Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog

This is a collaborative post from yours truly and @emilyrobe, a Twitter friend of mine:

Just before Christmas I was ill with a virus that took about 20 days to clear off. After that I found myself in what I term a ‘funk’, one of those unmotivated, apathetic moods that drive you insane because you want to work, you just can’t find the energy!

I twitted this out looking for reactions and had a few great suggestions, to do lists, order ranking, people recommended systems for me to look at or resources to read. None of them had hit the spot though. What had put me in this ‘funk’?

My head was so busy with ‘noise’ that I couldn’t think straight and I felt very isolated. There was no creativity or clarity that I could pull on, lists weren’t helping! I needed to clear some space so I could think straight and ping!, there was my light-bulb moment. Space!

I work from home, I’m a busy mum of three, wife and virtual assistant, I’d been ill and my ‘space’ was cluttered. I’d got used to having my laptop on my knee whilst I wasn’t working and had broken the habit of working at my desk, which had become cluttered, in fact the whole house was cluttered.

Having identified the source of frustration and spending time eliminating some of it, my mood lifted somewhat, cleaning up released some of that blocked energy, standing back and noting the small achievements of a clean house and a tidy desk made me realise how seemingly small inconsequential things can make us unproductive.

My good working habits had been broken by illness and I had fallen into the trap of trying to work where there are distractions, ie on the sofa or dining table, the noisiest and busiest places in my home! Once those areas had been reclaimed and the clutter eliminated, I felt much more like working and the ‘funk’ had gone.

I was in a similar “funk” at the same time, and we tweeted back-and-forth about it. I was not sick but we had been doing a lot of traveling and my to-do list was being neglected. My own problem was clutter in my mind and in my scattered lists of things to do.

Unfortunately my newly-mobile lifestyle had not yet been fully organized. Living out of suitcases for 3 months is no easy task, and I finally decided that I needed a new system to capture and track my Next Actions. So I did what everyone should do, and went to look for help in the Work.Life.Creativity forum. We have a topic there called Working the List that was a big help, with ideas on how to capture, organize and prioritize the Next Actions.

What a relief! I did a mind dump last night, writing down every possible thing that I could think of that needed doing and then organized them into a set of lists based on my new Contexts and situation. The new context list looks like this:

• Calls Track in my Calendar
• Errands Track in my hPDA
• Book Candidates Track in my Capture Notebook
• Writing Track in the Lists Notebook
• Computer Track in the Lists Notebook
• Agendas Track in the Lists Notebook
• Read/Review Track in the Lists Notebook
• Reflecting Track in the Lists Notebook

The first three items have been tracked in those tools for some time now so I am comfortable using them and in knowing where to look for them. The new piece of the puzzle is the Lists Notebook.

Once I had organized the various tasks and Next Actions, it was a simple matter to number the pages in the notebook (right-hand only, 1-96) and then break it up into sections. The blank Index page shown in the pic has been labeled and detailed as to which sort of things go where.

What a relief to have this all done! I slept better last night than I have in a while, and didn’t have to worry about anything nagging me from the back of my mind.

What sort of tools do you use for tracking your lists? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

Dragos shares his experience at eDragonU: Staying GTD Over The Hype

Two or three years ago, a strange topic about organization skills, de-cluttering and mind like water exploded on the Internet. It was about GTD, or Getting Things Done, a methodology for boosting productivity invented and shared by David Alled in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity [aff link]. This phenomenon lead to a sudden surge of new blogs, with 43folders.com of Merlin Mann becoming the icon blog for this trend. Soon, other useful and very popular blogs appeared. At that time even yours truly was a GTD wannabee and one of my very first posts in this blog - and one of the most popular, I must say - was about GTD for people in transition countries. GTD posts and blogs where spreading over the internet at light speed. It was the Golden Era.

But now the hype is over.

Personal GTD Points to consider

First:

• Clear your mind, capture all those loose thoughts
• Track your Next Actions in the way that suits your personality
• Live and Die by the 2 Minute Rule
• Keep things in perspective

Read the whole article at eDragonu: Staying GTD Over The Hype

Then visit the Work.Life.Creativity forum for the new home for GTD and related discussions.

The Getting Things Done workflow is a very powerful approach to managing the actions and tasks that we need to accomplish every day. It may not have occurred to you that it is possible to apply the 5-step workflow as a framework for your business.
That is, clients and customers are inputs like any other, and as such you can manage them as you would an e-mail.

Apply the GTD Workflow to your business

The system itself is quite simple, and can be handled with a tool like HighriseHQ, Salesforce, or any other customer relationship system - or with a pencil and paper. You can adapt these basics to whichever system you currently use.

1. Collect - This first step is handling the initial lead, whether it comes in via advertising or a sales call, you collect as much information about the client and their situation as you can. Are you getting the right information? Are you asking the right questions?
2. Process - In step two the client’s wants and needs are analyzed and possible solutions are generated.
3. Organize - Create a proposal based on selecting the best of the possible solutions.
4. Review - Also called “the pitch”, go over the proposed solution with the client, presenting the features and benefits of the solution. This is also the step where objections will be raised. Since an objection is a request for more information, it enables you to further examine the client’s needs and determine the need behind the need. This will allow you to further customize and personalize the solution.
5. Do - Ask for the sale. Whatever business you are in there comes a time to close the deal and ask the client for their business, and then complete the transaction. Implement your solution and ask for a referral.

How could you implement this very simple framework in your own business? Do you currently have a formalized sales process in place? What do you suppose a workflow system like this could do for your training and retention expenses?

Leave a comment.

I have been reading the new book by David Allen, “Making It All Work“, and getting some really powerful insights. The main thrust of the book is that it expands your Getting Things Done practice by emphasizing a couple of points that I have been advocating here for the past year or so:

1. Get control of your system
2. Gain perspective on your responsibilities

Keeping things in context has become my own personal mantra, and one way to do that is with a comprehensive series of reviews. I personally recommend a series of 69 reviews over the course of the year:

• Weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly
• Annually

This may seem like a lot, but with some practice and by discovering what is most important to you these reviews do not take a lot of time and the return on that investment of time is invaluable. I use the weekly reviews to keep myself on track with the day-to-day work for my clients and personal projects. The monthly reviews focus on the larger scale of how my business is going and what I need to drill down on in the future.

The quarterly reviews are mainly geared toward measuring my progress toward the big goals, aspirations, and long-term success. These are the times that I really think about where I am headed and what is being done to get there. Last year I kept some fairly detailed notes during these highly introspective reviews and they came very handy recently when I sat down to look at what worked and what didn’t. This made my annual review go smoothly and provided a template for this year’s goal-setting.

Improving Relationships

One of my primary goals for 2009 is to expand and grow my new consulting business. Working for myself is an enormous challenge, with a fantastic reward - I get to work one-on-one with some really cool people. And I learn something new from every one.

Part of my plan to maintain and expand these existing client relationships - and get the new sales year off to a good start - is to schedule an annual review focusing on each of them.

During this review, I will be looking over the past year’s work with the client using this template:

• Thank them for their business, and tell them how important they are to me.
• Invite them to share their thoughts about the business we did with them - both positive and negative.
• Highlight the positive things we accomplished for them, and how we worked together to address their business issues.
• Brainstorm with the client on new products or services that I can help them to develop and market.

I am looking forward to building sustained relationships based on mutual trust and professional respect, and being able to ask for referrals to create these same powerful relationships with new clients.