I’ve been reading Sally McGhee’s book, “Take Back Your Life!” and I have found some of her organizational ideas to be fascinating. She has developed a productivity solution similar to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.” Her track has taken a little different twist as she has added the concept of meaningful objectives to the mix.
You can think of meaningful objectives as important and measurable goals. Having goals at the top of the list is really important for focus. Sally Explains…
Meaningful Objectives are your North star, your guiding light, and your reference point for success or failure. Without meaning, objectives become dry and nothing more on a to-do list that you might (or might not) look at every now and then. You won’t be motivated to work on your objectives, but you’ll feel guilty if you don’t.
I took Sally’s idea of meaningful objectives and incorporated them into a simple work flow idea that seems to work well for me.
1. Start with a goal or meaningful objectives. These need to be measurable and actionable with a due date.
2. Divide the Goal into logical projects
3. Incorporate the idea of a focused 50 minute work period to accomplish project tasks
4. Divide the tasks into their most simplistic form… next actions
Let’s put this idea into practice with an example.
1. Our Meaningful Objective. Write a 150 page book on productivity solutions in 3 months
2. Our projects: Table of Contents, Forward, Acknowledgments, 15 chapters, Index
3. Sample Accomplishment: Take 50 minutes and write a chapter
4. Individual Actions: 1.Chapter Title. 2.Main body. 3.Wrap Up 4.Illustrations
While this example is over-simplistic, the idea of Goals, Projects, Accomplishments, and Individual Actions has worked very well for me. We’ll take a look at some paper based solutions later this week that will take this process and make it simple to implement.
Technorati Tags: GTD, Outlook, Productivity