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Someday Lists for Fun and Profit

Published on April 18, 2008 in Books, Mental, Must Read, Personal, Professional and Reviews. 0 Comments

Someday Lists for Fun and Profit

Do you want to renovate your kitchen? How about a new car? Does a European vacation get your heart racing? These are the kinds of things you need to have on your someday list.

Items on your someday list are unique. These are goals that can’t be projects because their action plans wouldn’t be specific enough. For example, European vacation could become a project someday as long as you’re ready to take the vacation. However if you’re like me, one of the steps of this plan would say, “get $8,000.” That’s way too vague to be actionable. Who knows when I’ll have an extra $8,000 to spend on a luxury?! So until I have the money and the time, European vacation sits on my someday list.

Don’t get me wrong. Your someday list shouldn’t be a sorrowful list of all the things you want to do but can’t. It should be something to motivate you to succeed! It should be something fun; something full of exciting goals to drive you to complete your projects. After all, what good is a great organizational system that helps you get all your work done quickly if there’s no light at the end of the tunnel? Your someday list is the light.

First make your list. Write down everything that gets your hear pumping. Now make those items real. Get a piece of paper and some magazines and make a collage that depicts your goals! When you’re done, you can put all these papers in a three-ring binder that you can look at any time you’re feeling down. If you ever have a day where you don’t feel like looking at your next action list, pull out your someday binder and flip through the pages. You’ll be amazed how energized you’ll feel after you remind yourself why you’re working!

The beauty of the Getting Things Done system is that it not only gets you organized and moves you forward, but it also keeps you motivated. It truly is a self-sustaining system! But before we end this series, I’m going to take you back to the beginning. Once you’ve reached this point, you should be well organized but ideas constantly pop up and new tasks constantly present themselves. If you don’t have a way to capture and deal with them, you’ll quickly find yourself back at Collect and Conquer trying to get your life back on track. Your Talking Pad: Don’t Leave Home Without It will show you how to keep your system on track.

Tickle Your Way to Success

Published on April 16, 2008 in Books, Educational, Mental, Must Read, Personal, Professional and Reviews. 0 Comments

What do you do with your great ideas? What happens to every invention you think of? What happens to the ideas you have for a book? What happens to all those little ideas you have to increase productivity or decrease costs? Are these little stones cut and polished until they shine like gemstones or do they sit and languish until you forget that they were gems and discard them as worthless rocks? If you’re trashing these diamonds in the rough, you need to create a system to make sure that you never mistake a ruby for a piece of red glass.

The best way to make sure that no great ideas slip through your fingers is to make a tickler file. Tickler files can be pretty easy to set up. All you need is a card file and a bunch of index cards. I have a little black box that holds 3×5 cards. I also cut up a couple of index cards to make dividers with tabs to maintain some semblance of order to system that’s little more than a collection of random thoughts at this point. You can have as many or as few categories as you’d like and you can feel free to add or delete categories as needed.

Now that you have your tickler file set up, grab a stack of index cards and start writing! Write down every idea for every invention, book, or whatever you’ve been thinking about. When you’re done, go back to each card and write down the questions you have about that idea. Do you need to figure out how an invention could be put together? Do you need a more efficient system at work but haven’t quite figured out what it could be? Write these concerns on the card. Over time you’ll notice that so many questions and comments have accumulated that an action plan for your idea now seems clear. At that point you can take your idea out of your tickler file and turn in into a project. Your rock is now on it’s way to becoming a diamond!

Most people have ideas and think, “If only I could make it happen.” With this system, you have a way to make your ideas realities almost automatically! Make sure you review your tickler file every week. You’ll be surprised at all the new comments you can add!

There’s one more facet we’ve yet to cover: long term goals. What do you do with items like “renovate my home” or “buy a new car”? You can’t have a nebulous item like “get $25,000” on an action plan. How do we organize these goals so that they can be achieved one day? Find out in Someday Lists for Fun and Profit.

The Perpetual Project War Board

Published on April 14, 2008 in Books, Educational, Mental, Must Read, Personal, Professional and Reviews. 0 Comments

The Perpetual Project War Board

By this point you’ve collected every piece of paper and task that’s been demanding your attention and organized them all into their own projects that each have their own little folder with an action plan attached to each one. You also have a “next action” list compiled so you always know what step you need to take to move your projects forward.

After following this system for a while, you’ll begin to notice that certain files get reincarnated ever week, month, and/or quarter. Every time these projects return from the dead you have to waste ten to fifteen minutes making another file and another action plan. How can these projects be organized so you still get them done without having to constantly replace the files? You create a Perpetual Project War Board.

What is a Perpetual Project War Board exactly? It’s a big white board that you use to collect all of your recurring projects. First you take a white board that’s large enough to contain all of your weekly, monthly, and quarterly projects. My white board is 3 feet by 4 feet. Yours may be larger or smaller depending on what tasks you’re facing. After you get your board take thin black electrical tape and make vertical lines from top to bottom that are space far enough apart for you to write in the white spaces. Next take thick black electrical tape and make two vertical lines to separate the board into three categories. Label the top line in each category “Weekly”, “Monthly”, and “Quarterly”. Finally, get your thin black tape again and make a vertical line close enough to the thick black tape so you have little boxes big enough to write a number at the end of every line except for you category labels. Here’s what your war board should look like:

warboard.jpg

Now fill in all of your weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks. When you’re done, create an action plan for each and every one. These plans should to look like the ones you have for all of your other projects except all of the tasks in your action plan need to have a number associated with them. Once you have all of these action plans made, get a three-hole punch and put them in a three-ring binder that’s separated into three parts (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly). Make sure this binder is always with your war board.

Now go through all of the projects written on your war board and write down the number that corresponds with the next task you need to do on your action plan. Then add all of those tasks to your next action list. Every time you complete one of these tasks, change the number next to that project and add the next task to your next action list. Now you have a system to help you progress in all your recurring tasks!

Congratulations! You’ve tamed all of your actionable tasks. But what about the ideas you have that have yet to develop into actionable projects? Read the next article Tickle Your Way to Success to find out how to deal with these projects in the making.

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