Mike
Carruthers:
How productive you are depends in large part on how well
you understand and use Parkinson's Law.
Donald Wetmore:
Which says, in part, that a project tends to expand with the
time allocated for it. So, in other words if you only give yourself
one thing to do today or tomorrow, it'll take you all day to
do it.
Donald Wetmore,
author of
The Productivity Handbook.
If you give yourself
a dozen things to do you may not get twelve done but you get
nine done. Because having a lot to do creates a healthy sense
of pressure on us where we automatically become better time
managers. And so we encourage people to over-plan their day
a bit, not a whole lot, to create a healthy sense of pressure
on us.
Donald believes
if you really want to get things done you have to plan to get
them done each day - on paper.
There's something
about putting something in writing, making a commitment, it
sets a direction, it creates sort of an itinerary. And then
the ability to check something off, it sounds like a small thing
and it is, but there's a wonderful psychological reward in being
able to check something off.
And when you
make your plan to do things, Donald says, have one central calendar.
The average person
uses thirteen different ways of keeping track of their time.
So, they've got a little daybook over here and they've got a
Palm Pilot over here and they've got a wall calendar over here.
Just that simple disorganization tends to create chaos and keeps
us from accomplishing what we want to accomplish. So, what we
recommend is use one system that incorporates everything.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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