Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity

Moving out of web programming has found me reading productivity books. In a programming/IT environment, there are bounded projects, milestones and measurable deliverables. However, in ministry, I have to say it is a bit different, and I do sometimes doubt my productivity in some areas. I know that when dealing with people, and life and volunteers, some "projects" or "tasks" may not have real strong measurable deliverables. Even so, I still read another productivity book, perhaps in the hope to find that silver bullet that will mean I might work "better" or be more "productive", whatever that may mean, or at least feel more on top of things than I sometimes do.

This book I kinda had read before on Tim's blog a few years back while I was still working in IT as he posted a series on productivity which I think turned into this book. When I first read his round of articles I agreed with his idea that you need four separate tools to get things done, and they should remain separate. 

Email, to-do, calendar and notes. Email is a bad to-do list or a repository of notes, it should just be a place for communication. Tasks are not good calendar appointments, and neither are notes. There are some tools like Asana that try to be more than a to-do list, which could have documents and include instant messaging. These may be useful in a collaborative environment, likewise Trello. But with any team productivity tools, they really are only good if everyone uses them.

This book starts out trying to give a broader view as to why productivity is good and then sets out a method for getting things done. I do buy into the idea that productivity is good, that bringing order out of chaos is reflecting God's word, and when we do that we mimic Him a little. Challies says being productive allows us to live out our purpose in life. Not that being productive is the end goal, but the thing that we are being productive in.

Productivity is effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God... Productivity calls you to direct your whole life at this great goal of bringing glory to God by doing good for others.

However, do know there is a danger of going too far and not enjoying rest, and creativity and simply not getting things done (I write this while in Darwin on holidays, with my email client minimised). I probably do struggle with the line sometimes, and this book isn't really dealing with that.

It is suggested that the main way to bring about order in your life is to order your life into a few categories. This could be work, church, family, friends, a hobby etc. and then under each of these big categories list areas, roles or projects that you are responsible for. Once you have summed your life into this framework, sorting tasks, emails, papers, and notes should be easier as now everything will have its own home. This life taxonomy will then be mimicked in your productivity tools to help clean and sort where things are to live. 

This book then goes into a bit of detail about the purpose of your four productivity tools and then gets into the nitty gritty of explaining how to use one tool for each. Evernote for notes, Todoist for tasks, Gmail for emails and Google Calendar for events. 

Personally, for my work, I use OneNote for notes, Microsoft To-Do for tasks, and Outlook for email and calendar (sort of). All these are Microsoft tools and Outlook is pretty much the industry standard for most places (and if you work for a church you can get up to 300 Microsoft licenses for free).

OneNote I have a few separate "notebooks" for the major categories of my life, St Matts, Life Groups, Seniors Ministry and personal, and then in each notebook, I have lots of "tabs" with pages under them for more detailed areas. I have a web clipper extension that will quickly copy the article content to a "Quick Notes" tab for future reference. I also use MS Lense on my phone for "scanning" in documents, those turn into files and live in my OneDrive, but sometimes the images also end up in my OneNote

I use Microsoft To-Do for my task, not because it is the best tool out there, but I hope task integration between Outlook and OneNote will only improve over time. You can flag an email and it will come up as a task in To-Do.  You can do nested tasks (to one level) and set deadlines and recurring tasks, which I do use all the time. I have a set of projects with their own colour and set of tasks, and the "My Day" feature allows you to select which tasks you plan on doing for that day and not to be distracted with everything else on the other lists. And if you don't get those done for the day, it will suggest you do them the following day. The element of planning your day can be key to getting things done with focus and less distraction.

Outlook for email is pretty standard. I do try to get zero inbox but normally by Friday afternoon, I might have single-digit emails left. Once I have filed or replied to an email I file it in a folder somewhere. With calendars, I do think Google Calender is more flexible and more useful for my family to see where everyone needs to be, but for work, I have two Outlook calendars. One is for meetings and appointments, and the other is my time budget. I use MS Flow to then copy the calendar event from Outlook to my Google Calendar, so my family can know when I am out.

I got the time budget calendar from Redeeming Your Time. Overall I found that book more helpful in linking your todo list with your calendar. The idea is that at the end of your day, you can compare your next day's calendar with its meetings and appointments with your tasks list and see what time you have. In this book, it felt like the use of calendars and tasks was treated a little entry-level. (Just before this book I skimmed through To-Do List Formula by Damon Zahariades which goes into more detail about tasks. He likes you to put a deadline on all your tasks, to not have small less-than-10-minute tasks on your list, and to add a reason why you are doing this task as well as adding categories for project, type and location to each task, some helpful stuff there, and maybe too much detail as well).

From this book I did find the following helpful, which I may start to use when I get back from my holidays:

Naming convention for tasks. Start each with a verb and then a colon. This lets you know what you are to do with some more information, eg Email: Bob about the TPS report, Call: Sus about her head, Write: better fake task names for this blog post.

A "waiting for" list. This is a reminder that you have asked someone for something, or need someone to get back to you for a project. You make a task with a deadline to remind yourself when you asked for that thing and a reasonable date for when you hope to hear back and progress.

There were two detailed routines that I liked. One was for the start of the day to help plan your day (Redeeming Your Time suggested doing this the day before). It involved prayer, looking over your tasks, waiting for list and calendar and what is coming up in the next 7 days. 

The other routine was for the end of the week with the idea to sort all your tasks and notes and emails that you have accumulated over the week and to give them a home. Not to mention cleaning your desk and PC for random files, as well as thinking about how you might serve or surprise someone next week.

There are some extra resources or planners associated with this book that you can download to help get yourself more organised. These maybe useful. 

Overall I liked to the basic framework of having the right tool for the job and knowing how to organise your life projects and roles. The daily and weekly routines I will give a go (as I kinda already have one, but this was more detailed) However, I did find Redeeming Your Time perhaps a little better.