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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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My friend Bill has put together a pretty cool tutorial for the Bubble Planner Organizer. It is a pen-and-paper system that uses a Mind-mapping-style format to collect your thoughts and put together your agenda. It works really well, and I highly recommend it.

How does it work? Well, I’ll let Bill tell you:

Memory is naturally associative, not linear. Bubble Maps allow associations and links to be recorded and reinforced due to the location of the bubbles on the page. The method of loci technique, which was taught by Aristotle, uses the associative properties of your memory to connect new information to locations (or loci) that you already know.

For more info, or to purchase this awesome planner system, click this logo (affiliate):

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6m5c5o. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

“As you walk and eat and travel,
be where you are.
Otherwise you will miss most of your life.”

~ Buddha

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5963e5. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

When I was a kid I hated washing the dinner dishes by hand in the kitchen sink. Hated it! I would do anything to get out of it. Finally resorting to doing such a bad job of it that my mom had to give in and do them herself.

Our new home in Maine does not have a dishwasher.

I do, however, have something that I did not have when I was younger. Patience. And an appreciation for a job well-done. Now, I actually enjoy doing the dishes by hand. It gives me a chance to be purely in the moment, mindful of the washing and the rinsing, letting all of my other thoughts vanish.

When I wash the dishes, I wash the dishes.

When you multi-task, the efficiency level of any given part of your attention goes down. You are not giving anything your best, nor will you get the best possible result. Work on “mono-tasking“.

Do one thing at a time. You may find that you get more done, and more importantly, things will get done better.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/64fqj4. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint is busy cranking widgets today, so I have stepped up to provide the helpful tips for today’s GTD Cafe -

Change Your Focus for a Change in Result

It is remarkable to me that I hear so many stories about people who are bound and determined to “get organized” and seem to fail so spectacularly. They will clean their house or office from top-to-bottom, without regard to where they are actually putting things, or how they use the “stuff” that was not put away in the first place.

There is a fairly common-sense skill that every person would do well to develop, the skill of being ready to start over. Frequently the people that I have known that need to get organized are focused on the wrong things.

These people are looking at the mess, the physical clutter, and not the processes that created the mess. These processes often look like the tangled cables of a collapsed suspension bridge, and are as effective as the same.

As David Allen says, “Are you ready for ‘Ready’?“:

1. Where is your Focus - When some type of crisis grabs your attention, how long does it take you to get back on track?
2. Where is your Balance - Do you have a system in place for capturing what you are doing right now, so that you can easily come back to it?
3. Where is your Result - Is your result clear in your mind? Is it written down? Has it been communicated to your team?

Having answers (good answers!) to these three questions can allow you to be ready when an emergency pops up, or when someone else needs your help and you need to re-direct your attention. “Can you surrender control at one level, in order to move quickly to [another] one?” [~David Allen, Ready for Anything, p. 61]

Here are a couple of tips for putting these solutions into place:

• Do you have a summary, or progress-so-far-page, for each of the projects that you are working on that you keep updated? This can make it easier to return to something that you have had to put down.
• Be mindful of your work habits and how you actually use your tools and space. Put your phone on the same side of your desk as the hand you use to hold it. Keep often-accessed file folders in your desk drawer cabinet rather than the cabinet across the way, etc.
• When there is an emergency, take 5 seconds to stop, think, and make a note of where you are, what you are doing. No matter what the emergency is, you have 5 seconds to mark your place.(Unless the building is on fire, then scram!)

“Once you shift the image held in your mind, different things will automatically start to happen. Focus on red, red shows up. Focus on a different outcome for a conversation, and different thoughts will come to you.”

~ David Allen

Are you ready for a change in focus?

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