2 Key measures of effective productivity systems
that I learned from my mother.
When the Instigator blog was compiling tips for The Ultimate Guide to Productivity I posted my best tip, use the productivity system that works for you.
“There are people that make getting ready to get things done an art form. They have the slickest looking DayTimers, the latest PDAs and the most powerful software, but they never put it to use.”
How do you know if the system is working? There are two key measures of an effective productivity system.
I was speaking with my mother a couple of days ago and telling her about my recent bout of sickness and the problems with treatment. She asked me what antibiotic I was taking and, when I told her, she said, “you’re father was on that.”
As we chatted about it, I heard some rustling paper in the background and mom said, “I thought so, here’s the prescription.” She read off the details. I asked why he had been on the medication and she said, “that was in 2003, when he had his surgery.”
My mother will be 78 in a couple of months. Not only did she remember the name of the antibiotic from four years ago, within 45 seconds she had pulled a copy of the prescription from her files. She understands the first measure of an effective productivity system:
1) You can find things that need to be found. It doesn’t matter whether you use an electronic document system like Eric Mack, or you’re using a shoe box in your closet: if you can’t retrieve the information when you need it, the system is not effective.
My mother has never owned a PDA or used a computer. The closest she ever came to digital organization was an electronic address book she used until it became too difficult to read the screen. My mother has gotten things done by using heavily annotated paper calendars.
She never misses a birthday or anniversary; she does not accrue interest or penalties for late bill payment; and she doesn’t miss appointments, meetings and other activities. In fact, visiting mom and dad forces me to be more organized, because she needs to be organized. She understands the second measure of an effective productivity system:
2) Things get done when they need to be done. Whether your list contains a half-dozen items per week or a half-dozen per hour, they have to be completed in a timely fashion. Use a context based system like David Allen’s GTD, a text-based list like Todo.txt, or whatever it takes to meet your commitments on time.
As you maintain your productivity systems, these two measures can be a benchmark against which you can test the effectiveness of your systems.
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