Blog / Time Management
Complete Productivity by Lee Woodward
Picasso once said, ‘Action is the foundational key to all success’. Action alone is what drives change.
So, how do you act consciously and make the most of every day?
- How do you go from being organised to systemised and strategic?
- How do you drive transformational change rather than react, day in and day out?
- How do you sort the wheat from the chaff?
To create the life and business you want, you have to set aside time for transformational projects and tasks – otherwise they will never happen. There's only so much you can take on at one time; so you want to spend time on the things you consider most important.
ONE Grab David Allen’s book - Getting Things Done
This book is a masterpiece and reading it transformed me from being organised to systemised.
Maximising personal productivity means being agile and open and constantly incorporating great ideas into your everyday life and business, so Allen says it’s vital to capture, process and act on the idea.
Allen’s framework has five parts:
1. Capture 2. Process 3. Organise 4. Review 5. Do
Allen suggests taking the great idea and putting it into a priority list of what you want to achieve in time and order. Create folders that make sense for your business and adopt Allen’s approach. The very effective Amber Werchon from Real Estate Hot Topics, runs five folders: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. If something comes in, she pops it into a folder. If she doesn’t get to it on Tuesday, she’ll get to it on Wednesday and keep moving it round until it gets done. She captures, organises and reviews her information – all the time. There is no right or wrong way to capture, process, organise and review and do your work. The best way is the way that you feel is most effective. What matters is capturing and doing. Everyday review and look at all the things you’ve captured, processed and organised and then book a time in your diary to do it. What doesn’t get booked, doesn’t get done. So for example, if you said, ‘Lee, I need you to do this’ and I added it onto my to do list, it ain’t necessarily going to happen. However if you said, ‘Lee,
tomorrow morning at 8:30 you and I are booked to do this’, I’ll turn up to the booking. Find an approach that works for you – if it’s a paper diary or your computer, you just need a system that works for you for capturing ideas and acting upon them.
TWO Book chunks of time in your diary for productivity blasts
Make this the time you power away for two hours to work through your to do list. If you don’t allocate time, change will not occur. As Dr Phil says, ‘If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, nothing will change’. Change what you have been doing. Devote time and energy to the new.
THREE Review
Reflection and action is the basis of all educational theory. Why do children write reflection pieces for school? Reviews engage the brain with understanding and are the greatest motivators in prompting action. Review daily or a particular day of the week and make a regular booking in your diary for it.
Some of us have so many projects but feel like we are getting nowhere and drowning in a sea of undoable tasks.
FOUR Chunk and buy a medium size white board
Chunk rather than task. A chunk, or a project, has more than two tasks to it. For example, making an appointment with the artwork person is a task. Building a brand new listing presentation is a project.
Don’t build a whole list of projects. Yes, a project list is important, but it needs segmenting into swim-line channels, so you can understand the priorities and the capacity of what you can handle at any one given time.
Go to Officeworks, buy a mediumsize white board, and break it into three even columns.
In column one, put the heading 'Next’.
In the middle column, put 'Doing'.
In the last column, put 'Finalising’.
Project: Build a brand new selling plan for my business.
From Next put it in the Doing column.
Get your branding together.
Get your logos
Get your words right.
Ring the designer.
Print it.
You can then move it into the ‘Finalising' column. Finalising means, ‘Okay, I've got the document, but now I need to role play with it. I need to learn the words and select the questions of when they come in to finalise that project’.
FIVE Get Evernote
Evernote is a fantastic free piece of web-based software and it allows you to store folders, projects and tasks and capture photos, documents, text and voice recordings.
If you have the App from Evernote and a great idea strikes, you can just grab your phone, click Evernote, click voice note and take a voice note. It will load it into the Cloud, and it will then turn up on your computer or device.
You can take a photo of a signboard and process it into your lead generation or lead conversion folders because you now have a system and structure in place for capturing great ideas.
I use a mix of paper, Evernote, my own mobile software and voice note recordings. I like my blended organisational system as the tools are available at different times. Of course, I am forever reviewing a better way to do it.
SIX Get Complete Productivity
This piece of software was actually designed for me personally, but because I meet and coach so many people who are having the same difficulties, I've decided to release it to the industry and my members so they can have that same structural feeling and organisation that I have from using the software myself. All I did in building the software was to break my brain into the segments of things I'm forced to remember, yet segment them out so they are not on one never ending long to do list.
Remember, if you correct your mind, everything will fall into place.
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