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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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I have found an interesting post at Behance Magazine that I’d like to share with you today: Tip: 10 Realizations For Productivity & Making Ideas Happen from Behance Magazine

Our years of research have caused us to question the status quo of everyday project management:

* What if compulsive filing yields little benefit?
* What if priority matters more than context?
* What if the success of every project (and life) ultimately comes down to organizing actions you must take?
* What if the design of the method we use for productivity influences our psychology for getting stuff done?

These are some very important questions, with nuggets of wisdom that I have been considering myself for a while now. As I started a new full-time job in July I have been working very hard to make all of my projects successes but I have had to consider priority over context on several occasions - such as working on day-job tasks and planning at home rather than blogging or working on the new website projects.

I have talked about the design of the productivity system influencing your psychological state many times and I know that I have helped a few of you “personalize” your GTD and other systems.

It looks like Behance is working on a new service for managing productivity online, one that takes into account such realizations as:

Questions such as these have led our team to some very important realizations:

1. Actions should be kept separate from email.
Email can kill productivity, because the actions you must take are buried in regular communication. An inbox full of email - even well-filed emails - still forces you to dig through every communication to find the hidden task. Tasks to be completed, or “Action Steps,” should have a management system of their own.

2. People should NOT share whole projects, just relevant items within projects.
Until now, all project management systems were made up of projects that were shared among different people. However, the way people really THINK about their work is more personal: we define our projects in our own terms - and it is rare that 100% of any project is relevant to all involved. Rather than share entire projects, we now have the technology to share just the relevant components of projects - action steps, reference items, discussions, milestones - and the recipient can then organize these components in a way that makes sense for his/her system.

Read the whole post [Tip: 10 Realizations For Productivity & Making Ideas Happen from Behance Magazine] for more background on these insights. (Not an affiliate link, I have not heard anything else about the new product)

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/64wz7b. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Dr. Pascal Venier points to an article by Francis Heylighen and Clément Vidal (2007) Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity. Well, I took one look at that title and knew I had to have it. The summary of this white paper is:

Allen (2001) proposed the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) method for personal productivity enhancement, and reduction of the stress caused by information overload. This paper argues that recent insights in psychology and cognitive science support and extend GTD’s recommendations. We first summarize GTD with the help of a flowchart. We then review the theories of situated, embodied and distributed cognition that purport to explain how the brain processes information and plans actions in the real world. The conclusion is that the brain heavily relies on the environment, to function as an external memory, a trigger for actions, and a source of affordances, disturbances and feedback. We then show how these principles are practically implemented in GTD, with its focus on organizing tasks into “actionable” external memories, and on opportunistic, situation-dependent execution. Finally, we propose an extension of GTD to support collaborative work, inspired by the concept of stigmergy.

What the heck is Stigmergy?

According to Wikipedia:

Stigmergy is a method of indirect communication in a self-organizing emergent system where its individual parts communicate with one another by modifying their local environment.

Stigmergy was first observed in nature - ants communicate to one another by laying down pheromones along their trails, so where ants go within and around their ant colony is a stigmergic system.

That helps a lot, doesn’t it? And how in the world is GTD like ants in a colony? Well, dear readers, the answer is of course, found within the brilliant white paper. I have read it so you don’t have to!

The authors have analyzed the GTD methodology through the lens of academic theories on situated and embodied cognition. That sounds like a big mouthful of techno-babble, but it is actually very simple: the human brain uses long-term memory to be good at recognizing patterns and responding in a way that alters its environment to be closer to the ideal situation. For example, when you see a sink full of dirty dishes, the pattern of “how to wash the dishes” is recognized, and you act on the situation, over and over until the dishes are clean. Once the dishes are clean, you are done, and a feeling of satisfaction replaces the stress and anxiety of seeing the dirty dishes.

Adaptive Productivity Management

Gaining a sense of control over your situation is accomplished by delegating as much of the information storage, task processing, and action management to your environment (i.e. a list, a computer, or a file cabinet).

Then, the decision to perform a specific action at any given time is made by the individual based on time available, energy level, and priority. The feedback-driven decision making process is further enhanced by the knowledge that you are moving toward completion at a comfortable pace. The basic principle of performing an action while having access to the most appropriate mental patterns, physical properties, and environmental tools/resources leads to the stress-free state of flow, or “mind like water”.

Collect
Process
Organize
Review
Do

Related reading on environmental contexts at Delightful Work.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6ln6zw. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

One of my readers asked for some help this week in designing a small calendar for their 3″ x 5″ size planner. They were looking for a 2-page per month size calendar with blanks for the dates, and also some lined note pages.

So I put together a new download for the HD BizBlog Shop:

Here is a pic of the lined note pages:

Visit the HD BizBlog Shop to see all of the Productivity Tools that are available. And thank you for supporting HD BizBlog!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/58nurd. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Ever since I read Steve Leveen’s Little Guide To Your Well-Read Life, I have become a fan of writing notes to myself in the margins of my non-fiction books. I have found that it helps me to remember what I have read, and leaves a “tag” if I need to go back and refer to something later. I also use a 3″x5″ card as my bookmark for writing longer notes, marking interesting quotes, or capturing questions that occur to me while reading.

If I am planning to do a review of the book after reading it, I also use that notecard to track all of the page numbers where I have highlighted something for quoting or special mention. The Innovation Tools Weblog has a post on how Don Snyder uses his index card bookmark:

“The front of the card is horizontal and contains spaces for book title and author’s name to allow for easy filing. The card opens like a book and the inside is ruled to allow for journal-like entry of important points in the book. I list the page number and then the concept I wish to note. The back of the card includes additional ruled lines for final points. I also included a spot on the front of the card to list the most valuable lesson I learned from the book, as well as a favorite quote… Once a book is read, I can replace it on my bookshelf and file the card/bookmark in my office for future referral. I can file books on subject, author, or title - and information is always on-hand.”

Snyder uses an 8″x6″ ruled card of his own design for these notes, there is a more complete description at Snyder’s BrainBlog. (Which, by the way, also has an interesting post about “old” books being made into “new” journals. I have a feeling that at least a couple of my friends that are into notebooks and DIY stuff will appreciate what hobo arona is doing here.)

This has given me an idea for a formatted notecard to use while reading, specifically designed for taking notes.

Here ( note-card-template.pdf ) are two free downloads, a super-simple note card and “pocket” template (and a more detailed one here [ note-card-template2.pdf ]) that you can glue into the front of your book, like Library books had, back in the day. I may do something more elaborate, and offer it in the store with the GTD Calendar and the Review Workbook.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/33pzsk. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen