if I include them in the next version I will be sure to give you credit and send you a free copy of the book.
I came across a great productivity questionnaire that you should definitely complete. Once done, the site will provide an analysis of your time management skills. You answer a series of questions, it only takes a few minutes, and they give you a page of feedback with your results and suggestions on how to improve.
https://www.activia.co.uk/time-management-test
I thought they nailed it with the following line about me.
Your answers indicate a highly significant pattern of good time management, with a little easily distracted, behavior.
Give it a shot.
Jim McCullen
www.controlyourday.net
This blog post is a bit out of the norm for me but I thought it would be great to share these ideas with my audience. At the beginning of each year I go through all of my monthly expenses and check to see if there is any way I can reduce the cash that is flying out of my wallet. My intention is not to reduce the quality of the services, just reduce the costs. The link to the Samsung product is an affiliate link, the other links are just direct to the site.
Finally I am not an expert in any of these areas, I have no official training or certifications, I am just sharing with you my experiences. Please obtain professional advise if needed before making any decisions or changes. If you have suggestions to add, please comment on the post and feel free to share it with others on your social networks.
Jim McCullen
www.controlyourday.net
100 Life Hacks You Need To Read To Start Your 2016 Right
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/100-life-hacks-you-need-t_b_8939902.html
GTD is an organizational system. It doesn’t put rules around how you actually do your work. Instead, it focuses on how you capture the work you need to do, organize it, and choose what needs your attention. At its core, GTD stands on five “pillars,” or steps to getting and staying organized:
Learn more about the basics of David Allen’s Getting Things Done from this Lifehacker artice on GTD.
Jim McCullen / controlyouday.net
The new year is a great time for a fresh start. Give thought to the systems and processes you apply to get things done at work and home. Here are 5 things you should stop doing to make 2016 a more successful and productive year.
If you are a Microsoft Outlook user, stop by ControlYourDay.net to check out a better way to manage email and tasks in Outlook using the best practices of Getting Things Done (David Allen).
Happy New Year !
Jim McCullen
Best selling author S.J. Scott included my book Control Your Day in his list of top GTD productivity books. Fantastic to see my name up there with some of the top books on the subject.
Stop by his site to check out the complete list and to check out his content on forming great habits. He has some great free content on his site including a free audio book and ebook.
I wrote this as a guest post for Joy Healey over at www.joyhealey.com. Joy blogs about internet marketing, blogging, ebooks and other topics, she also posts reviews on books of interest.
Take Back Control of Your Inbox
What does your email inbox look like today? When I say inbox I am really talking about all of your collection buckets. A collection bucket is any place or device or software that you use to keep track of all of the things you need to get done: like projects, tasks, errands, bills, etc.
You might have a box on your desk at work, or maybe just a section of your desk where you pile papers you need to get back to. What about at home? Do you have a place where you keep bills to be paid, receipts to be filed, things you need to do for your kids, pets or other family members? Do you have multiple email accounts? How do you keep it all organized?
In this article, my goal is to share some proven techniques with you that will help you reduce your stress levels and the time you spend managing your systems.
The concepts I am going to cover are all based on the bestselling book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. David is a productivity guru, if you have not read or heard about his book you should check the link above, after you are finished reading, and pick up a copy.
Collection Buckets
You need to develop a trusted system and reduce the number of collection buckets you have. If you are a paper person, it is fine to have a collection box for work and for home, but make sure everything gets into that box and that you work through each box at least once a week (Weekly Review). The Weekly review is critical to the success of your system, if you don’t perform this step, then your collection box will quickly get out of control and out of date.
A few years back, I developed a system (Control Your Day) that uses Microsoft Outlook and the concepts of Getting Things Done to allow you to take back control of your Email Inbox. You can get more information about how to set up the system at ControlYourDay.net.
Thanks to spam, and to the fact that we are leading multi-faceted lives these days, most people have a number of email addresses they use for different purposes.
In my case I have an email address for each book I publish, a personal address, an email list address and a number of others all on Gmail. Instead of checking each mailbox individually, I set up the auto-forward feature for each account and auto-forward all of my email addresses to my primary personal address.
My personal address is set up in Microsoft Outlook so that I can manage all of my messages in Outlook. I can still see who sent me the original message and I can reply from any of the email addresses I have setup. You can see I have multiple collection points but they all funnel into one system, one final collection box that I can then manage.
Next Actions
This is another “Getting Things Done” concept from David Allen. I have a great story that clearly highlights the value of setting next actions.
Last summer, one of my drain pipes broke on my garage. Every night when I came home from work, I would see that broken drain pipe and think to myself “I need to fix that” which created a bit of stress for me. On the weekend I would be out running errands and I would remember that I needed to fix the drain pipe but then I would realize I didn’t know what parts I needed to complete the job.
This is where Next Actions come into play. What was my first Next Action for this project? I needed to figure out the parts that I needed for the job. I took a few minutes and measured everything out and wrote down a list of parts. That completed my first deliverable for this project, a bit of relief.
My next action was to get that list on to my errands list. During my next visit to the home improvement store, I was able to pick up all of the parts that I needed.
My next action was to block out some time to get the project done. The weekend came and I had all of the parts and an action plan. I was able to fix the drain and get onto another project.
You can apply these same concepts to your email. When you read an email you may not have time to work on it immediately. Can you set a next action and put that information in a comments field or at the top of the message?
This way when you come back to that message you don’t have to read through it again to figure out what the next action is; you already have that written down.
Take that one step further and define a context for your next action.
Context Lists
In my drain pipe example, I talked about my errands list. This is an example of a Context List.
How many times have you gone to a store, walked around with a thought in the back of your head that you needed something but you couldn’t remember what it was? Then you get back home, try to turn on your lamp and realize you needed light bulbs. You can build context lists for errands, phone calls, things to do when you are at the office, at home, etc. Then you can use these lists to work productively within that context.
If your collection boxes (in-boxes) are out of control, they are creating stress for you, causing you to miss deadlines or fail to deliver on commitments you’ve made. If you can take back control, you will put yourself in a position of power and take just a little bit of stress out of your life.
If you think these concepts would help you take back control, pick up a copy of “Getting Things Done“.
If you are a Microsoft Outlook user, then you should add “Control Your Day” to your reading list.
Please add your questions, thoughts and comments below, and you can reach Jim at [email protected]
I came across a great post today by Martin Webster. This is a great post to print out and post on your wall right next to your monitor. I need great reminders like this to reset myself every once in a while, especially when my workload gets overloaded.
Latest Gmail phishing scam. A hacker that knows your email address and cell phone # goes to Gmail and requests an SMS password reset. They then send you an email from an address that looks like it is coming from Google or a text and say your account is at risk, they just sent you a code, please reply back with that code so we can protect your account. The hacker now has the code and can login to your email account. They can then take it over or worse add themselves as an auto-foward and watch everything you do. Here is a link to an article with more details on this scam.