Your Organizing Coach

A Blackberry is Just a Tool

Having information is not the same as knowing what to do with it. Sometimes more is just ... more. Will a Blackberry make you better at your job? Are you sure about that?

In an interview with CIO Insight magazine, David Allen said, "If you are unproductive to begin with, technology will add something else you are unproductive about." Having great tools is wonderful, but they don't automatically bestow the skills needed to use them. It's easy to have the illusion of productivity when you are constantly pushing information around.

Go ahead and get the Blackberry if you want it. If you also want to be more productive, you'll need to

• be clear on what you're trying to accomplish
• make decisions
• take action on those decisions
• follow up on the actions of others
• stay on track

Electronic devices such as Blackberrys are great for aiding you in those tasks (so is a pen and some paper). It's you, however, who supplies the brain power.

Decision Making: Brain vs. Gut

Yesterday I wrote about the value of writing it all down when you’re trying to figure out what to do first. This technique works for other kinds of decision making too. If you have a big decision to make that you can give a yes or no answer to, you can make a list of the pros and cons. Examples are: Should I take this job? Should I buy that particular car? Should I move?

The interesting thing about this method is that even if your pro list is much longer than your con list, you may realize that your answer is no anyway. This is typically true when the entries on your pro list are things like, “it’s a great opportunity,” “I would learn a lot” and “it would make (fill in the blank) happy.”

When you stare at that long list of positive reasons to do something, you ought to feel like you’ve been given the green light. It should make you happy! If you feel dread or misery or even just lack of enthusiasm, it doesn’t matter how long that list is, you know your answer is no.

Starting Somewhere

Starting is hard. It means going from a standstill into some useful activity that you may not feel confident about doing. Once you have started, though, it’s much easier to continue. That’s why I have a bunch of tricks for just getting started, any which way.

One typical problem people have is that everything they need to do seems equally important. Here are a few ways to handle it.

• Assign each task a number from 1 through X (whatever the total is) randomly. Then do the tasks in that order.
• Another, more fun, way is to write each one on a separate index cards and then shuffle the deck. Turn over a card and do that task. Keep going till you’re done.

If you realize when you do this that all the tasks are actually not equally important, feel free to reorder them. Sometimes you don’t know which is most important, or which is least important, until you put them in some kind of order.

It’s easier to make decisions like this when you get it all down on paper. When it’s just in your head, it’s too vague, too unreal. Writing down a list of tasks gets you to think more concretely about them.

What if you’re still not sure about the order you’ve chosen? Just get going. Even if you get to a point where you have to stop and do something else that, it turns out, has to be completed first, you’ll probably be farther along than if you tried to figure it all out in your head first.