{"id":1606,"date":"2013-01-06T21:36:12","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T02:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/?p=1606"},"modified":"2013-01-06T21:36:14","modified_gmt":"2013-01-07T02:36:14","slug":"my-productive-practices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/2013\/01\/06\/my-productive-practices\/","title":{"rendered":"My Productive Practices"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/2013\/01\/06\/my-productive-practices\/productive-matrix\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1607\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1607\" title=\"productive matrix\" src=\"http:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/productive-matrix-640x428.png\" alt=\"productive matrix\" width=\"640\" height=\"428\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/productive-matrix-640x428.png 640w, https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/productive-matrix-1024x684.png 1024w, https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/productive-matrix.png 1027w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>At this time of year the interwebs get very productive creating blog postings about productivity, and this blog is all about me adding \u00c2\u00a0information to an existing saturation, so here goes:<\/p>\n<p>These two recent articles have some good ideas for a more productive 2013:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Robert C. Pozen in <em>Forbes<\/em>: http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/susanadams\/2012\/10\/08\/6-ways-to-be-more-productive\/<\/li>\n<li>Erin Schulte collected thoughts from a number of productive people in <em>Fast Company<\/em> http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/3004136\/11-productivity-hacks-super-productive-people<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Geeks are always keen to approach organizing their lives as an engineering problem. \u00c2\u00a0Hence the obsession with <a href=\" http:\/\/books.google.ca\/books?id=iykLVJAK49kC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=0142000280&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=Vs_pUN7MAc_wrAHws4CwAQ&amp;ved=0CEAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\">David Allen&#8217;s <em>Getting Things Done<\/em><\/a> is a time-management methodology \u00c2\u00a0and the steady flow of ideas that come out of http:\/\/lifehacker.com<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what I consider my top five most productive practices:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>The OHIO principle for E-Mail: Only Handle It Once. \u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><br \/>\nDon&#8217;t keep re-reading waiting until you&#8217;re ready for a response, choose to handle then or not respond at all (with an exception for the &#8220;can&#8217;t read this here&#8221; problem with mobile devices &#8211; but mark it as unread). \u00c2\u00a0I&#8217;m not a dogmatic process-to-zero inbox person, but I do work sequentially. I&#8217;ll only mark as read when the messages is &#8220;no longer my responsibility&#8221; and some times that means responding asking for clarity to buy a little time and share the responsibility of transmitting a clear message.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Tasks are important and ubiquitous.<\/strong><br \/>\nI think I&#8217;m one of the few people who values Microsoft Outlook&#8217;s Tasks feature, and there&#8217;s all kinds of other task Apps. \u00c2\u00a0The trick for me is having those task synced across all my devices, so that when I have the moment of inspiration or recollection I record it easily. \u00c2\u00a0Tasks (or your calendar) is often an important next step after E-Mail comes in that allows you to &#8220;deal&#8221; with it at an initial level and mark the message as read. \u00c2\u00a0It&#8217;s also worth noting that a project is not a task.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Unsubscribe!<\/strong><br \/>\nTake a second or two to unsubscribe from those mailing lists that you&#8217;re just deleting. \u00c2\u00a0One of my practices has been if the mailings are something that I&#8217;m a little interested in, unsubscribe, but try to follow on Twitter. \u00c2\u00a0Switch from the sender-controlled medium or E-Mail to the reviver-controlled medium of Twitter (and better yet, Flipboard cover stories).<\/li>\n<li><strong>E-Mail filters.<\/strong><br \/>\nYour mobile phone is not the end of them! \u00c2\u00a0If your E-Mail accounts are attached to Gmail, Hotmail etc. or your corporate Exchange account if you use your webmail interface to craft your mail rules they&#8217;ll be processed before they hit your desktop AND your mobile phone. \u00c2\u00a0The key with Exchange is that you can easily overwrite your server-based rules with your desktop. \u00c2\u00a0I have rules that automatically mark out of office messages are read, strip priorities (sorry) and a few that forward on to my Evernote E-Mail address. \u00c2\u00a0Speaking of E-Mail filters and rules&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><strong>Automation is your friend: We all should learn a good scripting language.<\/strong><br \/>\nFrom <a href=\"http:\/\/ifttt.com\">IFTTT<\/a> to Python &amp; Perl to PowerShell &amp; Automator everything a computer can do for you, it should be.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Also, never forget anything! \u00c2\u00a0For that trick, please see <a href=\"http:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/me-and-evernote\">my blog posting on Evernote<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At this time of year the interwebs get very productive creating blog postings about productivity, and this blog is all about me adding \u00c2\u00a0information to an existing saturation, so here goes: These two recent articles have some good ideas for a more productive 2013: Robert C. Pozen in Forbes: http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/susanadams\/2012\/10\/08\/6-ways-to-be-more-productive\/ Erin Schulte collected thoughts from&hellip; <a class=\"continue\" href=\"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/2013\/01\/06\/my-productive-practices\/\">Continue Reading<span> My Productive Practices<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,14,37,39,18,3,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1611,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions\/1611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}