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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.

Whakate has a Life Design E-Book available as a free download for a limited time:

Getting Started with Life Design E-Book

Are you fed up with the pep-talks and supposedly life-changing quick-fixes that never seem to last more than 48 hours? Whakate presents its new e-book that will show you how to get more productive and organized with a compilation of life design methods that actually work in the long term.

If you want to get started with designing your life, this book is for you!

* Personality
* Assertiveness
* Values & Goals
* Habits
* Time Management
* Gadgets & Tools
* GTD & DIT

I will read this e-book over the weekend, and report back with a review. I recommend that you go over and download it now, as I do not know how long it will be free.

I get asked this question a lot, and the short answer is, “You can’t.”

The long answer is that you can make more time for the important things, if you stop doing things that are not important. The trick is to identify those things and weed them out.

Do you know what you are doing with your time?

As previously discussed in the post “3 Steps to Better Time Management” we need to take a look at three things in our lives:

1. How do we really spend our time?
2. What is truly important to us?
3. How can we make our commitments more effective?

If you feel like you do not have enough time it is likely that you are busy spending your time rather than investing it.

Knowing what we are really doing with our time is essential, and in order to find out we need to create a time log, a blank piece of paper divided into three columns: “Time”,” Activity”, and “Interruption”. Carry this paper with you for an entire day, recording your actions and activities, according to these instructions:

1. Every time you take on a new activity, make an entry on the Time Log. You may feel foolish. It will interrupt your work. Do it anyway and do it for the entire day. Pick a happy medium in defining what constitutes a new activity. (Don’t stop to note every pen stroke, but don’t have only large blocks of time entered as a single activity.)

2. Under “time,” enter the time you start the new activity, to the minute. Under “activity,” enter a brief description of what you’re doing. Under “interruption,” explain why the activity felt like an interruption of your time, if it did. This last column is totally subjective.

Tracking your day like this will allow you to see exactly what it is that you have been doing, so be honest and disciplined about it. You may be surprised at how different it is from what you think that you have been doing. It also allows you to track the types of interruptions that you experience, and when. I would recommend that if you do this exercise, put the completed time tracker in your Tickler File for four weeks later and do it again then. This will enable you to track your progress on staying productive, and managing those interruptions (if possible).

The next step is to look over your actions and activities for the day with a hi-lighter in your hand. Hi-light the entries that you consider to be “important”, and make a list of them on a second sheet of paper. Then make a list of the “unimportant” or “interruption” entries. Staple these together and file them in your Tickler for comparison four weeks from now. You may want to write the “interruptions” on a 3″x5″ card and keep it in your organizer so that you can be reminded of what activities you are working on eliminating.

Make more time: Action steps

Look at your time-tracker log. Are you spending time doing things that you do not need to do? Are they wasteful of your resources? Are there tasks or activities that could be delegated?

• Stop doing the things that you do not need to do. This can be difficult but it is essential. Delegate as much as possible, delete the rest as best you can.
• Batch your activities. Some tasks, like checking e-mail, paying bills and filing can be done in groups. Create some filters for your e-mail account and only check it periodically (the period will vary based on your needs). In fact, if e-mail is one of those activities that pulls you out of a workflow mindset then you definitely need to get it under control.
• Set a regular time for a Weekly Review. Checking back on yourself is a powerful motivator to get things done in  timely manner. Looking at a long list of un-done tasks can be depressing, but looking back upon a list of crossed-off activities is inspirational! Use your Review time to create a short list of Most Important Tasks - the things that have to get done next week. Focus on this list and your work will seem much less daunting.

What do you think? Do you have any tips for making more time for the things that matter?
Please share in the comments.

My friend Marina Martin [ Sufficient Thrust ] has a terrific resource for setting New Year’s Resolutions that you should take a look at. I used this little booklet last year and it made an amazing difference in my effectiveness, in fact I accomplished all but two of my goals!

In my work here as a Productivity evangelist I have tried, experimented with, and discarded a ton of applications, methods, and practices for setting goals and getting them done. This one works. Martin says:

I’m the very definition of a Type-A personality and have worked as an efficiency consultant for years, so making lists and plans is second nature to me. Something I’ve come to believe strongly is that Type-A personalities perform best when we have specific action steps, as opposed to paragraphs of theory. The blogosphere is certainly full of posts about resolutions, but I couldn’t find anything that satisfied my craving for step-by-step success — so I made it myself! I use this exact same process myself whenever I have a goal to achieve, with great results, and I’m excited that others have benefited from it too.

Since I am such a laid-back, relaxed person this type of system appealed to me. How does this resolution-defining system work?

The Perfect New Year’s Resolution

The #1 reason why people don’t achieve their resolutions is because their resolutions weren’t really resolutions at all.

It’s no secret around here that I’m big on goal-setting. However, New Year’s Resolutions are a very specific kind of goal.

A New Year’s Resolution has to meet the following criteria:

* It must be achievable by 11:59pm on December 31 of that calendar year.
* It must be measurable AND specific. In other words, a complete stranger should easily be able to objectively determine whether or not you’ve achieved it.
* It should positively impact your life, if only indirectly.
* A process of events should be required in order to achieve it. “Visit Kenya” doesn’t count if you normally travel and it’s within your financial means and comfort zone. It would count, however, if you had to come up with some way of financing the trip, or if you moved there for a month, or if you were having an existential crisis about hippos and were going there to confront your fears.

Martin recommends creating 4-6 specific, actionable goals for the new year, and provides a resource for breaking those goals down into action steps. For example:

A lousy Resolution: “Lose weight”
A better one: “Lose 20lbs”
A really good example: “Weigh 134lbs naked on the morning of December 31″
And simply awesome: “Run three miles without stopping wearing XXS Aerie sweatpants”

The awesome version of this resolution not only incorporates two common goals — losing weight and exercising more — into one, but it also focuses on one of the real reasons we want to lose weight: to fit into a smaller clothing size. It doesn’t matter what number the scale shows if your pants won’t fit!

Read more about it and download the Ultimate Guide to New Year’s Resolutions here. And let’s all give Marina a big hug and thank you for sharing this resource with us!

For more help in keeping up your motivation and getting some accountability, you may want to get involved with Leo Babauta’s new 30 Day Challenge forum.

If you need even more help, or just want to discuss how to make 2009 your best year yet, feel free to drop me a line: Contact Stephen.