“Another Two Yards”

In the great movie Chariots of Fire, sprinter Harold Abrahams was devastated after losing a 100-yard dash. Professional coach Sam Mussabini watched the race closely, and afterwards said: “I can find you another two yards.” Abrahams trusts Mussabini, engages him, and wins the gold medal in the 1924 Paris Olympics.

In Life and Work

Most of us run a race against time. Competing priorities vie for our attention. What will we do or not do? How can we possibly get everything done that’s important?

In life and work, what we really need is more hours, not yards.

Is it really possible to get more time? Yes! Although we all have exactly 168 hours per week, the real question is: how many hours are productive, and how productive?

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Synchronizing Outlook tasks to your iPhone or Android is dangerous. If you don’t do it right, you could lose everything. Worse, the steps are different for each situation. When clients ask for my help, I usually steer them toward safer solutions.

Many attempt the sync anyway.

A client recently emailed me with this tragic tale:

“You were very kind to warn that trying to sync Outlook with my Android might prove challenging. I set up Exchange to connect Outlook 2007 with Touchdown, and MS encouraged me to add my own domain name which I almost did.

Reluctant to let MS host my account I tried to restore the original setup. In what turned out to be a colossal error, I deleted the email address which I had added to the MS365 (MS exchange) account.

Instantaneously, I lost all of my contacts, my calendar and my tasks. The real salt in my wound was losing all of customization I had made via your TRO online training.”

Recovering from that data loss took many hours of hard, stressful work.

Why Does Outlook Lose Data?

Outlook is old technology, more than a decade old. Back in the day, they pioneered the idea of synching between computers and mobile devices. Their solutions were sometimes clunky, awkward, and looked suspiciously like the 1980s, but they did it. Unfortunately, Outlook still uses that same infrastructure to sync with your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android.

When you try to set up the sync, you’ll see strange [Click title for more...]

You asked, and so we’ve delivered. Today we are excited to announce that the Nozbe version of the Total, Relaxed Organization training (TRO) is complete and online. You can now choose Nozbe as your task manager and get full setup and training instructions for organizing your work and email through Nozbe, one of the rising stars in task management.

What is Nozbe?

Nozbe is an online (“cloud”) task manager specifically designed around David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy. More than any other online task program we’ve reviewed, Nozbe helps train the casual user to implement the GTD method quickly and easily. With an aesthetic, easy-to-use interface, Nozbe will have you organizing tasks in minutes. Android, iPhone, and tablet apps will keep you in sync with your tasks anywhere you go. For those who also want offline access, Nozbe is beta testing a desktop application for Mac and PC.

Nozbe has been acclaimed on Lifhacker.org, ZDNet, and the blogs of productivity aficionados the world over. Nozbe’s multiple language translations (including Japanese, Spanish, and German) make it a good option for teams working internationally.

Why do TRO with Nozbe?

Total, Relaxed Organization (TRO) is a more powerful time management system, designed for team leaders, business owners, and executives–who have heavier workloads. TRO is designed to help you organize more work in less time while keeping you focused on profit-producing (or career-enhancing) objectives.

TRO integrates the principles behind GTD and Covey–principles such as clearing your mind, collection points, urgent vs. important, prioritization, and [Click title for more...]

A lot of people ask me about Evernote. Should they use it for tasks? Should they use it to go paperless? Should they use it for everything? How will it help them? Here’s what you need to know.

What is Evernote?

Evernote is a virtual filing cabinet that lets you see your files on any computer, your phone, or your tablet. It can also take screen captures and remember web sites you’d like to revisit. Everything is searchable, making retrieval easy, even if you have a lot of information. It is also a great file-sharing tool. (More about Evernote.)

Evernote for Tasks

In a word, don’t. Yes, it’s possible to creates lists of tasks or do GTD with Evernote, but you have to do it inside of documents. You risk losing your tasks somewhere in all the files and notes. In order to make sure you haven’t missed anything, you have to check every document every day. That’s too much work.

Hundreds of existing applications can help you manage, prioritize, and even collaborate on tasks. The best of these will save you more time than Evernote, and some even link up with your Evernote files. Use the right tool for the job. Evernote’s job is file management, not tasks.

When to use Evernote

Use Evernote as a repository for information, especially anything already electronic or for things you might need away from the office. For people who travel, collaborate with a team, work from multiple offices, or who [Click title for more...]

In a few days, millions of people will start down the path of a new year’s resolution, determined to be better, smarter, trimmer, or more organized in 2012. But a year is a very long road to walk. By next January, only a handful will even remember their resolutions for the year. But a few will succeed.

As a time management coach, I’ve seen the successful ones, and I know how they do it. They have five simple keys that anybody (including you) can use:

1. Simple but meaningful goals.
2. Start right.
3. Plan ahead.
4. Connect with habits daily.
5. Fail without giving up.

Simple but Meaningful

People who succeed with their resolutions for change work on a few simple goals. They are more interested in success than they are in the thrill of contemplating success. They aren’t looking to become perfect overnight and aren’t charmed into the thrill of perfect living for two weeks. They choose a simple, believable goal, leaving other goals for a later date. Knowing they can succeed, they also know that they will have more opportunities to meet goals. Simple.

Meaningful resolutions are also important. Half of America will exercise on January 1st (or 2nd), but the soon-to-be bride will still be exercising in March. Why? Most people resolve to exercise, because they know they should. In contrast, the bride is thinking, “I’ll fit in my wedding dress if it kills me.” When our goals are meaningful, we look beyond the goal to something we want more than [Click title for more...]

Organizing yourself often creates frustration when a new discovery dawns: everyone else is disorganized.  Your boss misses deadlines.  Your spouse forgets appointments.  Team members drop easy assignments and interrupt you constantly.  The more organized you become, the more painfully you feel other people’s disorder.

Team productivity has a greater impact on an organization than personal productivity.  Your ability to reach goals has more to do with your team than you.  Ideally, everyone would be trained and organized with the same, effective system, but sometimes you can’t affect that change.  Fortunately, there are simple ways you can encourage your team to be more productive.

First, insist that every member of your team use an inbox.  Inboxes greatly reduce interruptions and ensure that important assignments all go to one place.  When team members know team assignments are sitting in that inbox–and only in that inbox–they will be much more focused on completing work for the team.
Inboxes also reduce the chance of assignments getting lost.  All too often, the transfer of responsibility goes something like this: “Did you get the report I left on your chair?” or “Did you get the brief; I gave the brief to Joan to give to you?”  Your team needs clear channels for handing off tasks.  Checking one inbox is infinitely easier than checking your office and everyone else’s.  The Law of Collection Points (from the TRO training) holds true for teams as well as individuals: “The more collection points you have, the worse things [Click title for more...]

An office without paper.  Sounds great, right?  Over the last year more and more people have been asking for my help setting up their very own paperless office.  But for some people, “paperless” isn’t always the golden solution they thought it would be.  Here’s what you need to know before you commit to the switch.

What does “paperless” really mean?

“Paperless” means that you convert existing paper documents into virtual documents.  E-paper.  Many e-paper solutions include a filing system for both the scanned documents and your computer-based documents (things you never printed).  Practical solutions usually involve buying a specialized scanner, software, and/or a subscription to an online document manager.  If you have a lot of files, you may need to pay additional fees for more storage space.

Paperless solutions may work over an in-office network, over the Internet, or just for your own computer.  Internet-enabled solutions are the easiest and often include options for viewing documents on mobile devices, such as iPhone, Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Kindle Fire, or your Android phone.

Why are you going paperless?

There are lots of bad reasons for upgrading to a paperless office.

- Saving the environment

- Keeping a clean office

- Saving time or effort

Remember, we are talking about converting existing papers into electronic form.  Because the papers already exist, scanning won’t save a tree.  If papers clutter your office, e-paper will clutter your hard drive.  If filing is too much work, then scanning, labeling, sorting, uploading, and shredding it will [Click title for more...]

As I coach people on their time management skills, they often lament:

“My family is all disorganized, and I’m afraid that I will never be able to learn how to get organized.”

“I try to get organized, but I can only manage it in small bursts. Then everything falls apart.”

“The TRO system would help me a lot, I can see that. I’m just too chaotic to ever learn it.”

Anyone can get organized. There is no “time management gene.” You weren’t born disorganized, and you don’t have to live disorganized. To be an organized person, you need two things: the time management mindset and an airtight system.

The Time Management Mindset

Organized people are absolutely convinced that everything won’t fit. Choosing one activity disallows others, and they make choices based on this knowledge. The time management mindset is the ability to see the options and choose the best use of your time. 

“But that’s too simple to solve my problems,” you say. Actually, it’s exactly the solution for your problems. A few examples will illustrate:

You have work tomorrow, but your friends convince you to stay out late. The next day, you’re rushed, late, tired. To get everything done, you have to work late. You curse yourself for being so disorganized.

You are required to submit a report by the 15th of each month. You set it aside with plans to do it on the 14th, a day early. But several deadlines creep up, overwhelming you in the days [Click title for more...]

When people claim to “lack focus” they often mean their attention is caught between two places. Family vs. work, sales vs. support, reading vs. daydreaming. The brain can only focus on one thing at a time, so if you split your attention your productivity will suffer.

Creating personal rituals is a good way to regularly shift your entire attention from one thing to another. A ritual is a meaningful pattern of behavior reserved for a certain time, place, or situation. The human mind thrives on patterns, and by building meaningful patterns into your life you build structure and order around which to manage yourself.

Rituals are not routines. Rituals imbue our actions with purpose and mark important transitions. Rituals are habits of emotion. Routines are simply habits of motion. A well-designed ritual engages you in the activity at hand while routines just get the chores done.

By turning a crucial daily transition into a ritual instead of a routine, you can help yourself make the transition quickly, reign in your energy, and focus exclusively on the new area.

Here is how to invent your own ritual:

1. Find a crucial transition in your day, a transition you’ve had trouble with.
2. Identify an action or behavior which would bring your previous activity to closure or release you from the mental burdens associated with it.
3. Create an action or activity which would prepare you (physically, emotionally, or mentally) for your new focus.
4. Identify a regular time when you will enact your ritual. You

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