Waiting can use up a portion of your time. Good time management puts waiting time to use.

Whether at the office, out and about, or at home, here are seven ways to make use of waiting time:

• Review your lists: Check your to-do lists, your shopping lists or other reminders; add, subtract or rearrange, as necessary.
• Review your calendar: If you’re waiting and can contact people, set-up, confirm or reschedule items on your calendar.
• Sort mail: E-mail, paper mail —whether at work or at home— can be organized while on the phone or watching T.V.
• Personal/professional development: Read an industry journal or a school assignment. Carry a media player and listen to speakers, trainers or podcasts.
• Use the phone: If you have access to a phone, use the time to make or return calls.
• Work on hobbies: Carry needlework with you. If you draw, carry a sketch book. Carry a digital camera and snap off a few pictures.
• Structured relaxing: It doesn’t have to be all about efficiency; read a book, solve a crossword puzzle, or play a game on your PDA.

We do a lot of waiting. We can’t get those minutes or hours back, but we can use the time to be productive. Make it a practice to carry your “tools” with you and you’ll find you never have to sit twiddling your thumbs while you wait.

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Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Time is money, the adage goes, and lots of money gets lost in being disorganization. Disorganization is so prevalent in the workplace that the Professional Organizers in Canada estimates a typical office worker wastes 150 hours a year – almost one month – searching for misplaced information. For someone earning $50,000 a year, that translates to a loss of $3,842 a year.

If a lack of organization has your head spinning, take possession of schedule and workspace with this guide eliminating to these six disorganization demons.

1. Manage paper effectively – Barbara Hemphill, author of The Paper Tiger, offers the FAT principle for paper burden: file it, act on it, or toss it. Once you’ve thrown away as much as possible, file everything else into an effective retrieval system or a hard-paper filing system.Sort your files into the following groups according to how often you need them:
   1. Action Files: store in a desk drawer, desk-top file box or anywhere else that’s easy to reach.
   2. Reference Files: store in a convenient location close to your desk.
   3. Archive Files: store in a filing cabinet or an off-site location.
2. Make meetings effective – Managers can spend an average of 17 hours a week in meetings, and that doesn’t include preparation and follow-up time. If you’re holding a meeting, draw up an agenda and circulate it to the staff attending beforehand. Set time limits for each topic, then stick to them.Other time-saving tricks:
   1. schedule the meeting when people are inclined to be brief: before lunch or the end of the day.
   2. invite as few people as possible to limit discussion.
3. Manage drop-in visitors – Reduce “people clutter” by placing in/out trays outside your space to avoid being disturbed by staff. Keep the office door closed. If you have an open-door policy, place your back to the entrance, or face away from your cubicle entry to indicate your unavailability. If staff still insist on speaking with you, stand immediately and walk toward your visitor and cordially ask the purpose of the visit.
4. Schedule telephone calls – Before returning calls, note what you want to say and what you want to find out beforehand. Be brief and to the point, and let the person know that your time is limited. If the discussion is likely to take longer, suggest another date when more time is available. When placing calls, respect the time of other employees by immediately asking if you have phoned at a convenient time or should call back later.
5. Manage your time – Plan when you’re going to tackle tasks and allow enough time to complete all or part of them. Work on difficult jobs first, or at a time when you’re at peak performance, saving the less stressful tasks for when you have less energy.
6. Delegate effectively – If you’re in a position to delegate, the general rule is to pass along work to one of your staff if he or she can do it 80 per cent as well as you can. Make sure the person doesn’t already have a full plate, and give them a deadline. If you’re on the receiving end of delegation, learn to say no if your schedule is full, or find out what isn’t urgent and leave it for another day. If you don’t have a choice, ask for guidance on priorities.

Tags: GTD, productivity

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Write it down

Unless you have very little to do or the tasks you have are highly repetitive, you cannot depend on your brain to recall everything that needs doing. The things that are most immediate are going to push away things in the background —often the most important. By writing things down you free up your brain to analyse the information and make productive decisions.

Here are three things I keep in mind with writing things down:

1. Keep the system simple –  the point of writing things down is to get it into a system that makes it easy to find. If your process is too complicated, you’re not going to trust the system and therefore are not likely to use it effectively.
2. Review it – the “brain dump” is not static. The point of writing things down is not to get them out of your mind and then forget about them. You have to review the list regularly.
3. Do it – zen habits addresses this one, How to Actually Execute Your To-Do List: or, Why Writing It Down Doesn’t Actually Get It Done

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Unfortunately, meeting are a fact of business life. So, if you have to have them, you might as well make them work. Here are some on-line articles with tips for holding productive meetings:

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

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.

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Here are the negative associated with people that arrive late:

* Latecomers are holding up others and hurting the productivity of everyone who has to wait
* Latecomers are demoralizing those who do bother to show up on time. This sometime starts a chain reaction where everyone starts showing up 5 then 10 then 15 minutes late to the detriment of all.
* Showing up late disrespects others’ time. It is interpreted as ‘The latecomer thinks he is more important or has better things to do than I do.’
* Other people extend lateness to meeting to expect tardiness in other arenas such as project deadlines. Thus, managers label late comers as high maintenance and dependant on others since the manager infers latecomers will be unreliable to be self-regulating. The manager has additional work to check on the work of the late contributor.
* Late people start a domino affect that can set entire groups, departments, and projects back. That hurts reputations as well as budgets and plans.
* Latecomers can get a reputation as ‘in need of attention’, ‘show boater’, ‘egomaniac’, and more.

She doesn’t leave it at the negatives, but talks about the positive attributes of those who know the importance of being on time.

There also has some tips to help those with tardiness issues. You can find some Maria Gracia tips at my post, 7 Tips to Get You Where You’re Going-On Time!

Are you late? – lifehack.org

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

So, now I’m back in the office after a long unplanned break: the message light on the phone is blinking; both my virtual and real in-boxes are overflowing; last week’s next actions are now overdue; my staff and my manager all want a piece of me; and I just want to go home a crawl back into bed. How do I get things back on track?

It’s time to get back to basics:

1. Collect: Grab everything that needs your attention. Whether you use David Allen’s mind sweep or you prefer a list format, go through your messages, e-mail, missed actions, etc. and capture all the items that require some action.
2. Meet: Sit down with co-workers. This is the people version of collecting. Find out what was managed was you were away, what new issues have arisen and add these to your mind-sweep list. This is also a good time to thank them for covering your unexpected absence.
3. Process: Once you’ve collected all the open loops, figure out what you need to do to close them. Whether it’s as simple as throwing a brochure in the garbage or as complex as planning a management retreat, you need to identify the steps needed to move the item forward.
4. Prioritize: Next, you can organize the action steps into lists of what you’re going to do.
5. Get it done: Now that you know what you need to do, get started. It may take time and effort to get things reorganized to move forward, but don’t stop at the end of step four. Here’s where you can pull things back on track.

One other observation: the better you’re maintaining your system day-to-day, the smaller the impact of unexpected absences. If you are already behind when an illness strikes, it will be that much harder to bring things into line.

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Some of the features:

• multiple users can collaborate simultaneously
• export/ import (Word, MindManager etc.)
• collapsing lists
• create slideshows from your maps
• ribbon interface like Office 2007
• recovery of deleted maps or map parts
• add hyperlinks inside a Comap
• task management to coordinate collaboration

There is one aspect that most mind mappers might find a little quirky; Comaps are organized left to right. This is billed as a feature, “providing much faster overview of your semantic structure.” While it might provide a more logical approach to scanning, it defeats the purpose of the free-form nature of mind mapping.

Otherwise, this looks like as full-featured an on-line mind-mapping service as is available. I imported a map I had created in MindManager, and it rendered it completely with no problems.

This is not a free service. The current cost is $11.99 for a half-year subscription. You can share maps for free viewing, but for others to collaborate, they will need to sign up for the six month subscription. There is a 30 day free trial and a free demo map for viewing.

comapping.com – Home

Recommended: Zen to Done Productivity eBook The Ultimate Simple Productivity System