Productivity Hacks

 Five Steps to Taking Effective Notes

Students and businesspeople feel that the drudgery of writing notes dwarfs the benefits of organization. I think this is a false assumption. There are five note-writing steps for drafting oral and written communications and for daily organization. Follow these guidelines and you will be taking effective notes and soon accept them as a welcome companion to your daily life.

Notes organize your content and help you stay on task, but ultimately you will be communicating your written or verbal ideas to others. Very often, this means sending documents or presentations to colleagues with whom you collaborate. Just as taking effective notes in a word processor makes your day more efficient, removing duplicate contacts from address books in applications such as Microsoft Outlook will increase productivity, and software is available to carry out the job. One such program is a cloud based app called Scrubly. Scrubly allows you to merge, delete, cleanup and download your address book quickly and easily.

Other relevant articles:

EnglishCompanion “Introduction to Note Making”
Lifehacker “Geek to Live”
MIT “Tips for Note Taking”

Productivity isn’t all about taking effective notes. Up next is “Five Ways to Unleash the Potential of Your iPhone”
taking effective notes taking effective notes taking effective notes

Become Successful by Doing What You Want!

Do you find that your mind often drifts off while you are at work? Are you constantly watching the clock and calculating, to the very minute, how much longer you need to stay at work? Do you find your work boring and work-related tasks difficult to complete? Do you wish that you could be someone else? Someone who has endless energy and radiates happiness? Find Your Passion Being that person who radiates happiness and who is energetic and excited about life can happen, when you find and pursue your passion, you become successful. People who follow their passions and do what they love, do stuff better. It’s as simple as: do what you love and love what you do! Shakespeare had it right when he said “To Thy Ownself be True”. Being true to who you are and working in an area that you are passionate about creates a wonderful cycle of success and adds happiness to your life. Like most, cleaning the toilet does not move me to passion but if I can find a way to make cleaning the toilet important to me, then the task becomes doable. I totally love to have a clean and fresh smelling house. It just makes me feel better. If I take that passion for feeling better and apply it to the toilet, then the toilet is easier to clean. The toilet becomes my friend. Well, not my friend exactly, but you get the idea. Because I can’t only do the things that I want to do and can’t afford to hire a cleaner, I use this technique to help me complete those necessary daily household type tasks.

I dislike my job for many reasons. Often I find it very tedious and I try to leave work early when I can. My job is boring, and even worse, there are not enough tasks to keep me occupied. Occasionally though we get an influx of orders and when that happens, I find that my productivity increases and work is easier. Nothing is worse for me than not having enough to do! In order to stave off the boredom and make my job more tolerable, I search out extra tasks and keep a notebook on hand to write my ideas. I tell myself (and believe) that my current job is only temporary and important because it pays my bills. I make my job work for me, by finding moments of happiness throughout the day.

When I get home from work, I turn to my real passion: writing in my blog and keeping up to date with my friends and family. This is what brings me the most happiness. My email account is VERY important to me and I try to keep it as organized as possible (saving time is my passion too). I often send out group emails to my contacts and it is highly important to me that I do not have duplicate contacts in my address book or other messaging applications. I don’t want to look like a rookie who sends out the same message to people more than once. Luckily for me, there is software that will deal with duplicate contacts, so I can avoid doing a mundane task during my fun time.

Other relevant articles:

Passion, The Ultimate Productivity Tool
Discover Your Passion, Do What You Love & Success Will Follow
Without Passion & Purpose, Greater Productivity Cannot Help You!

To become successful it involves more than just doing what you want! Taking effective notes will certainly help!

become successful become successful become successful become successful

The Benefits of an Agenda List

To many of us, the idea of an agenda list is a foreign one. However, we are all familiar with a similar item known as the grocery list. Just as grocery lists are used to remind us of what to buy, agenda lists are used to remind us who to speak with. Time management and productivity is greatly increased with the use of a proper agenda list. This simple tool includes a list of information that we must get from people around us to complete our projects. Think of an agenda list as a personal to-do list.Why Agenda Lists are UsefulThough we often don’t like to admit it, most of us rely heavily on information from those around us to move through our daily lives and complete our tasks on time. Whether it is as simple as reminding our boss to send us a file or as complex as asking a coworker to rewrite last week’s meeting agenda, these requests can pile up. Having a list of them can keep us organized and decrease time spent running around the office trying to get the information we need.

Time management can also be improved with the proper use of an agenda list. Not only do we save time by asking for information when we see coworkers, we also save the time usually spent deciding what to do next. If we have a list of the information that we need right in front of us, all we need to do is choose a task that fits into our open time slot and complete it.

Having an agenda list and crossing off information that we have already obtained can also give us a sense of personal accomplishment. I know that I love to see my long list of checked off tasks at the end of the day. It makes me feel as though I have really completed something.

How to Organize Your Agenda List

Time management is a very personal skill that we all approach differently. The same goes for agenda lists. It may take us a few tries to find an organizational method that works well. I start by listing all the projects that I am working on. Under each project, I list the names of people who are involved. Under each name, I list all the information that I must get from that person as separate bullet points. When I get a piece of information, I cross it off. I make a new agenda each week, but that is just my personal preference.

Keeping It All Together

Making an agenda sheet is a great first step towards better time management and workplace productivity. A great next step is to organize our address books and contact lists by deleting any old contacts and duplicate entries. Taking this step can save us a lot of time in the long run. Thankfully, it is not a task that is very difficult to complete. There are a number of software programs designed especially for this purpose and these help us to streamline our lists in no time.

Other Related Articles:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4731325_meeting-agenda-that-works.html

http://meetingmix.com/resources/how-to-create-a-meeting-agenda

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-an-Agenda-for-a-Meeting

The agenda list will help you to do stuff well, while doing what you want!

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Getting Things Done: The Successful Man’s Task List

Sometimes I am overwhelmed with things to do and I need to find a quick and easy way to organize all the tasks and just start getting things done. The best way that I have found to make it easier on myself is just to make a to-do list. Very simple, but also extremely effective. Creating a to-do list seems to be a lost art, as many lists are too general or don’t include all the tasks that need to be accomplished.I used to look at to-do lists with dread and tried to avoid them at all costs. But that is simply because I didn’t grasp the full power of the to-do list. I was so stressed out because I created lists without easily achievable tasks. I created larger goals that seemed much more daunting to tackle.

I would create a list, work on it, and then abandon it after a few items were crossed off. Part of the issue was that I created vague, general tasks that didn’t give me a specific path to follow through to completion. When it comes to getting things done, it is best to be as specific as possible. That way there is no confusion over what is to be done first, and then next, and then how to finish. Creating to-do lists like this changed my life and made me far more productive than I ever thought possible.

The best way to illustrate my point is to give an example. If I wanted to create a to-do list including cleaning my bedroom, would I just write “Clean bedroom” on the list and leave it at that? The old me would, and I wouldn’t be getting things done, or if they did get done, they wouldn’t be very thorough. By creating a specific list of all the tasks, I can make sure that I check them all off to do a complete and thorough job. I will create a sample to-do list for cleaning my bedroom:

Clean Bedroom

– Make the bed

– Vacuum the carpet

– Organize closet

– Hang up clothes

– Sort shoes

This is by no means a complete list, but it gives the general idea of the type of tasks I will put on a to-do list. If I just had “Clean bedroom” on the list, then I probably wouldn’t have gotten to the very specific aspects such as organizing my shoes. By creating a list with specific tasks, it aids in getting things done and gives you a roadmap of manageable steps you can precisely follow in order to do a complete and thorough job.

Creating to-do lists can help you streamline your productivity and make it easier for you to get things done in your daily life. There are other things I do to increase my productivity as well. When running errands, I have along lists of contacts on my smartphone that I have to sort through when calling a particular business or person. I have found I often have more than one listing for some people with multiple entries. There is software that can delete duplicate contacts and merge them into one single list though and allow me to boost my productivity.

Other relevant articles:

http://www.earlytorise.com/2008/02/25/using-daily-task-lists-to-accomplish-your-goals-2/

http://mysuperchargedlife.com/blog/personal-productivity-accomplish-3-things-today/

In line with Getting Things Done is working with The Power of Agenda Lists