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

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.

Productivity advice from Seth Godin:
Is effort a myth?

With that forewarning, here’s a bootstrapper’s/marketer’s/entrepreneur’s/fast-rising executive’s effort diet. Go through the list and decide whether or not it’s worth it. Or make up your own diet. Effort is a choice, at least make it on purpose:

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ’spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:

* Exercise for thirty minutes.
* Read relevant non-fiction (trade magazines, journals, business books, blogs, etc.)
* Send three thank you notes.
* Learn new digital techniques (spreadsheet macros, Firefox shortcuts, productivity tools, graphic design, html coding)
* Volunteer.
* Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
* Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

If you somehow pulled this off, then six months from now, you would be the fittest, best rested, most intelligent, best funded and motivated person in your office or your field. You would know how to do things other people don’t, you’d have a wider network and you’d be more focused.

What would you do with 120 minutes?

Greetings. I know that you all do not particularly like affiliate offers for books and so-on, but this could be a very important chance. The economy is tough, there is a highly-contested Presidential election in the US, and my lovely bride is still looking for work.

I want to tell you about my friend Naomi who has a new offer for her Online Business School, that I would like you to check out. Here is a snippet that cuts right to the center of the message:

Recently, in a small town in Ontario, the area’s largest employer closed its doors. Most of the town, trained only in the art and science of making canned soup, found themselves out of work.

A few thousand soup makers live in a town where nobody wants to pay them to make soup. Now all of them are going to try to find a way to apply their skill sets to other employers in the area. The competition is fierce, and their mortgages are on the line.

Except there are no other major employers in the area, least of all ones that can make use of Jerry’s 12 years of mushroom chopping experience.

Some of them will find jobs, sure, and good for them. But many others are going to have to reinvent themselves.

Is this something that could happen to you?

Do you only have one stream of income? Is your family only a couple of paychecks away from big time problems? If you feel threatened by the economic downturn, no matter who gets elected President of the USA, you need to re-invent yourself. Learn how here.

Every athlete has one, whether for an individual or team sport, from little kids on the sandlot to professionals on the gridiron. Even bridal parties need someone to instruct and manage the actions of the team members. Professional football and baseball teams often have a different coach for each particular aspect of the game, offense, defense, you name it.

Yet many people outside of these arenas are completely on their own.

The worlds of business and work, family and life are just as important to each of us as they are to professional athletes, yet once we are out of school or college we rarely get any coaching on our performance.

What can a coach do for you?

A coach or mentor is there to help you develop your skills. In many areas of life (such as money, parenting, marriage, leadership, public speaking, even health and excercise) there are coaches available who can guide you to:

• Discover and develop your passions
• Build a clear vision for the future
• Write your personal mission statement
• Learn how to relate to co-workers
• Learn how to manage people
• Learn how to navigate change
• Build your communication skills
• Appraise your performance
• Break out of a rut
• Learn to think about problems in a different way
• Take action in areas that need improvement
• Free yourself of a destructive self-image
• Improve communications in a marriage or relationship
• Become more confident in yourself
• Take more responsibility
• Take more (or less)! risks
• Grow in your faith

If you have had a growth experience with a coach or mentor, tell us about it in the Comments! If you are interested in getting some coaching (particularly about Productivity practices), see the services page and drop me a line.

Or just send me an e-mail. And to totally free Productivity information, and share your experiences with others, join the Productivity Mastermind conference call on Thursdays at 4:00pm Eastern.