I’ve been in GTD stride this week. I’ve done about 50 things on my to-do list (~20% of all tasks) in the last two days!
I’ve been in GTD stride this week. I’ve done about 50 things on my to-do list (~20% of all tasks) in the last two days!
The two most important efficiency concepts for me at work right now are that you should “touch things” as few times as possible, and that you make decisions quickly.
A bunch of time management people advocate the “touch things once” philosophy, which is that you only process material one time. You don’t read an email once to decide which folder to put it in, a second time to review what you need to do, and a third time to reply to it. You do all manual action on an event one time.
The crazy dude I quoted last month advocates quick decision-making. He makes all his decisions within one minute, even flipping a coin if necessary.
How do these apply to my work?
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I went to LISA 2005 two weeks ago. Check out my trip report (PDF) if you’re interested. (The report is pretty dry.)
I think Thoreau once argued that, given a nearby city he had to travel to, the ordinary person would earn their wages for coach fare and travel the next day, whereas Thoreau would just walk and get there.
The only flaw with Thoreau’s thought is that some time is more valuable than other time. For example, if I had to get to the nearby city to catch a friend before they left, I might be willing to take out a loan.
I’ve been playing Urban Dead, a zombie game. As a human, you can search for ammo or you can attack with melee weapons. The balance is that it takes you a long time to find ammo and load it into your weapon, so the urbandead wiki argues this is a “stored action.”
More than that, I think that the idea of “stored action” can be applied to preventative maintenance. For example, if you fuel up your car when it’s not an emergency, you have more time freed in case of emergency.
Is exercise a way of storing your actions (because you live longer)?