Productivity | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

GTD Tip: Jott Easy Notes to Self

In The Four-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss advocates radical outsourcing of your life, going so far as to have a personal assistant in Bangalore handle all those nagging details. Whether you go that far or not, one thing all personal productivity and life enhancement gurus say is you need to start by gathering those details into one place, so you can decide whether to handle them yourself or delegate.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen says you should have as few inboxes as possible, but as many as you need, so you can capture all your ideas and projects in a place where you can be sure to process them later.

I personally rely on email as my main inbox (you have to have a physical inbox, too), so I try to get everything possible into my email, where I can move it to appropriate Context, Project or Tickler folders. So when I get an idea if I’m out and about, and I don’t have my trusty PowerBook with me, I typically have pulled out the Blackberry and sent myself an email for later triage.

Thanks to a tip from Michael Hyatt, I now have a better way of doing this for some circumstances. He recently highlighted Jott.com, a free service that takes dictation on your voice messages and sends the transcription to your email inbox. I tried it, and even with my Minneso-o-o-o-otan accent, it does pretty well. Here are a few examples from this morning:

One of cardinal principles of David Allen’s getting things done system is that you need to get everything out of your head and into an external trusted system.

Perfect. Didn’t capitalize the book title, but what would you expect?

I used to use my BlackBerry and hunt and pack key by key to send myself an e-mail with whatever idea it was that had come into my head. Now, instead I can just call this 800 number and it recognizes my caller ID and sends me an e-mail.

One misspelling, but still not bad at all.

One problem I see with this, although it’s not a terrible problem, is that the limit on the length of the message seems to be a little short. So, what we have coming will sometimes be a series of smaller e-mails instead one longer post.

Gotta like that! Used “it’s” instead of “its.” Smart.

I’ve got this set up as a one-touch speed dial on my cell phone. It won’t work from my office phone because the caller ID is the same for every extension, and its the caller ID that tells Jott.com where to send the transcript. But then again, if I’m at the office I can just pull out the laptop and add the note.

Another bonus: if for some reason the transcript was horribly mangled, jott.com lets you listen to the audio file, too.

Technorati: GTD, Productivity, Getting Things Done, Jott.com, Lifehacks, Jott, David Allen

I Dare You!

…to read this book by William Danforth (1870-1956), founder of the Ralston Purina Company, and grandfather of former U.S. Sen. John Danforth. I’ve just had the delight of finishing it after my assistant, Laurie Mona, passed it along to me last week. She had found it quite interesting and challenging, so have I, and I think you will, too.

Mr. Danforth attributed much of his direction and success in life to a challenge from one of his teachers, when he was a sickly young boy: “I dare you to be the healthiest boy in the class.” Through this experience he learned the power of a dare to create courage and single-minded focus, to get people out of their ruts. As he summarizes it:

My practical experience has convinced me that inner growth and broadening personality come from daring and sharing. You dare to use the talents you have. You find yourself growing stronger — physically, mentally, socially and spiritually. You multiply your daring a hundredfold by sharing its fruits. You give your life away and, behold! a richer life comes back to you. This principle works through all of life:

Our most valuable possessions are those which can be shared without lessening: those which, when shared, multiply. Our least valuable possessions are those which when divided are diminished.

So, in keeping with that philosophy, I’m sharing a bit with you, as Laurie did with me.
Danforth dares the reader to adventure and action, starting with his four-square checkerboard philosophy of a balanced life (which explains the checkerboard motif on all those Purina dog-food bags.) The four sides of his checker are the physical, mental, social and spiritual, and he says when they are out of proportion we cannot become our best. And so he dares us to grow in each of these dimensions.

Here’s just one example — from “I DARE YOU TO THINK CREATIVELY” — that highlights what is compelling about this book, which was written in 1931, in the early years of the Great Depression:

The Edisons and the Marconis were the long range thinkers of yesterday. Wanted–some long range thinkers today. Where yesterday a hundred new inventions were made, a thousand new ones will be made tomorrow and some of you who read this message will dare to make them. I read an article not long ago where sombody prophesied conditions twenty years from now. Our homes would be artificially cooled in the summer just as they are artificially heated in the winter. Transportation will be just as different from today as today is from the gay ’90’s. People will dress differently, think differently, live differently. Are you leaders going to sit back and wait for yourselves to be adapted to these conditions? Or are you going to be one of those who help bring about these changes?

How amazed would Mr. Danforth be if he had lived to see today? As one who dreamed of air conditioning, how would he react to video cameras, DVDs, cell phones, PDAs and the internet? One thing I can confidently predict: he would issue the same challenge, but updated for our time. “Who will be the next Gates or Jobs? Who will develop the next Google?”

You’ll also find his language somewhat dated, hopefully in an amusing sort of way. In addition to his admonition to walk a mile a day in the fresh air, he advises daily calisthenics to “squeeze that liver.” But until you’ve had the success of a Danforth, it’s probably best not to laugh too quickly, but instead see what you can learn from him.

In I Dare You! you’ll also find some nuggets of practical wisdom I’ve noted in more contemporary books. Like David Allen in Getting Things Done, Danforth advises continually carrying a small notebook to capture creative ideas, even keeping one by his nightstand. Like Jim Collins in Good to Great, he extols the value of a “Magnificant Obsession” – or what Collins calls a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

You can get the book on Amazon, or from the foundation established by Mr. Danforth.

I Dare You!

Technorati: Productivity, Personal Growth, William Danforth, Purina

GTD: Halfway There

For the last couple of weeks I have been strolling my GTD memory lane, reminiscing about what I’ve learned in the last 367 days since I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done on a plane ride home from Jacksonville.

In listening to Merlin Mann’s Productive Talk podcasts with David this week, I heard some heartening news: I’m probably halfway to “getting” GTD. In Productive Talk #7: Implementing GTD, David says for most people it takes about two years “to really re-groove the neural patterns.” This podcast series also is available on the DavidCo site. It’s well worth a listen.

Here’s a list of links to my top ten reflections so far, based on having my brain half-wired through only a year of GTD:

GTD: A Year Later
GTD: Taking the Plunge
GTD and Entourage

My First-Time Experience with Inbox Zero
GTD Success in Two Minutes or Less

Why excuses for not taking time to implement GTD are sick

Why GTD beats other books on personal organization.

Why even mediocrity in GTD pays big dividends.

How the Roadmap seminar is like Neo being introduced to Morpheus

And finally, a conceptual connection I have personally observed between the GTD methodology and a world-famous medical facility’s pioneering work in developing systems for seeing lots of patients while giving each the individual attention they need.

I expect I will continue to have observations over the coming months, such as this one which is not exactly about GTD, but connects blogging to a key GTD concept, the general reference filing system. So, if through the magic of search and the Long Tail you have come across this post sometime well beyond November 2006, you can click here to read my continuing saga.

GTD and The Invention of the Medical Record

In my work with Mayo Clinic in news media relations, I always look for applications of the principles of Mayo’s medical practice. Mayo Clinic is the first and largest integrated, not-for-profit group practice in the world. I figure the same principles that make Mayo Clinic successful as a medical practice would be likely to lead to success in relations with news media, too…and in my personal life. Or at least they would be a good place to start.

One of Mayo Clinic’s innovations, just over 100 years ago, was the unified patient record. In that day it was revolutionary to even think of physicians working in teams instead of taking individual responsibility for their patients. But Dr. William Mayo and Dr. Charles Mayo knew what they didn’t know, and that knowledge in medicine was growing so rapidly that they needed to combine the expertise of others to get the best results for their patients. As Dr. Will put it, “…In order that the sick may have the benefit of advancing knowledge, union of forces is necessary.”

The Mayo brothers saw that to have that “union of forces” it also was necessary to have a centralized medical record for each patient, instead of each physician keeping notes in a journal. One of the early Mayo partners, Dr. Henry Plummer, developed this pioneering system that is taken for granted today. It wasn’t obvious at the time.

Now Mayo Clinic has a completely electronic version of the medical record, which enables specialists to collaborate even more efficiently, because they can be looking at the same patient’s records and images, even if they aren’t together in the same office…or even in the same state.

How does this relate to GTD and “stress-free productivity?” David Allen says an external, trusted system is essential. You can’t keep it all in your head. You need to put your information into a system that you know you will review regularly, and from which you will be able to get the information when you need it. With that, you can be “in the moment” and focus on what you’re doing right then, instead of thinking about what you’re not doing.

Mayo Clinic is able to efficiently diagnose and treat more than 500,000 patients a year because its systems are organized so every piece of information needed is available at the point of care delivery, and because processes are set up to get data into the system quickly, easily and completely. Caregivers know and trust that all of the information is in the system. That, and the salaried model for compensation, enables physicians to take as much time as they need with each patient, without feeling stressed and hurried.

So how have we applied this to our media relations work? Our media relations team has developed a similar system for press calls, so when a journalist calls for a comment from one of Mayo’s medical or scientific subject experts, or in response to a news release, we can track what happened with that call. It’s a trusted system, because every call we receive is entered into it.

That’s probably why GTD resonated with me so much, and why I just took the plunge after reading the book on my plane ride home from Jacksonville.

Taking the time to organize a system really fits with Mayo Clinic’s heritage, too. When Dr. Plummer invented the centralized medical record in early 1907, he just disappeared for a few days to do it. When he came back, he had invented the basic structure that is still used today, nearly 100 years later. I suppose he could have just said he was too busy with the press of patients to see, that he couldn’t make time to get away and do this planning. But patients all over the world are better off because he made the time.

Your investment of time in establishing your GTD system probably won’t have such an enormous payoff for all of humanity as Dr. Plummer’s did. But who knows? Maybe it will.

It will make a long-term difference for you personally. By developing a system that lets you make your decisions up front about where different kinds of information should go, you will save a huge amount of time in your everyday life. You won’t find yourself caught in dilemmas, wasting time trying to decide where a given bit of information belongs. You will have some rules and structure that reduce these collecting and processing decisions to a snap, because you’ll know where things should go.

It is practically necessary to have both paper records and electronic systems for organizing your life. Paper isn’t going away, and virtually everyone today also needs a system for tracking the electronic inputs, too…e-mail, at a minimum. In a future post I will look at systems for both physical and virtual organization.

Technorati: GTD, Mayo Clinic, Medical Record, Henry Plummer, Productivity, Organization, News Media

GTD Roadmap: Meeting Morpheus

One of the high points of my last year with GTD was attending the DavidCo Roadmap Seminar in Minneapolis on May 5. I had taken the red pill by just plunging into the GTD system, reading the book and trying to apply it consistently. The book alone is more than adequate to help you make great personal productivity progress, even imperfectly applied. Like Neo in The Matrix, I started to see new ways of doing things, and how to defeat the Agent Smith of procrastination.

Attending the Roadmap would be another great way to start, or to re-energize your application of GTD. Hearing David Allen in person is like meeting Morpheus.

In The Matrix, Neo learned jujitsu and Kung Fu in 10 hours. A day with David at the Roadmap seminar won’t make you a Black Belt in GTD, but it’s still a worthwhile investment.

You can read more about my experience with GTD in the last 51 weeks here. Also, check out the Black Belt Productivity blog. I just discovered it while composing this post. It’s going in the list of feeds I read.

Technorati: GTD, David Allen, The Matrix, Neo, Morpheus, Agent Smith