Category Archives: Productivity

Just read Julie Morgenstern’s new book

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I just finished reading this book a few days ago:

Making Work Work : New Strategies for Surviving and Thriving at the Office

There is some very nice info in here on how to make sure that your goals are aligned with your boss’s, how to concentrate on the things that really matter, and how to stave off interrruptions (“nibblers” as the author calls them). In particular, I found her advice about avoiding email in the morning to be extrememely useful. Reading email definitely has a tendency to distract and especially in the morning it seems to get the day off to an unfocused, non-productive start.

Daily Deals at FranklinCovey.com

Gresham’s Law of Planning

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The teacher of my Project Management class, Mike Taylor, mentioned “Gresham’s Law of Planning” in last night’s class and told us to look it up. It turns out that the original Gresham’s Law was actually penned by economist Thomas Gresham and had everything to do with economics and nothing to do with planning – in short, it said “bad money drives out good money”. Later, some folks interested in project planning and time management saw an analogous principle with regards to time management and decided to call it Gresham’s Law of Planning. The best description of it that I could find with a quick web search came from here and it said:

An important principle of Organisation design that relates to managerial decision making is Gresham’s Law of Planning. This law states that there is a general tendency for programmed activities to overshadow non-programmed activities. Hence, if a series of decisions are to be made, those that are more routine and repetitive will tend to be made before the ones that are unique and require considerable thought. This happens presumably because you attempt to clear the desk so that you can get down to the really serious decisions. Unfortunately, the desks very often never get cleared.

In other words, you never get done the things you most want to get done, because life is a never-ending stream of interruptions.

Quick File

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Awesome program just pointed out to me by someone on the GtD_Palm Yahoo! group.

Quick File

I had desperately wanted a way to quickly file
messages using the keyboard. Until now, I had used AutoHotkey (also a powerful program) to
write a little macro that mapped F12 to move a message
to my “(Ref_daily)” folder. With this, you use Alt+Q or any other key of your choosing to file your messages and it does very nice (and configurable) completion on your folder names and can be configured to default to a particular folder.

Side note: Quick File did not seem to like
the fact that my folder had parentheses in the name (the completion worked but it refused to move it). I sent a quick bug report to the author and
renamed my folder to #Ref instead and now it’s
working beautifully.

StrokeIt – Mouse Gestures for Windows

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I just tried this freeware Windows program, which was recommended by a colleague (Thanks, Ben!), and I am very impressed.

StrokeIt – Mouse Gestures for Windows

If you’ve ever used Mouse Gestures, in say, Mozilla or Firefox, then this will be very familiar to you – it’s the same concept except that it can be configured to work globally in the Windows environment and in all applications. Fully configurable, you choose which gestures map to which operations.

It’s a time saver, because although you’re still using the mouse to say, minimize or close a window, you are doing a very broad gesture and not trying to find and click on a tiny little button. In other words, much less accuracy is required.

In general, I find it productive to use the keyboard whenever I can instead of the mouse, but some common operations don’t have a key shortcut (like Minimize) and others have an awkward key shortcut (like Close => Alt+F4). This nicely fills those gaps.