For those that are using them here are the updated 2010 Task / Goal planner templates:

• Weekly Goal Planner
• Daily Task Planner

If you are not familiar then these are described in the EffectivenessSeries.

Image Credit: "Google Wave en la actualidad" by Rafa.Garcés on Flickr

My first thought with Google Wave was that this was something that was great, I could immediately see a bunch of uses for it…

• More feature rich chat medium
• Great for working collaboratively on creating text / documents.
• A half way point between email and chat for conversations that spam a couple of days (you know when you feel you’re having a conversation by email).

But I have to be honest I did think it was too much of a paradigm shift. It’s been said elsewhere, but I did think it would go the way of RSS where it was just too much of a different way of thinking for people to get it any time soon.

And then people in my contacts list started using it and I was surprised not just by how many but by whom. The people I’ve been waving with are mostly not the obvious web2.0 earlier adopters. And then I started seeing what people are doing with embedded gadgets and it’s power really started to become apparent.

Now something else has just occurred to me about Google Wave. It’s the perfect back channel. We all have people in our contact list that we send links, thoughts, questions, etc. to multiple times a day. Currently we either send emails, which is a pain a) because emails are too asynchronous, the paradigm is a letter and people feel obliged to craft a proper response and b) everyone battles with keeping on top of their inbox. Or we send links in chat which is too synchronous, the paradigm is a conversation and useful stuff is too easily lost in the chatter or we feel we’re interrupting and people are obliged respond (immediately).

Wave is the perfect semi-synchronous (i think I made that up) medium. You can drop links, thoughts, snippets, whatever into wave and your collaborators can review later. You can have multiple people per wave (teams), or multiple waves per contact (different projects). Now I think for a project team, or for a bunch of other uses, that could be really powerful.

I’ve got some invites going spare if you’ve not tried Google Wave and would like to. If I know who you are (or if I don’t and you think you can convince me you deserve one   then let me know.

This is my brief review of The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, posted to the PMBA Forums.

4-Hour Work Week Cover

I chose to read The 4-Hour Work Week at this point for some specific reasons, beyond the mere fact that it is a PMBA text. I’d just quit my job, moved to a new country and was looking to start a fresh, not with my own business at this stage but with a new ‘corporate’ job. I was not disappointed by the choice to read this book, now.

The greatest value from the book for me was further proof behind the idea that there is another way, beyond the regular approach to corporate life, and that it’s achievable. I found that in this respect the book was inspiring and instructional.

There are some real gems in the book regarding personal productivity, Timothy Ferris has taken this to quite some extremes but there is a lot of food for thought in the book regarding virtual personal assistance, outsourcing, managing inputs, prioritisation of your life goals and more.

The book is organised such that if you want to follow the Timothy’s path fairly closely then it’s a step-by-step how-to, this was done with out detracting from it’s readability by someone taking another route.

I found that the specific ideas around what your business might do or how to go about achieving it (roughly the middle part of the book) not always relevant to my situation or likely projects. It steered dangerously close to ‘get rich quick schemes’ at times which left me a little cold. For me the passing references to ‘information products’ were closer to my likely projects and would have made for more pertinent examples that were, shall we say, for business ventures with more noble aims.

Again, the greatest value of the book was that he promotes an approach to life, and your happiness in it, which resonated with me in quite a profound way. Beyond that there was a lot of practical advice for managing your life and your business in such a way as to maximise your time, hopefully for more fun and happiness.

An enjoyable and useful read. The book is backed up by a great web site with extra material, surely a must nowadays.

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.

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.

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…

The third and final part of the Meeting Basics SlideShare series is now up and can be viewed below.  You can view the others in the series here.

You can also download a PDF onepager, that supplements the slideshow.