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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.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/a9uscv. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

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.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/97s6e8. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Last week’s conference call was a good discussion about using Tickler files for analog and digital uses. We had some input from the callers about real-life applications, and setting up a digital workflow.

The call lasted just under 13 minutes and I would love to hear your thoughts.
Join in the discussions at the Work.Life.Creativity forum, where we kicked things off.

Be sure to register for the next Productivity Mastermind call [Upcoming link] this Thursday, 15 January, at 2:00 pm!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/82h2jx. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

My new capture notebook.

This is a 4″ x 6″ Notebook that I picked up at Pottery Barn in Portland, ME. I bought 3 because they were on sale for 50% off, not knowing exactly what I would use them for. After my little spiral notebook that I was using for capture ran out of pages (and got a little worse for wear) I decided to use one of these notebooks. The verdict: it worked great!

However, with a little tweaking it can work even better.

Read more –>

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/7aqvkz. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen