This is the sixth post in a series on Personal Effectiveness, if you want to start from the beginning start here or you view all posts in the series here.

I’ve used weekly highlight reports for work for some time, sometimes submitting them to a manager, sometimes just for my own purposes, they will vary based on the nature of the work but basically include:

• Headlines
• For each project:
  • RAG Status
  • Actions completed
  • Actions planned (inc dates)
• Issues

I think it’s an important reflective step, even if you are not required to do it. I do it before or during my weekly review.

More recently I’ve been experimenting with the idea of doing a weekly report for personal projects and posting it to this blog. You can view them here. I’ve used the categories from the Personal MBA’s Personal Master Plan goal setting advice for the weekly reports, minus relationships (which seemed inappropriate) and with the addition of headlines borrowed from the highlight report above.

• Headlines
• Wealth / Career
• Skills / Personal Growth
• Health / Fitness
• Relationships
• Enjoyment

You may not wish to post it to a blog but it is something that’s worth doing, even if you just save it somewhere or email it to your partner.

Headlines

• Lots of effort in looking for work, as you would expect.
• Good progress on studying Czech this week, helped by a very pleasant and sunny afternoon in the park (and a very patient teacher).

Wealth / Career

• Job Hunting - Yes. Did that. There is certainly no shortage of things I’m interested in across a range of roles / industries.
• LinkedIn – Spent some time looking at how to get the most out of this for both me and my contacts. I’m working on recommendations for some of the people I’ve enjoyed working with over the last few years.
• Designed and ordered new personal cards.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Toastmasters - attended and took a role (somewhat unexpectedly) in a meeting.
• Czech – Little bit of revision to the system I’m using with my Teach Yourself Czech and some good effort on this. Post to come one this.
• Personal Effectiveness Blog Posts - Continued posting this series, it’s even attracted comments which are pretty rare around here these days.
• LibraryThing – sorted out my LibraryThing account, inspired by some clever stuff I’ve read about how other people are using either LibraryThing or GoodReads. Post to follow, can’t finish the process at the moment as most of my books are on the high seas.
• Books – Ordered some more Personal MBA books from Amazon (thanks for the voucher L+M) and discovered a great book shop (Shakespeare & Sons) near our house.

Health / Fitness

• 2 Long Runs – The week started well with two good long runs but then petered out due to an insidious cold.
• Even If It Rains – Week two of our nascent imported from China running club, great fun, lots of ideas.

Enjoyment

• Bought, listened to and very much enjoyed – AfterQuake music by / for the victims of last year’s Sichuan, China earthquake. Musically it stands up on it’s own and it’s for a very good cause so go and buy it now.
• Watched – Ray Anderson give an inspiring and down-right encouraging TED talk on how his old-world business is heading towards it’s zero-impact environmental goal.
• Watched – TED talks from Dan Ariely on the flaws in our cognitive limitations (i.e. we’re all dumb) and testing our intuition and the bugs in our moral code.
• Read – ChangeThis Manifesto from Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone) about ‘lifeline’ relationships that can help you become the best you can be. Moved to action by this one.

I also enjoyed: ChangeThis:CreativeElegance; TED:Mary Roach:Orgasm; a book written by a friend; RadioThreeSixty; studying in the sunshine and much, much more.

Studying in the Park

This is the fifth post in a series on Personal Effectiveness, if you want to start from the beginning start here or you view all posts in the series here.

Where my system deviates a little, in implementation but not in principal, from the Personal MBA’s Personal Master Plan is at the weekly level. I found that using BackPack or any other online system was too cumbersome for me on a weekly level. What I wanted was a form on my desk, on a single side of A4 that I could scribble on as the week progressed. I’ve created a template that I print off and fill-in when I do my weekly review but can add to as the week progresses if necessary. My check-list for weekly review is here. Download a pdf of the weekly goal planning template.

I personally schedule my weekly review for a Friday afternoon, it’s in the calendar for 15:00 most weeks. The reason for doing it on Friday afternoon is that most of the time I’m able to dedicate to personal projects is at the weekend. My week thus effectively runs Saturday to Friday and I’m front loading it with time for personal projects. I know that anything I don’t get done on the weekend then has to be fitted into ‘the working week’ (or rather it’s evenings). I also know before I finish on Friday what I need to do in the following week. It’s helpful to hit the ground running on Monday AM with a plan, it means in extreme circumstances I schedule time over the weekend to ‘get ahead’. Finally it means I can spend some time on Friday afternoon setting up meetings, etc. for the following week. It’s also nice because it can mean that everything work wise is neatly tied off before 17:00 on Friday.

Where I return pretty much to the PMP (and indeed GTD) is at the daily level. The PMP recommends a template from the printable CEO to use as a daily task planner. This is essentially what I use, though I use my own slightly modified version which removes the boxes related to billing which I don’t need. My template is here, the original is here.

My daily review then takes place in two stages. I review personal email, facebook, twitter and do a quick first pass at the days schedule before leaving the house. I then have 30 minutes blocked off in my calendar at the very beginning of my time in the office for the full review. I do parse email at this time, contrary to the advice but I find it necessary to plan my day. Dealing with email this way is possibly a symptom of having worked in Asia for so many years where the bulk of the email came in during the UK working day, so would be waiting for me in the morning. My checklist for the daily review is here.

This is the fourth post in a series on Personal Effectiveness, if you want to start from the beginning start here or you view all posts in the series here.

In the Personal Master Plan (PMP) Josh Kaufman over at the Personal MBA suggests that we goal set for five key areas of our lives:

• Wealth / Career
• Skills / Personal Growth
• Health / Fitness
• Relationships
• Enjoyment

Go and read the Personal Master Plan now, really.

I personally use a 6th category of work because it’s helpful for me to use the same system to track work goals and, for me, they sometimes sit logically separately from my Wealth / Career or Skills / Personal Growth goals, though thankfully they often overlap.

• Work

The PMP recommends 37 Signals BackPack as the tool for tracking the goals and I do you use this for three year, one year and monthly goals and for my Someday / Maybe list. I have a different system for weekly goal setting and tracking which is described in a later post.

As per the PMP’s recommendations these goals are the reviewed and adjusted in monthly and yearly reviews. My check-lists for monthly and yearly reviews can be viewed here.

One final note, effective goal setting is a skill in itself and beyond the scope of this post. There are some good examples of effective 3 year goals and how the trickle down to effective 1 year goals, etc in the PMP document. For some other great implementable and pragmatic advice on goal setting look to Manager Tools who suggest that the critical things that goals must be are measurable and time-constrained. It’s good advice.

Headlines

• Attended Toastmasters – Attended meetings of both of the Toastmasters clubs here in Prague.
• Looked for work – Lots of effort here.
• Even If It Rains – Had the the first trial run of the running club we are trying to re-create here.
• PersonalEffectiveness - Finished writing and have begun publishing a series of blog posts on ‘the system’ i use.

Wealth / Career

• Looked for work - lots of effort in this space, not much obvious progress but there is a plan and it’s being followed, and in week three, I’m reasonably comfortable with that.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Attended Toastmasters – Attended meetings of both of the Toastmasters clubs here in Prague. Had a great time at both, got to speak at both and met great people at both. I hope my timetable doesn’t mean I have to choose between them!
• Czech – Something of a consolidation week rather than pushing ahead with the lessons in the book, feeling like I’m getting that all important feel for the language though.
• PersonalEffectiveness - Finished writing and have begun publishing a series of blog posts on ‘the system’ i use for managing my life. This has been on the list for so long I’m so happy to see it done.

Health / Fitness

• 3 Good Runs – Happy to be following the plan and trying to find routes near my house that aren’t 100% hills!
• Even If It Rains – Had the first trial run of a running club idea we’re trying to transplant here from Hangzhou.

Enjoyment

• Read (or rather finished) – The Czech’s in a Nutshell which is a fantastic, lighthearted overview of my new home and it’s inhabitants. Very useful stuff.
• Socailised – which is nice.

This is the third post in a series on Personal Effectiveness, if you want to start from the beginning start here or you view all posts in the series here.

This was the last piece to fall into place for me. I fought against doing this for a long time, the British ‘Oh, come off it!’ instinct made this difficult, it sounded hokey.

Personal Mission Statement? Oh, come off it!.

Eventually though the need for it became too obvious, that in order to make sense if my life and to guide the decision making involved in the goal setting which is what the rest of this system is about, I needed to answer some questions. Questions about what, fundamentally I value and what I want my life to be about.

The solution, which I already knew and had fought against for so long was in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit 2 is to begin with the end in mind. To do this on a lifetime scale then you must develop that personal mission statement or some other method of understanding what your core values are and what achievements you wish for your life to be about. That might be to feed the starving, to be important in the life of a child or simply to teach or to learn. That part is up to you.

This post on Stephen Covey’s website provides a good overview; I’ve experimented with the tool though and didn’t find it very helpful. I would also really recommend reading the 7 Habits book, and not just for this bit.

It’s a very personal thing and will take time.

This is the second post in a series on Personal Effectiveness, if you want to start from the beginning start here or you view all posts in the series here.

The way I manage my daily routine and the ’stuff’ in my life is mostly drawn from GTD, David Allen’s rightly, incredibly famous productivity book Getting Things Done.
Key things that I do:

• Firstly I recommend that you follow the outline in GTD for getting control of your stuff in the first place, all the stuff in your head, your inboxes, your garage, your in-tray, your notepad, your stickies, your hopes and dreams, etc..
• Follow the the GTD system for dealing with inputs, described beautifully in this fabulous diagram.
  • Firstly is it actionable? If not file it or bin it.
  • Secondly will it take less than 2 minutes? If so, do it now.
  • Thirdly if will take longer – defer it by putting it in your calendar, delegate it to someone else or record it as a next action in your trusted system or a project plan.
• GTD then recommends that you have a ‘trusted system’ for capturing next actions by project i.e. ‘Find job’, ‘Get Prince2 Certified’ or ‘Learn to cook Chinese food’. Or for capturing next actions by context i.e. ‘Calls’, ‘Home’, ‘Work’, Etc..
• I give projects mnemonics or short (often silly) names. This makes it easier to remember / reference. So ‘Oliver’ (as in Twist) might be find a job and ‘Forest’ (as in Gump) might be the marathon plan.
• I experimented with a bunch of different tools as ‘my trusted system’ and in the end I felt that the system that works best for me is the Hipster PDA, see below. It isn’t linked to my employer which Outlook inevitably is, making it unsuitable for personal projects and it’s accessible anywhere which the TiddlyWiki based solutions weren’t so works for meetings in coffee shops and calls from the backs of taxis.
• Manage your interruptions, notifications off in email and IM, build time into the day for processing this stuff. Personally I allocate 30 minutes to an hour for daily review at the beginning of the day (see post to follow) which includes amongst other things a quick review of email, voicemail, RSS, Facebook and Twitter before I plan my day (GTD recommends you do these things the other way round).

43 Folders, creator of the Hipster PDA describes it thus…

“The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain.”

My Hipster PDA as it sits on my desk in front of me as I type…

So I’m currently ‘between jobs’ or more succinctly ‘unemployed’, having decided that “1. Move to Prague, 2. Find job” was a better way to sequence the steps in the plan. I’m trying to think of it though as ’self employed’ where I have one major project ‘find super-cool job’ and a bunch of smaller projects.

I was lucky, before I leapt, to have the chance to talk to a few people with experience about to deal with this process, how to manage your time and stay effective. What became clear to me is that my existing process of managing work and life would do just fine, perhaps with some minor tweaks. I’ve been meaning to post this forever, so without further ado, here is ‘the system’.

Before I start though my system works for me, it might not work for you off the shelf, I rather suspect the trick is to find something that is suitable to you. Be careful though, not to enshrine ineffective behaviours as ‘me’ or ‘my way of doing things’. If ‘personal mission statements’ or ‘weekly goal setting’ doesn’t sound like something you’d do then it might be a good sign that you should. Unless of course you are already wildly effective, in which case stop reading now and have 5 minutes of your life back (but YOU already knew that).

None of this is new or original, I’ve pieced together a system that works for me from things I’ve read. I’ve tested it and tweaked it over the last couple of years. As I work through it below I’ll include links to the sources, I encourage you to go read them, they’re the experts.

There’s rather a lot of this and it’s probably best not digested all in one go, so this will be a series of posts covering the following topics or features of the system drawn from the various sources, that works for me.

• Stuff – The day to management of all of the inputs and outputs, projects, tasks and distractions.
• Values & Purpose – The overall picture, the principles that guide.
• Planning – It’s not sexy, but it works.
• Day to Week Effectiveness – Goals become tasks.
• Weekly Reports – reviews and accountability.

Stay tuned over the next week or so for these topics in more detail.

Update 2009-05-25: All the posts in the series are now live, links above will take you to the indivdual posts or you can view all posts in the series here. The overall flow looks something like this…

Headlines

• Still living in Prague. Week 2 in Prague, over the ‘first week excitement’ and now trying to get down to business. However it’s another short week due to public holidays.

Wealth / Career

• Applied for two more exciting positions, through agencies.
• Working on list of companies to apply to directly, kinda fun.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Another chapter of my Teach Yourself Czech book. System seems to work, post to follow.

Health / Fitness

• Two good runs from three planned, we’re underway again. I’m trying to do what I’ve always said I couldn’t do and train without a goal. Ok, the goal is obviously to get ‘marathon fit’ again, I just don’t know which event I’m going to get to and when.
• In-line skating with E.

Enjoyment

• Read Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England. Interesting and enjoyable read. Not sure that’s the best word but you know what I mean. More good insight / history to my new home.
  
• Treated ourselves to an evening out ‘authentic’ Indian meal and then a few drinks, might have found ourselves a local, it’s right in the middle of a local park, how cool is that?

Headlines

• Moved to Prague. This was week one in Prague and the Calendar was pretty busy before I started. My objectives were to focus on developing a working routine that worked and getting a lot of the practical things like metro pass and bank account sorted. I also wanted to spend some time learning the city some more so that when things get hectic I’m not worrying about finding places or getting there on time.

Wealth / Career

• Monitoring the jobs boards, couple of applications for roles I’d love (still being idealistic at this stage).
• Set up ‘collapsable office’ system (dinning table doubles as desk), set up wifi.
• Wrap up activities related to tax and leaving jobs, etc.
• Finsihed oragnising my stuff to be shipped.
• Opened bank account.
• Lots of organising and planning.
• Updated critical online presences to reflect the fact I’m now in Prague.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Investigated local Toastmasters options.
• Finally feel that I have a system that works with my Teach Yourself Czech Book. Post to follow on this.

Health / Fitness

• Developing a good breakfast habit. Finally possible now I’m existing in only one timezone.

Enjoyment

• Read Chris Guillebeau’s fantastic ebook (manifesto) 279 Days to Overnight Success
• Watched fantastic TEDTalk’s from Nathan Wolfe and Larry Brilliant on virus transmission and response linked from a TED Blog post which is a Swine Flu Q&A session with Wolfe.
• I’ve deliberately been out of the house every day, learning the city and it’s public transport system.
• Helped organise a party.

There is another post comming on organisation and personal effectiveness but this weekly report is part of my strategy for staying effective while unemployed (I prefer to think of it as self employed). I’d originally just planned to mail this to my self but have been inspired to post to the blog by seeing how Sacha Chua uses this strategy so effectively.