Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Updated: Free presentation creation seminar

[Note: This post previously announced this seminar - now it tells you how to access the archive]

This morning, I saw an online seminar by Cliff Atkinson (author of Beyond Bullet Points) called: Creating a 15-Minute Presentation in 1-Hour. It is a very useful walk-through of the process from start-to-finish, and illustrates the concepts from Cliff's book very effectively.

You can access the content by clicking the link above (may require a free registration at Microsoft Office Online).

Take advantage of this Freebie if you have any interest in improving your presentation creation skillz.

Cliff's seminars never disappoint - I'm a member of his Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) community, and it is worth the price of admission - he does weekly e-Lessons on various topics, including soliciting topics from volunteers in the BBP community. He actually creates presentations with the volunteers, based on their topic - cool stuff.

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Eluma opens it up

Last month, I wrote about Eluma 2.0 (Eluma: Browse, organize, and share) which is a pretty cool tool for organizing, sharing, and tracking web-based information (web sites, RSS, web clippings, etc.) on Windows XP and Windows Vista. At the time of my original review, Eluma was in private beta.

Good news: Eluma has unleashed the hounds, and Eluma 2.0 is now in public beta. You can find out more about Eluma and download the beta at their web site. They also have a useful blog that discusses how to cope with information overload (using Eluma, of course).

Here is their video fly-by:

There is a lot of new stuff in the new version, and it keeps improving.
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Improve your productivity: Establish your operating principles

Last week, I posted about some excellent analysis by Tim Ferriss ("You wouldn't like me when I'm unproductive...") comparing the "fighting styles" of various productivity gurus. If you aren't familiar with Tim's work, he is the author of "The 4 Hour Work Week," which is chock full of ideas to change you life. It certainly changed my mental models in a significant way.

Anyway, browsing around Tim's blog, I stumbled across his Flickr photostream where I saw the photo at right. It depicts a set of operating guidelines he developed while working with a department in a Fortune 500 company.

I really like this concept, and my colleague Matt and I are just beginning to experiment with our own variations of this approach. If you break down what's on the board, it has an excellent set of guidance embedded in it:

  • Throttle back on email. Don't check it constantly, and don't do work email away from work.
  • Focus on a few specific, high value activities per day.
  • Record your results - and if you're on a team, let the team know what you're doing (I love that they are using a Wiki for that).
  • Minimize unproductive chatting.
  • Focus on one thing at a time and avoid the overhead of multitasking. (My buddy Gene and I use the analogy that even though an air traffic controller has lots of planes queuing up, each one should only land one plane at a time.)
  • Get out on time. I think this has a good psychological effect for driving better focus, and helps prevent tasks from expanding to consume all the available time.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes with our experiment. I don't know if I can go quite as "purist" as what's on this board. For example, given how my work is structured, it's unlikely that I'll totally eliminate all after-hours email in the near future, but I can certainly do less of it.

Even so, I definitely think establishing some operating guidelines like these will help me and the others on my team.

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Total Workday Control

In my continuing quest for methods and tools to make me more productive, I've been reading and applying Michael Linenberger's latest techniques from the 2nd edition of his book, Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook. As I've chronicled here in the past (see "My GTD Odyssey"), I have been a follower of Michael's methods for a long time.


One of the reasons I liked them is that they were more prescriptive than -- but still philosophically compatible with -- David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology. I found Linenberger's instructions to be more actionable and specific, and they helped me sustain my productivity better than GTD alone. As I mention in my GTD Odyssey posts, with GTD I missed the "go to the list; get next task" feel that I remember from my old Franklin/Covey days - and Linenberger's method feels more comfortable in this regard.


"Manage Your Now"


In this second edition, Linenberger has raised the bar again and introduces more techniques, workflows, and Outlook tweaks to help make things easier. He's even moved beyond "Total Workday Control" to establish a methodology he refers to as "Managing Your Now" or "MYN" for short (I suppose everybody's gotta have a 3-letter acronym, or TLA, these days).


The book walks you through a step-by-step sequence for setting up Outlook for better email, task, and calendar management through the use of customized views to help you filter the information you must deal with to get your work done (the book's example of the Task view is at right).


MYN involves managing to a "Now Horizon" and segmenting your tasks. Basically, you are able to create several tiers of priority:



  • Critical-Now: the 1-3 tasks that must be done today
  • Target-Now: high priority items that you would like to do today but are not urgently due
  • Opportunity-Now: medium priority items that need to be done soon, and could be done today if the right opportunity presents itself
  • Over-the-Horizon: items that are on your lists, but you've consciously pushed them out for future consideration

This filtering and sorting method has made it much easier for me to become more methodical about working through the tasks on my lists, and the views described in the book provide a sort of "at a glance" cockpit to help you pilot your day. Find out more in the sample chapter available on the book web site.

The right tool for the job


You can go through the book and manually set up the views, but I recommend using a tool described in the book instead: The MYN special edition of ClearContext IMS. This not only automatically configures all of the special MYN views, it offers a ton of very easy-to-use shortcuts to help you become more productive with Outlook. The features are numerous, efficient, and sooo useful. I've been a loyal ClearContext customer for at least a couple of years now and couldn't live wthout it.


By the way - even if you choose not to adopt Linenberger's methodology, I highly recommend ClearContext. You can get the regular, non-MYN version at the ClearContext web site, and they even offer a 30-day trial so you can find out if it's a fit for you.


Some examples: I love being able to file a whole topic thread automatically, schedule follow-up tasks automatically, and use ClearContext's "Unsubscribe" button to make irrelevant email threads disappear

Commit - don't dabble

As I mentioned above, this book is much more prescriptive than the first edition. One of the asepcts of that is that it really requires a commitment for a few weeks to really develop new habits so you can get the benefits of Linenberger's methods. I think it's absolutely worth the commitment - I don't have exact metrics, but I think the books claims that you can increase your efficiency by 25% to 45% are in line with actual results.

And I also recommend taking a 'baby steps' approach to adoption, and focusing on the front half of the book to become proficient in the basics of task, calendar and email management before moving on to the more advanced topics later in the book (like project management and Goal/Project/Task management).

Summary

Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook can truly help you "Manage Your Now" whether you're an accomplished GTD user or someone just getting started on the path to gain control of your workday. Just make sure you stick with it for a few weeks (21 days is a good rule of thumb) to ensure you get the benefits.



"You wouldn't like me when I'm unproductive..."

I read an awesome post by Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek), on Time Management Guru-itis: Mark Hurst vs. David Allen and Tim Ferriss. It's quite an interesting analysis, and I think it is pretty accurate and insightful.

One of the interesting differences in Tim's dealio is that it's very much about how you feel as you live your life - not just how productive you are. As Tim puts it:

"Is responding to all inquiries on a moment's notice really success? I would argue it is a reactive mode that precludes life, at least the type of life I want to have."

I must admit, this is one of the things I often struggle with. Getting my balance slider bar set to the right setting is tricky. Why? Well, the optimum setting for balance can vary depending on the demands (or lack thereof) stemming from work, personal life, etc. There is the flip side, as well, in which you "impose" a balance setting on your life, then make your activities fit that setting.

Ferriss and David Allen (of GTD fame) both offer methods to impose your own balance setting, but they have completely different approaches for how to get there. I've learned tips, techniques, and philosophies from both of them, and I think they have both impacted my thinking far more than I ever expected.

Check out Tim's analysis and join the conversation (and thanks to Matt for pointing the article out today).

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