• Luis Miguel Urrea Guia • Michael Hyatt • Leo Babauta • Jocelyn Glei •

• Stephen Smith • Howard Flomberg • James Mallinson • Andrew Filev • Michael Sliwinski •
www.ProductiveMagazine.com #5 (August 2010)

magazine

Exclusive Interview

Luis Miguel
Urrea Guia
4 Cultivating Good Habits
4 Getting Focused Easier
4 Making Meetings Work
4 Productivity on the iPad

Sponsored by

From the Editor
Our Magazine joins
Productive Firm to receive
regular updates
I
am very happy to offer you this
newest, fifth issue of your Productive!
Magazine. This is a breakthrough
issue as I believe we have nailed the
way this magazine will be published in the
future and it’s going to be an exciting time
for you and for our small team.
We have some really fantastic authors
publishing regularly for us and we decided
to give you a new issue of the magazine
every two months until the end of this year.
In December, based on your feedback,
readership and the experience gathered
publishing this magazine, we’ll decide how
often to publish issues in 2011.
We want to give you more productivity-
related content, not only with this
magazine but also through short videos,
 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by
magazine
By Michael Sliwinski, Editor
additional in-depth articles and books.
This is why we are launching a new
productivity membership site called
Productive! Firm and both this magazine
and my Productive! Show will now be
a part of this site. I’m sure you’ll love it.
Members of Productive Firm will also
receive inside scoop before the magazine
gets published, will be able to read
the entire, uncut interview with each
issue’s guest and more. Speaking about
our guests, this time we decided to try
something different and you probably
don’t know the person on the cover of
the magazine. But believe me, you want
to get to know him.
I got many emails from people saying
I focus too much on celebrities like David
Allen and Guy Kawasaki... and I should
be interviewing people who are highly
productive... but are regular people like
you and me. So I chose one of my closest
friends and one of the most famous
Spanish sculptors – Miguel Guia.
Luis Miguel Urrea Guia (that’s his
complete name) is a sculptor, an artist who
also runs a series of successful companies
in Madrid, Spain. We used to work closely
together on some projects and I was
always amazed how he got stuff done. He
quickly became my productivity guru and
actually he inspired me to build the first
 magazine

version of Nozbe – my GTD productivity

app. In the interview Miguel Guia explains
his way of approaching productivity and
cultivating good habits that help him get
more done.

Continuing the theme of successful

entrepreneurs and productivity in small
companies, we’ve got great articles by our
regular contributors like Leo Babauta (who
was our featured guest in the last issue of
the magazine), Michael Hyatt and others...

Hope you like the new changes to the

magazine and how it is coming together.
I’m sure you’ll love this issue of your
favorite productivity magazine and now,
without further ado I encourage you
to prepare a beverage of your choice, sit in
a comfortable armchair, and grab the iPad
to read this new issue of the Productive!
Magazine. Enjoy!

Yours productively,

Michael Sliwinski (@MichaelNozbe)

Founder, Nozbe – Simply Get It Done!

#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by 

 magazine

Table
Productive!Magazine
www.ProductiveMagazine.com

of contents
Sponsor:
www.Nozbe.com

Your Online tool for Getting Things Done

05
– available in your computer browser, mobile phone and
Michael Sliwinski
on your iPhone.
Ditch the bad habits and
cultivate the good ones Chief Editor:
Interview with Luis Miguel Michael Sliwinski
Urrea Guia editor@productivemagazine.com

Technical Editor:

08
Michael Hyatt Maciej Budzich
tech@productivemagazine.com
Scheduling Time in the www.blog.mediafun.pl
„Alone Zone”
Editorial Team:
Lori Anderson

10
Leo Babauta
Frictionless Work: Delfina Gerbert
How to Clear Your Life
of Non-Essential Tasks
Dustin Wax

13
Howard Flomberg
Quick&Dirty Guide to:
Meetings – how to make Tribute:
them work Marc Orchant (1957-2007)
The Productive!Magazine is dedicated
to the memory of a productivity guru,
great blogger and a very close friend,

16 20
Marc Orchant who passed away on 9th
James Mallison Andrew Filev December 2007.
Getting Things Done… Focusing on Getting
FASTER Things Done with Project All articles are copyright © by their respective authors.
Management 2.0 Productive!Magazine is copyright © by Michael Sliwinski.
Getting Things Done® and GTD® are the registered
trademarks of the David Allen Company.

18 22 24
Stephen Smith Michael Sliwinski Jocelyn Glei
Kanban Changes the 7 ways the new Apple 10 Laws of
Perspective iPad will increase your Productivity
productivity

 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by

 magazine

Productive! Magazine Interview with Luis Miguel Urrea Guia

Ditch
the bad
habits
and
cultivate
the good
ones
by Michael Sliwinski

Q: Who are you and what do you do for living?
I’m Luis Miguel Urrea Guia and I’m a sculptor and painter
known under a nickname “Miguel Guia” and I’m also an owner of
several businesses and a senior semi-professional athlete – I’m
the residing champion of Spain in “hammer throw” my senior age
category.
Q: Please tell me more about what inspires you as an artist?
My passion is to make art accessible to everyone with sense of
beauty, as a sculptor and painter I’m completely in love with art
and as a second generation of an artisan family, throughout the last
ten years, I have intended to bring back more dignity of art pieces
to homes in all over the world.

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Q: What is the rhythm of your day? How
do you work?
I have intense days, although for a while
I have been organizing my time well. I get
up early and spend my day on advancing
all the necessary matters. My work order is
to prepare ideas early, analyze what steps
need to get done to achieve my daily goals,
and concentrate totally on these since the
very start.
Q: Spain is famous for “siesta” – a mid-
day 2-3 hour nap. I heard you didn’t
believe in them?
Well, it is not really a matter of belief, it’s
a Spanish custom and I respect it. I know
 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by
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As a sculptor and painter I’m completely in love
with art.
there are people who can’t live without it. I just
personally prefer to sleep well during nights
and use every minute of the day constructively
(and simply enjoy the whole day).
Q: What is your system of productivity
like? How do you use it on daily basis?
So, to start with I have a notebook
always on my table and I write down all the
things I want to do on a given day. I do my
best to see them all through and if I can’t,
I postpone them for the following day.
As I have said before, I write down the
topic and the main points of each action,
if I have to call I add the phone number,
some commentary about the person and
the main purpose of the call. Now, at
the time of the phone call I have all this
information right here in my notebook.
The most important part of my “system”
is a blue or green marker – once a task
is done, I cross it with the marker. This is
very rewarding as it relaxes me as the day
progresses to see the page fill in with green.
 magazine

You have to schedule

your day to have
enough time for work,
trainings and enjoying
life.
Q: I know you are an early riser. Why is
getting up early so important to you?

For many years now I have preferred

to enjoy the light, peacefulness and good
vibration after good rest. No one bothering
me with daily things. I’m the first person
in the office and I’m getting a lot done
before anyone shows up. This way I’m
progressing very well throughout the
day. I have an expression that perfectly
describes this: “if you don’t get up early,
you’ll keep on running the whole day with
your tongue out of your mouth” trying
to catch up with everything.

Q: How did practicing sports influence
your way of working and self-
organization?
Since early childhood I have been
practicing sports that required a strong
discipline and compromise with the
trainer and colleagues from team.
With years, this routine translated
into a certain way of living. You have
to schedule your day to have enough
time for work, trainings and enjoying life.
This kind of physical and psychological
fitness is required in sports like athletics
or american football. They help you
develop your will to make the extra effort
and to pursue your goals.
Q: What differences are there between
being a boss of a company, sculptor and
sportsman?
As a boss and an artist I’m a bit of
Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, although
none of them wins. My artistic vision does
not allow the company part to destroy
the artistic essence of our projects, and
the business part does not allow the
business topics influence the former. As
a sportsman, as I have said before, all the
effort and dedication that is used in this
field helps me to work better with my team
at work, too.
Q: What tips would you give to people
who do not know how to organize
themselves and do not know where
to start?
I have been giving little hints all though
this interview. To organize work well, it is
essential to prepare all the topics in the
morning and work through them before all
the interruptions and daily office life makes
you resolve them improperly.
In this life it is all about habits, good
ones.. or the bad ones. You just really need
to get rid of all those bad habits and pick
up new ones that will help you in your path
to an organized life. Getting up early, sports
and strength of will are always a good
start. It’s about a conscious decision how
you want your life to be and how you want
to live it.
About „Miguel Guia”
Luis Miguel
Urrea Guia is a
famous sculptor
and painter,
a national
athlete and a
businessman. He lives and works in
Madrid, Spain in Europe. His mission
is to bring world-class art to every
home (under nickname: „Miguel Guia”)
and he’s committed to getting it done.
He takes inspiration from masters like
Picasso, Dali or Chillida among others.
His web site: MiguelGuia.com

#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by 


Scheduling Time
in the „Alone Zone”
You schedule time for large meetings, small meetings, conference calls, and phone
appointments. If you are like many leaders, you often feel that your life consists of nothing
BUT meetings. As a result, there is no time to complete the work you volunteer for, agree to,
or are assigned in those same meetings. What can you do? Simple: Schedule time for you.
Y
ou need time for what Jason
Fried and David Heinemeier
Hansson, authors of Rework,
call “the Alone Zone”:
Long stretches of alone time are when
you are the most productive. When you
don’t have to mind-shift between various
tasks, you get a boatload done. (Ever
notice how much work you get done on
a plane since you’re offline and there are
zero outside distractions” (p. 105).
But this kind of alone time doesn’t
happen by accident. Like everything else
in the leader’s life, you must be intentional,
if you want to be effective.
I personally schedule four kinds of alone
time:
Long stretches of alone time are when you are the
most productive.
1. Morning time. I typically get up at 5:00
a.m. I do my most important tasks right
away, including exercise and reading.
I also try to get done my single most
important to-do item before I leave
for the office. Why? Because I know a
thousand interruptions and distractions
await me once I arrive.
 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by
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2. Weekly appointments. I literally block
out time on my calendar with the clever
title of “Office Work.” I generally do this
on Sunday night as I prepare for the next
week’s meetings. When I am really on the
ball, I do this a month in advance. The
beautiful thing is that when someone asks
for that time slot, I can legitimately say, “I’m
sorry, but I already have a commitment
then.” It’s a commitment to myself.
3. Quarterly reviews. I schedule a day and
a half by myself each quarter. I have
written about it on this blog before, so
I won’t repeat myself here. However,
this is a time when I can reflect back
over the previous quarter and then look
forward to the coming quarter. It’s an
opportunity to poke my head above the
clouds and see where I am going with
my business—and my life.
4. Travel time. I am never more productive
than when I am in an airplane. However,
I have to be very intentional. I upgrade
when I can. If that’s not possible, I get
an exit row seat. (It’s difficult to be
productive when the person in front
if you has their seat reclined, and
their head is practically in your lap!)
by Michael Hyatt
Specifically, I try to work on projects
that require extended creativity. I plan
in advance which projects I am going to
tackle.
I am sometimes asked, “How do you
get it all done?” Part of the secret is by
scheduling time to get it done. What about
you?
About Michael Hyatt
Michael Hyatt
is the President
and CEO
of Thomas
Nelson, the
largest Christian
publishing
company in the world and the seventh
largest trade book publishing company
in the U.S. Michael has written four
books, one of which landed on the
New York Times bestseller list. Hyatt
serves as Chairman of the Evangelical
Christian Publishers Association
(ECPA). He has been married to his
wife, Gail, for twenty- eight years. They
have five daughters and two grand
daughters and live outside of Nashville,
Tennessee.
Michael’s blog: MichaelHyatt.com
Michael on Twitter: @MichaelHyatt
 Time and Project Management
for Busy Professionals and their Teams

Nozbe web app syncs with native iPad and iPhone apps... and Evernote!
 magazine

Frictionless Work:
How to Clear Your Life of
Non-Essential Tasks
“It’s not the work which kills people, it’s the worry. It’s not the
revolution that destroys machinery it’s the friction.”
~ Henry Ward Beecher
by Leo Babauta

H
ow much of your day is spent
doing administrative tasks,
and not creating or doing other
important work?
How much time do you spend responding
to emails and IMs and social networks,
making payments, doing paperwork, filing,
sitting in meetings, driving, doing errands,
and so on? How much of that could be
cleared up for more important work?
Imagine this for a moment: you have no
administrative tasks, only the core work that
you love doing. Your day has been cleared
for creating, building, doing high-impact
projects. Isn’t it lovely?
Imagine this for a moment: you have no
administrative tasks, only the core work that you
love doing.
Is this a pipe dream? Perhaps for some,
who have little control over their work. But
if you have a larger degree of control, let’s
explore the idea of “frictionless work” or
even “frictionless living”.
If you have little control, consider a
change.
My Frictionless Business
I know I don’t have a typical job, but that
didn’t happen overnight and I did this on
purpose. Today, I have a few successful
blogs and a handful of successful books.
Only a year ago, that required a lot of
administrative work — so much so that I
hired an admin assistant to help out, and
outsourced other work.
But assistants, employees, delegating,
and outsourcing are not hassle-free … each
comes with work of its own: email or phone

10 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by


© Paulus Rusyanto - Fotolia.com
calls, following up, checking the quality of
work, doing contracts, reviewing terms,
clarifying, firing, searching for a better
employee/contract company, paying, filling
out tax info, and on and on.
The better solution is to simplify. Eliminate
non-essential tasks. And so I did, slowly:
- I eliminated comments from Zen Habits,
cutting back on a huge amount of work
for me. Comments turn a major blog into a
forum, where the blogger is the moderator.
It takes hours to moderate a major blog, and
while I outsourced that for months, it was
always a major headache that required a lot
of work. Eliminating comments, which only
magazine
By radically rethinking your work, you might be able
to eliminate a lot of admin tasks.
a tiny minority of readers used, eliminated
my need for that admin work or for hiring a
moderator.
- I stopped doing work that required me
to do paperwork or admin work. That meant
losing some income from consulting and
other business, but it also meant a lot more
free time for what I love doing.
- When a guest writer submits a guest
post, I no longer format the post but require
the writer to format it and submit for my
review. Mostly now I just need to read over
the post and hit publish.
- I got out of a bunch of ad networks
that were always asking me to do admin
work. That was a loss of income, but it also
simplified my website. Now I sell one ad a
month (which I’m also eliminating), and do
almost no work — the advertiser presses a
Paypal button to reserve the ad, and emails
me the ad image and link code.
- I eliminated email, for the most part,
except for collaborative projects (which are
few and far between). My email time went
from half my day to a few minutes a day.
- I sell ebooks automatically through
e-junkie, and affiliate payments are also
computed automatically.
- I now have almost no admin work to
run my blogs: I write, and publish. Once a
month I log into my Paypal account, send
out affiliate payments, and transfer money
to my bank account (and from there, my
bills are automatically paid and money is
automatically transferred to savings).
This is not to brag. I know I have it easy
compared to most, but this has all been
done gradually and on purpose. I created
this frictionless work.
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com
What Are Your Admin Tasks?
Take inventory of your work: what admin
tasks take up your time? Add to this list
over the course of the next couple of days,
because you’re probably forgetting some.
Now ask yourself: which of these can be
eliminated? Many of you will probably answer,
“Very few”, because you’re used to the way
things are done. “This is how things are done.”
But that’s an artificial limitation — instead, ask
yourself how it can be changed. How might it
be possible? Think radically different.
To eliminate tasks, you might have to
make major changes over time, but the
beauty is that you’ll also be freeing up time.
Consider some examples:
If you do a lot of paperwork, can you
require forms to be filled out digitally,
perhaps online? This will eliminate a lot of
work, and if the database is set up right,
eliminate filing.
If you spend a lot of time on calls or
email, can you provide other ways for
people to get info or get things done?
Perhaps put up an FAQ online, so common
questions are answered (like Google does
for its product support), or provide web
pages where people can automatically
download products or get other things
done without you as the bottleneck? Or
can you route those requests to someone
else?
Also unsubscribe from newsletters and
notifications and so forth, so you don’t
have to spend time processing them in your
inbox. Consider each email that comes
in and ask yourself: “How could this be
eliminated?”
Can you eliminate meetings, or at least
get out of them? How can you get the info
Sponsored by 11

without meetings? How can projects get
done without the meetings?
If you worked at home, you wouldn’t
have to commute, or do a lot of other tasks
associated with working in an office. It’s not
always possible, but often you can work
towards that goal.
Can you drop clients or parts of your
business, losing a little income but
eliminating all the admin work that goes
with it? The free time could be spent
creating something that would more than
make up for the loss of income.
Can you eliminate features that aren’t
completely essential, so you don’t have to
do all the work to support those features
(similar to how I eliminated comments)?
Can you stop worrying so much about
growth, customers, competitors, statistics,
and so forth — and focus instead on what
you love doing? A great quote by web
designer and developer Sam Brown: “I
used to stress a lot about my business, my
clients, the amount of work I was doing and
my competitors – but the minute I stopped
worrying about all of that and focussed on
just doing great work that I was happy with
it really made a big difference, to me and
my business.”
If you think a task is necessary under the
current conditions, consider changing the
current conditions.
These are just a few ideas and
questions to get you started, but you can
see that by radically rethinking your work,
you might be able to eliminate a lot of
admin tasks.
And free up time for what truly matters.
Frictionless Life
This concept of eliminating admin work
can apply to your personal life as well.
Imagine your personal time with as
few chores, errands, paperwork, and
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I now have almost no admin work to run my blogs:
I write, and publish.
commitments as possible. You’d be free to
… well, do what you love most.
I can’t claim to have done this
completely, but I have made huge progress
towards a frictionless life. Of course, I still
have chores to do (washing dishes, laundry,
etc.), but I’ve eliminated a lot of personal
tasks:
I don’t pay bills anymore. I either
pay them in advance if I get a big lump
payment, or I set up automatic payments
each month. In fact, because all my
transactions are electronic, I never go to the
bank.
I don’t file personal paperwork anymore.
I’ve gone paperless, so all documents
that I needed to keep are scanned, and
everything else is already digital. Even
contracts are done digitally.
Housework is minimal. Admittedly, my
wife does the laundry, but we share in
cooking and cleaning duties, and most
of it is painless as we have a pretty sparse
home. It’s fairly clean all the time.
Errands are minimal too. Mostly it’s
going to the grocery store or post office,
and we moved last year so those are within
walking distance. So we often walk to
those errands, getting a nice workout and
enjoying the outdoors in the process.
There isn’t much else we have to do,
except things with our kids and each other.
The fun stuff. Much of the friction of living
has been eliminated.
A Warning
It’s not always easy to change your work
and your life to get rid of the friction of admin
tasks, but once you do, it’s simply lovely.
However, there will likely be a temptation
to fill up your freed time with more email,
social networking, blog reading, and so
on. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this,
but before you do, consider how you really
want to spend your time. Do you want to
remove the friction just to fritter it away with
distractions?
I’m a big fan of doing nothing, of
solitude and relaxing and playing. So if
that’s how you use your free time, I’m
jumping with joy. You might, however,
spend this time creating, and that’s one of
the true wonders of creating frictionless
work and a frictionless life. Spend your
time doing what you love, living your
passion, making something new and
beautiful. You’ll be glad you did.
“The world is wide, and I will not waste
my life in friction when it could be turned
into momentum.” ~ Frances E. Willard
About Leo Babauta
Leo Babauta
lives in Guam
(soon moving to
San Francisco)
and is married
with six kids.
He’s a writer and a runner and a
vegetarian and he loves writing Zen
Habits - his blog that in a couple of
years became one of the top blogs
on the Internet with 100K+ readers
subscribed and counting. He’s a
published author of a bestselling book
„Power of Less”
Leo’s blog is „Zen Habits”
Leo on Twitter: @Zen_Habits

Quick&Dirty Guide to:
Meetings – how to make them work
”Terri, there’s a product meeting at 3 o’clock”
“3 o’clock on a Friday? What lamebrain set it up?”
“Check the Email, Terri”
“Oh.”
S
o Terri, Ernie, Terri’s boss, Greta
and four or five of their closest
friends go into the meeting.
Heck it’s only been scheduled
for one hour. What can possibly go wrong?
Shall I list problems that come up?
- Terri’s boss takes over the meeting
- Bill and Brett want to know why this
meeting was called.
magazine
- Terri adds insult to injury by asking
Greta to take notes.
- Marv wonders where the coffee is
- Ernie wants to talk about the monthly
status report
- Terri’s boss follows Ernie down that path.
After the prerequisite hour, Terri tries to
call the meeting over, her boss, however
has decided that since everyone is here –
let’s talk about the Christmas party.
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com
© Kelly Young - Fotolia.com
by Howard Flomberg
Sound familiar?
It is said that a camel is a horse designed
by a committee (*1). This saying sums
up the popular opinion of committees
and meetings. The general consensus
is that a committee can do nothing
successfully. Let me rephrase that: an
unorganized committee can do nothing
successfully. You can easily substitute the
word “meeting” for the word “committee”
they are essentially interchangeable as
Sponsored by 13

An unorganized committee can do nothing
successfully. You can easily substitute the word
“meeting” for the word “committee”.
far as accomplishments. Most qualitative
methodologies and decisions involve
(evolve in?) meetings. In many, if not most,
cases meetings become massive time
wasters. In an uncontrolled environment,
meetings can and frequently do become
confrontational. People tend to go off in
tangents and the reason for the meeting
rapidly becomes lost. So, how does one
control a meeting? Or can a meeting be
controlled?
Memorandum
To: H. Aardvark, C. Jones, L. Lopez,
M Miles, P. J. Peterson, S. Sutra and Z.
Zaplitney
From: H. Lee
Date: 07/04/76
Re: Corporate strategy, 07/05/1776
Meeting Room A. at 10:00 a.m.
We will be meeting next Thursday to
discuss the orientation of our new product,
the American Revolution. The Specific
Topics to be discussed are:
Tactics – will we fight in an open plain or
shall we be hiding behind trees?
Uniforms – Mr. Washington has
requested Buff and Blue, however Mr.
Rogers-Clark insists that forest green
would give us a decided advantage
Living quarters – shall we have the
men supply their own tents or can we
standardize? If we standardize, we need to
appoint a subcommittee to recommend a
supplier and pricing.
Rank Structure – Mr. Washington insists
on traditional military ranks; however our
Boston contingent feels that the men
should elect their own leaders.
How shall we decide these issues?
Please email your acceptance to the
meeting. If you cannot make this meeting,
please tell me who will be representing you.
- “Lighthorse” Harry Lee
14 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by
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Here’s how you do it:
1. Prepare an Agenda. Without an agenda
you are wasting everybody’s time.
The agenda should spell out, in some
real level of detail, the reason for the
meeting as well as the topic to be
discussed. See the example above.
2. The names in the agenda
memorandum are in alphabetic order.
Yes there are people who look at these
things as an indication of political
power. Head that one off. As a matter
of fact, alphabetize the names in all
memos that you write.
3. Topic, time, date and location are
prominently placed at the top. Insure
that everybody knows the location of
the meeting. A fast email the day before
the meeting containing this information
is not a bad idea. Sending out more
than one email IS a bad idea.
4. Each topic has a brief description.
Without an agenda you are
wasting everybody’s time.
If there is to be a decision, indicate
the choices. Any more detail is not
needed. This is your guide for the
meeting. Stick to these issues. Putting
too much information just invites more
discussion.
5. When you send the agenda out, ask
for an RSVP. If you are emailing –
generate a return receipt. You want
to head off the “I didn’t know about
the meeting.” If they approve a return
receipt, they’ll show up. If your
company uses a scheduling program
like Outlook© use it.
6. Don’t schedule meetings on Fridays
please! Especially during the spring and
fall. 10:00 in the morning is always a
good meeting time – it’s long enough
before lunch so that they can still sneak
out for an early lunch. 1:00 is deadly.
People will straggle in. they will be
sleepy and non-participatory. If you
schedule a meeting for 3:00 (especially
Friday at 3:00) you will get what you
deserve. If I am an invitee – I’ll totally
forget it.
7. The memo must go out at least one
full business day before the meeting.
Two or three days would be much
better. More than three days would
invite people to conveniently forget.
When you see the person in the
hallway, you might remind him(*2)
once. Any more than that and you will
see him avoid you like the proverbial
plague. One of my favorite ways to
remind someone is to joke – Don’t
forget Terri, you’re bringing the booze
to the meeting.
8. At the beginning of the meeting review
the agenda. If someone wants to add
something relevant to the agenda – ask
if everyone agrees. If it’s not relevant,
see the discussion below on the
“parking lot”
9. Do not allow the meeting to go for more
than one and a half hours. Schedule
another session if there is a need.
Here’s why – you have six (?) people
in a small room. In today’s offices’ you
need a wrecking ball to open a window.
Of course you close the door. Now you
have a bunch of Homosapiens all busy
converting oxygen to carbon dioxide in
a room with poor ventilation. And you
wonder why you get sleepy? It’s oxygen
deprivation(*3)

10. The Parking Lot. So Terri brings up
her favorite complaint – the striping
in the parking lot. She is concerned
that someone might trash her ’71
Gremlin. Set up a “Parking Lot.” Have
a place to record topics that need
resolution outside of the meeting. It
should be either a black/white board
or a large sheet of paper in plain view
to everyone. So you now say: Terri,
we really do need to discuss that,
let’s put it in the Meeting Parking Lot.
This is your secret weapon! You can
get poster sized “yellow stickies (*4)”
from your office supplies vendor. Stash
them somewhere. Once someone finds
out that you have the stickies, they
will disappear. Take one sheet and
put it on the wall. Label it “Parking
Lot”. The parking lot is where you put
those items that will take you down
the wrong path. But by posting them
you have assuaged Terri’s ego. Her
idea has been recognized and not
ignored. You’ll find that in a relaxed
environment, after a while when
someone brings up an item that is not
appropriate, you’ll hear a chorus of
“parking lot” and laughter.
11. Danger Will Robinson! If at all possible,
do not invite your manager (or your
manager’s manager for that matter).
If you do, the meeting becomes his
meeting. If you must invite him –
establish privately the procedure that
you are going to follow and get his
support. If he refuses to follow your
wishes – get your resume in shape. This
one can be a career ender if handled
poorly. Try and make that discussion
with your boss light. Review the agenda,
ask for his opinion, let him know you’ll
give him a full report, before he says
he’ll be there.
12. Again, if a topic is brought up that
is not on the agenda – steer the
conversation back to the agenda –
reschedule a meeting to discuss that
point or put it on the “parking lot.”
magazine
13. If you notice each item in the agenda
is phrased as an “Action Item” For
example: Living quarters – shall we
have the men supply their own tents or
can we standardize? If we standardize,
we need to appoint a subcommittee
to recommend a supplier and pricing.
Discuss each item. If it is too large or
important to settle at the meeting have
someone follow up on it or schedule
another meeting. If you ask, ”Who
wants to follow up on this?” in most
cases you will be greeted by a wall of
silence. Ask someone with an interest
in the topic to follow up. “Terri, can
you follow up on this?” Everyone is
relieved that you didn’t ask him or her
and is staring at Terri. You now have
peer pressure working for you. At the
end of the meeting, review the action
items. Note who has taken the action, if
Set up a “Parking Lot.” Have a place to record
topics that need resolution outside of the
meeting.
an action has not been resolved either
schedule a meeting to discuss it, or
appoint a volunteer.
14. Ensure that every issue is either
resolved or assigned to a person at
the meeting for resolution. After the
meeting, review each Parking Lot
item. Have someone assigned to it. A
sneaky way to control these items is to
ask: Terri, you brought up ‘Parking Lot
Striping” can you follow up on it? Terri
will never do that again.
15. Another real important item – If you
must ask someone to take notes –
NEVER ask a woman. She will hate you
for the rest of your life.
16. After the meeting send out a memo
promptly reviewing the decisions and
any topics assigned to someone. Send
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com
this memo out immediately, even if you
have to stay late to do it. List each action
item, who it is assigned to and how will
it be reviewed. Don’t forget the use a
return receipt. If you ask: “Please let me
know if you disagree” you probably will
not get any response until it’s too late,
and someone has been ticked off. More
successful is the language: “I assume
that if no one responds by the end of
the week then there are no corrections”.
Always take an active position.
17. One last point – Spell check the damn
thing! One learns by screwing up. We
all do. When I was interviewing for a
consulting spot, one of my favorite lines
was “I’ve been doing this for many years
and I’ve made a gazillion mistakes. You
get them all for free” Hopefully I’ve saved
you from some of them.
*1. I really love camels :-)
*2. Is my use of “him” offensive to
anyone? If so please accept my apology.
*3. I am NOT a doctor or a chemist. This
is a totally non- -scientific guess – but it’s
based on years of experience
*4.I call all Post-its “Yellow Stickies” no
matter what color they are. That should
be my worst habit..
About Howard
Flomberg
Howard is a
Retired Systems
Analyst, Adjunct
Professor and
Author. He lives in
Denver, Colorado.
Howard on Twitter: @hflomberg
Sponsored by 15
 magazine

Getting
Things
Done…
FASTER
© Vivid Pixels - Fotolia.com

When it comes to maximizing how productive you can be there is a lot of talk about adopting
frameworks like GTD or Covey’s Seven Habits, cutting down your projects list to the essentials,
finding the right tools, avoiding procrastination etc. However in this article I want to discuss
another point to increasing your productivity that tends to get overlooked – speeding up your work
so that that you will be getting things done faster (for the purposes of this post lets call it GTDF).

by James Mallison

I
Pick a set time on a magine a manufacturing plant. The
quicker products can be brought
Of course there is a catch to all
this. We also don’t always have to

clock or stopwatch through the construction line to
completion, the more productive the
and then see how plant is considered to be. Why can the
same approach not be applied to your
much you can get own work? You may not be a machine
work quickly through our work, though
with our jobs becoming stressful and
demanding it is becoming increasingly
important to achieve more in less time.
Also, some projects don’t suit well to

done before the time who works 24/7, but the benefits are still
clear – get your work done more quickly
runs out. and it will leave you with more free time to
play with.
being done faster, especially those
that require lots of brain power and/
or creative thought. However there are
those projects that you can work at more

16 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by


quickly with negligible loss of quality,
or as David Allen would call them, the
widget cranking projects.
With all this in mind, let’s look at how we
can work faster…
Set time limits
One of the most basic but effective ways
to speed up your work is to set time limits.
There are two fundamental approaches to
using time to your advantage:
The more traditional approach is to see
how quickly it takes you to do the task or
project, log the time, and then regularly
challenge yourself to beat that time. It’s a
simple but effective way of keeping your
motivation high using your competitive
drive, while allowing you to gradually
improve your overall speed and efficiency
over time.
Pick a set time on a clock or stopwatch
and then see how much you can get done
before the time runs out. This is useful if
you have limited time and want to become
more disciplined with how you use it. For
example, recently I decided to clean out
the storage cupboard. However I had to
fit it in with my other work, so when I had
some spare time I gave myself a thirty
minute time limit and set a challenge to
see how much I could clear out before the
alarm went off.
Keep focused
Manufacturing plants are active most
of the time, if not 24 hours a day and
though you obviously can’t be expected
to be that active, it is important you stay
focused as long as possible on what you
are doing so as to build up momentum
and in turn speed up your work. For
instance, if you have the TV on in the
background as you do your work (as I
am doing while writing this) it’s difficult
to keep focused long enough to get
any momentum (hence this is taking
longer to type than it usually would). As
much as possible find a chunk of time
magazine
Get enough sleep. Eat healthy and take
exercise.
to work where you won’t be interrupted,
disconnect the phone and turn the TV off.
While it is difficult to keep focused for
any length of time, for those periods we
are able to shut the rest of the world out,
it’s important to take advantage of it.
Maintain energy levels
Well maintained machines don’t get tired or
have off-days, and though we as humans
cannot maintain 100% energy levels all the
time, there are measures we can take to
stay as alert and energized as possible and
not try to work at an high pace when our
energy levels are low (you wouldn’t try and
drive a car on an almost empty fuel tank
would you?). Discussing ways of keeping
energized and alert is a topic worthy of
it’s own post so I won’t discuss it in detail
here, however in brief:
Get enough sleep. The average person
needs around eight hours to gain the full
benefits, though this can vary from person
to person. Note, that getting too much
sleep can be nearly as bad as not getting
enough.
Each person naturally feels more alert at
different times of the day, which is where
the night owl and early bird terms come
from. For instance, if you do your best
work in the morning, you can also do your
quickest work.
Eat healthy and take exercise. This
doesn’t really need much explanation but
if you are physically healthy you’re also
mentally healthy and this really helps with
your energy and focus levels.
Use the right tools
Manufacturing plants have huge, often
complex systems in place specifically
designed to do their job quickly and
productively. If one machine is old and
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com
out-dated it slows down the entire
production. Likewise you need to have
systems in place that help you achieve
your goals with minimal complications.
GTD is very reliant on speed, with David
Allen stating that if you can’t add a
next action to your system within a few
seconds you simply won’t do it. The same
applies whether you are trying to clean
dishes with poor quality washing liquid,
or trying to save files over a poor quality
network. Find and develop the right tools
for all the jobs in your workflow and if
something doesn’t work quickly enough
for you, replace it!
Lay the groundwork
Imagine again, the setup of a
manufacturing plant with its mass
production setup. It is a finely tuned and
intricate system which is able to create
a set number of products quickly and
effectively. You can mirror this by having
habits, approaches and best-practices
in place in your life that encourage fast,
efficient functioning. Knowing what works
for you and continually optimizing that
approach is key to getting things done
faster. That way you don’t let your bad
habits, like procrastination, and lack of
knowledge, like not having had any training
to use a particular software, slow you
down.
James Mallinson
James Mallinson comes from the UK
and is an aspiring author. He started
Organize IT nearly two years ago after
he began dabbling in productivity,
and wanted to share his tips and
experience.
Blog: Organize IT
James on Twitter: @JMallinson
Sponsored by 17

Kanban Changes the Perspective
From Wikipedia: Kanban is a
concept related to lean and
just-in-time (JIT) production.
The Japanese word kanban
is a common term meaning
“signboard” or “billboard“.
According to Taiichi Ohno, the
man credited with developing
JIT, kanban is a means
through which JIT is achieved.
by Stephen Smith
K
anban is a signaling system
to trigger action. As its name
suggests, Kanban historically uses
cards to signal the need for an item.
However, other devices such as plastic markers
(Kanban squares) or balls (often golf balls) or
an empty part-transport trolley or floor location
can also be used to trigger the movement,
production, or supply of a unit in a factory.
It was out of a need to maintain the level of
improvements that the Kanban system was
devised by Toyota. Kanban became an effective
tool to support the running of the production
system as a whole. In addition, it proved to be
an excellent way for promoting improvements
because reducing the number of Kanban in
circulation highlighted problem areas.
The wikipedia article on Kanban is
a good one, showing how the Kanban
system can be used to manage enormous
projects and collections of tasks, such as
an automobile factory. Most of us don’t run
car factories, but we can still benefit from
the basic principles of Kanban – which are
so simple that they will amaze you.
Create a System That You Enjoy Using
As the above article excerpt mentions,
there are many ways to “do” Kanban,
18 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by
magazine
or implement the Kanban process.
I personally like to use index cards but
you can use slips of paper, sticky notes, or
even digital applications – online or for your
mobile device.
For the purposes of this article, let’s think
about our Tasks and Projects as index cards,
then you can translate the concept to your
own version of this system. First, imagine
that each card contains a single Task or Next
Action to be completed. Everything on your
list can be written on a card which will then
be put on the Kanban board in one of two
zones: The Queue or Work in Progress (WIP).
In the image of the bulletin board, above,
you can see that it is divided into three
Zones: the left-hand side is for storing
cards that are yet to be acted upon;
the center area is for cards that you are
working on, or have prioritized to be part
of your list of “things to do”; the right-hand
zone is for collecting and organizing the
Tasks and Next Actions that have been
completed, these things are Done.
How Tasks Enter the Kanban System
My process for generating Next Action and
Project cards is quite basic, they usually come
to me while I am making my daily Journal/
Morning Pages entries, or when I am reading.
Cards are also generated by tasks that are
assigned to me, or to someone on my team,
via an input mechanism such as telephone or
e-mail. Each new card then simply goes into
the Queue and each morning I can assess the
situation, choose the tasks that I feel are most
important (or urgent), and move them into the
Work In Progress (WIP) zone.
I would like to mention an important
caveat here – the Kanban board is not
a replacement for your calendar when it
comes to the time-specific information
that you need to manage. Remember
that according to the principles of Getting
Things Done only three things are to be
entered into your calendar:
1. Time-specific actions
2. Day-specific actions
3. Day-specific information
That’s it. Because your calendar is a tool
that you use to tell you where you need to be
and when you need to be there, or when
something is scheduled to happen. Your
Kanban board is where you manage Tasks.
Use these two tools together for planning
your activities. For example, during your
Periodic Review you may decide that there are
some Most Important Tasks that you would like

to assign as time-specific (or set a deadline for
completion). Enter these in your calendar, or
create a Next Action Card with a due date on it.
Put that card in the Queue zone.
When the assigned time arrives, and
your calendar reminds you of the Task,
move that card from Queue to WIP. This
method will work whether you use a paper
planner or a digital calendar/PDA.
When you are Done
One of the best features of this system, for
me, is in the moving of Next Action Cards
into the Done zone. This gives me a simple
and easy way of reviewing exactly what was
accomplished in the previous period (day,
week, month, whatever scale you operate
on). The real beauty of this system is that it
replaces messy handwritten lists and gives
an instant overview of what is happening
right now. This is especially helpful in
recognizing when there are simply too many
things happening at once. The concept of the
overview provides a tool for managing your
current workload and the backlog of Tasks in
the Queue and creates a “Pull” mechanism
for adding new tasks to the WIP zone.
The “Pull” occurs when a task is
completed and a space is created when
the card is moved to the Done zone. As
the cards move from left to right across the
board I am able to see and measure the flow
of work that is being completed. This visual
sense of accomplishment is very gratifying!
Kanban and Delegation
I use a Kanban board both in my home
office, and in my office at work (I manage
a restaurant in a small resort hotel). As you
can imagine this system comes in very
handy for delegating tasks to my team.
Each of my supervisors takes a look at the
Kanban board at the beginning of their shift,
in order to see which tasks or Next Actions
have been assigned to them for the current
work period, and they can also see what is
planned for them in the future (in the Queue).
For example, projects can be completed
by multiple people as they can assess
each upcoming Next Action by evaluating
the time required to complete it, their
magazine
Simple space limitations will remind you that one
can only work on so many things at one time.
own energy level, and the external
circumstances then choosing those Next
Action Cards that fit the situation.
I am finding that this system of managing
our activities is very helpful to actual
productivity. A daily assessment of Next
Actions to be completed keeps priorities in
perspective, avoiding the mindless churn
that so often happens when we get caught
up in the day-to-day routine of handling the
“fires” and interruptions. It is very important
to be able to prioritize our activities, because
the tasks and projects shown on this board
are things that we do to support the main
objective of our jobs – to ensure that our
guests have a superior dining experience.
This happens out on the restaurant floor, not
in the office or at a computer.
Moving from Lists to Next Action Cards
Changing your personal productivity tools
can be a cause of stress and anxiety, so
I recommend starting slowly, perhaps
with a few sticky notes on the wall used in
conjunction with your current system. Learn
to capture inputs onto these sticky notes, or
perhaps in a similar fashion on your digital
device or smartphone. Then take some
time to practice and learn the technique of
assessing the Tasks and Next Actions that are
in progress, or are simply waiting to be started.
A list with tens or hundreds of items
it unwieldy and in drastic need of
perspective. Simple space limitations
will remind you that one can only work
on so many things at one time. Filling in
the Queue and WIP zones can force you
to prioritize your Next Actions, assess their
validity, and perhaps push them back into
the Queue for a more appropriate time. Or
simply decide that a particular item on a list
is not worth doing after all.
Tips for Maintaining Perspective and Next
Action Value
Here are a few tips for making your
transition more painless and beneficial:
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com
Write the date of generation on any
card that you put into the Kanban system.
This will aid you in deciding if an item has
gone stale, is not not as important as you
once thought, or perhaps its urgency has
increased.
Write the date that a card was moved
from the Queue zone into the WIP zone, for
the same reasons listed above.
Write the date that the Next Action
was completed, in order to make periodic
reviews more effective, especially in
tracking your accomplishments.
Make cards for Next Actions that have
been delegated to others, and keep them
in the WIP zone, with the date that the task
was assigned and the date that it is due.
Use a spatial reference for prioritizing
Next Actions, more important tasks should
be placed in the top left of the appropriate
zone, as this is where your eye is trained
to look first when scanning a “page” of
information.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it
comes to the usefulness of the Kanban system
for your productivity practice. Searching
Twitter and Flickr can give you plenty of
inspiration for enhancing your own system.
Please consider sharing your thoughts and
experiences with Kanban, I’ll be happy
to publish a summary or follow-up article.
About Stephen
Smith
Stephen Smith
is currently
a restaurant
manager who
uses basic
productivity
principles to
enhance the guest experience.
His Blog: StephenPSmith.com/blog
Stephen on Twitter: @hdbbstephen
Sponsored by 19

Focusing on Getting
Things Done with Project
Management 2.0
Let’s have a look at a typical project manager’s day. In the morning, he comes to his office and
checks his e-mail for messages with project updates. He then spends hours calling his team
members, e-mailing them or meeting them in person to collect all the information he needs and to
make sure that everything is well and on track...
... and after that, the manager has to
merge these updates into the project plan.
The updates also need to be communicated
to the upper management. So the project
manager has to make reports and hand
them in to the company’s executives to
keep them aware of the project’s progress.
The manager also has to follow up on
clients’ feedback or partners’ actions.
During the course of the day, he constantly
has to resolve issues through another
endless series of e-mails, phone calls and
meetings.
Looks familiar, doesn’t it? E-mail is still
the most popular project communication
tool. An employee on an average project
gets between 30 and 100 e-mails per day.
The majority of these e-mails contain tasks,
change requests and discussions, so it’s
hard to overestimate the knowledge buried
in e-mail inboxes every day. This knowledge
often bypasses project management tools
like Microsoft Project.
Have you ever missed an important e-
mail? Or forgot to send a reply to an urgent
request? Was it ever easy for you to find an
20 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by
magazine
indispensable piece of information buried in
the thousands of messages that you have
in your inbox? What if you weren’t CC’d on
that e-mail? It gets even worse when you
need to quickly share information that’s lost
in your inbox with a newcomer.
This knowledge, buried in e-mails, causes
project managers in too many organizations
today to waste hours on transferring
information from e-mails into their project
management systems and back. As a
result, their productivity and efficiency are
damaged by this unnecessary routine.
Instead of being a project leader, a project
manager turns into a project secretary.
Traditional project management systems
often are not integrated with e-mail.
Systems like Microsoft Project are designed
with the top-down project management
approach in mind and aren’t suited well
to leverage collective knowledge in an
easy way. It means they create dozens
of needless, routine jobs for the project
manager. Therefore, instead of helping
project managers, these systems make the
manager’s workload even bigger.
by Andrew Filev
What if managers could bring this
“project secretary” job to a minimum and
concentrate on the leadership part of the
management job? How much more efficient
and productive would the whole team
become as a result? Experts say this is
possible.
The change comes with the growing
popularity of Enterprise 2.0 principles
applied to project management. Project
Management 2.0 relies on the same
concepts as Enterprise 2.0. The power of
many, also known as collective intelligence,
helps to build, maintain and evolve an up-
to-date picture of operations. Flexible
Project Management 2.0 tools merge this
picture from various pieces, giving a perfect
example of what enterprise social software
researchers call „emergent structures.” The
software supporting these two concepts,
collective intelligence and emergent
structures, open new opportunities for
boosting your own efficiency and your
team’s efficiency by cutting the daily routine
and leaving more room for creativity and
leadership. They make a project manager’s
life easier by bringing three major benefits:

Reducing routine work
Project Management 2.0 practices and
supportive tools eliminate the need for
extra meetings, phone calls and e-mails,
thus saving you time and letting you focus
on getting things done. The best tools in
this area are integrated with e-mail. They
don’t break the habitual workflow, allowing
project participants to communicate via
e-mail messages. At the same time, they
automatically absorb information from e-
mails, which usually bypasses project
management systems and is traditionally
buried in the team’s inboxes.
With project management 2.0 tools,
this knowledge is shared and available to
everybody on the team at any given moment
in time. Just imagine: there’s no need to call
and ask your peer to find the important e-
mail from a customer who wanted to make
changes in a project schedule. Tasks, clients’
requirements, status updates, ideas and
project discussions are all captured by a
single system, are shared among the project
participants and are available at any given
moment in time. So even if you need the
information when nobody is in the office,
you can still get it immediately. No need to
call your employee on Saturday evening
when you suddenly need to know where the
project stands. Besides, there’s no need for
the manager to manually adjust project plans
and individual team members’ schedules.
Project Management 2.0 lets you to
avoid micromanagement by allowing team
members to mark updates of their part of
the project work in the shared collaborative
environment. This gives the project manager
the up-to-date picture of where his team
and the project stand. The top-down
control comes in when the project manager
aligns and guides those activities. Project
Management 2.0 practices and tools let
you gain harmony between top-down and
bottom-up management styles.
Providing multiple project views
Besides giving an up-to-date picture
of internal project operations, the new-
magazine
Naturally, software will not do the whole job alone,
but it empowers people and multiplies their efforts.
generation technologies enable managers
and other members of the project team
to view projects differently. Project
participants can pick any reasonable sub-
set of tasks, create a view with these tasks
and share the view with someone who
needs it. It means that more people can
collaborate and contribute to the project
work productively.
Each of these views can be changed
by team members as the organization
and its environment changes. The whole
structure evolves with time. Managers, who
have access to more perspectives and to
broader views, can align multiple projects,
avoid scheduling conflicts and set the right
priorities. Flexible, many-to-many structures
that allow creating, sharing and easy
merging of views are an important part of
the Project Management 2.0 approach. This
approach enables collective intelligence
and leads to collaborative planning. In turn,
collaborative planning makes organizations
more productive and transparent.
Giving the complete picture of all projects
Upper-level managers can access the
global organizational view, which gives
them a clear picture of where the business
stands. Project Management 2.0 tools
merge individual employees’ to-do lists
into one picture that is always up-to-
date. It means that corporate executives
are constantly in the loop with what’s
going on in the project. The information
is always at their fingertips. As a result,
the organization’s leaders can adjust
strategic plans to changes in the business
environment much faster. It becomes easier
for them to rapidly and cost-efficiently
recognize changes and adapt to them. The
whole organization becomes more agile
and therefore more competitive, thanks
to very simple tools and the powerful
practices of Project Management 2.0.
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com
The key to the making the whole
organization more productive lays in
gaining efficiency for the project manager
and his team. Project Management 2.0
tools and practices become a catalyst to
important innovations on the organizational
level. They let everybody from team
members to project managers and
corporate executives focus on getting
things done and spend less time on
routine tasks. Naturally, software will not
do the whole job alone, but it empowers
people and multiplies their efforts. Project
Management 2.0 democratizes project
management, bringing it outside of
enterprise project management offices to
other departments, as well as to small and
midsize businesses. It makes companies
more agile, projects more controllable and
people more productive.
About Andrew Filev
Andrew Filev
has been
managing
software teams
since 2001
with the help
of new-generation collaboration
and management applications.
His best practices are based on
implementation of Enterprise 2.0
software in project management.
Now Andrew is an expert in project
management, a successful software
entrepreneur and the CEO at Wrike.
com. Andrew’s ideas about improving
traditional project management
are reflected in his popular Project
Management 2.0 blog.
Visit Andrew’s Project Management Blog
Andrew on Twitter: @andrewsthoughts
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 magazine

7 ways the new Apple

iPad will increase your
productivity
With the iPad many believe the era of traditional computing is over. The PCs
and Macs are not going to be mainstream. The iPad-like devices are. They
are great for mass content consumption and... productivity. Here’s how.

by Michael Sliwinski

T
he Apple’s iPad is still causing
lots of controversy all over the
Internet and since it’s just been
shipped, one can already find
a number of ways the iPad will improve
your productivity:
1. There’s no „right” way to hold it, it
rotates automatically to adjust to you
iPhone users know this already, but
for many folks this can be a new
thing - you can just grab the iPad and
it rotates to adjust to the way you
grabbed it. It doesn’t force you to think
„how to hold it” - just grab it and start
playing with it.
2. Pinch and zoom photos, tap articles
to make them bigger and better for
reading
Again, nothing new for the iPhone
users, but on this kind of device it’s
unprecedented - just pinch and zoom or
simply tap to read an article better, to see
more details, to make sure your eyes are
not working too hard. This will make it a
perfect computing device for people with
sight problems.
3. Process email inbox to zero beautifully
The beautiful all new interface to email
will make processing messages to zero
fun and cool. You’ll be inclined to process
more messages at the time just because
of the cool interface of the new email
app - the „paper-like” feel to the email
messages and ease of use will encourage
you to get email done. Of course, the only
thing problematic here is the performance
of the on-screen keyboard, especially
for people like me who are touch-typing.
But you can get a bluetooth keyboard for
some serious writing.
4. Single-tasking will improve your focus,
it’s a feature, not a bug!
People complain about the fact that you
can be in one app at a time on the iPhone
and will do the same on the iPad... but

22 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by


The beautiful all new interface to email will make
processing messages to zero fun and cool.
this actually helps boost your focus and
decrease distractions. You’ll get more
done, one app at a time.
5. One email message at a time in vertical
view
Similar to the point above, iPad has
another focus-boosting feature in its email
client - when you rotate the screen you see
the email message in a beautiful vertical
view and you see only this message, no
inboxes, no folders, no clutter, just the
message that you can give full attention
to. Similarly other iPad apps work this
way, making the iPad the ultimate „focus”
machine.
Interacting with pretty tools makes you want to use
them more.
6. Beautiful calendar will encourage
planning your Weekly Review
The calendar app on the iPad is incredibly
similar to the good old-school paper calendars
we used to carry around with us. I’m sure this
app will encourage more order and better
planning... and who knows, maybe we’ll finally
be able to schedule your GTD Weekly Review
more often than once a month? Let’s hope so!
magazine
7. Books will encourage readership -
you’ll read David Allen’s book again!
The iPad is to serve as an eBook reader.
You can get all of the issues of this
magazine on the iPad’s iBooks software
and read it on the go. It is the most elegant
eBook we’ve seen so far. It’ll help you
read more and learn more... also about
productivity!
Elegance helps getting things done
I’ve highlighted many times in this post
the iPad’s aesthetics and the fact that the
apps coming with it also look gorgeous
and I’m telling you - interacting with
pretty tools makes you want to use
them more. I should know, I’m using the
About Michael
Sliwinski
Michael Sliwinski
is your chief
editor of the
Productive!
Macbook Air and enjoy working on it Magazine and
every day. now a host of
the new Productive! Show site. Every
How will the iPad improve our day he’s trying to help people get
productivity? Will the apps really deliver on more done with his web application
the iPad? Time will tell, but since it’s just Nozbe.com - now also available as a
a bigger iPhone/iPod Touch, I’m sure this native iPhone or iPad app.
device can be a real productivity booster Michael on Twitter: @MichaelNozbe
for everyone. It already is for me! Michael’s Blog: MichaelNozbe.com
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by 23
 magazine

10 Laws of
Productivity
You might think that creatives as diverse as Internet
entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, industrial design firm Studio 7.5,
and bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami would
have little in common. In fact, the tenets that guide how they
– and exceptionally productive creatives across the board
– make ideas happen are incredibly similar.
by Jocelyn Glei

H
ere are 10 laws of productivity
we’ve consistently observed
among serial idea executors:
1. Break the seal of hesitation.
A bias toward action is the most common
trait we’ve found across the hundreds of
creative professionals and entrepreneurs
we’ve interviewed. While preparing
properly as you start a new project is
certainly valuable, it’s also easy to lose
yourself in planning (and dreaming)
indefinitely. We must challenge ourselves
to take action sooner rather than later. The
minute that you start acting (e.g. building
a physical prototype, sharing a nascent
concept with your community), you start
getting valuable feedback that will help
refine your original idea – and move
forward with a more informed perspective.
2. Start small.
When our ideas are still in our head, we
tend to think big, blue sky concepts. The
downside is that such thinking makes the
barrier to entry – and action – quite high. To
avoid “blue sky paralysis,” pare your idea
down to a small, immediately executable
concept. Can you trial the idea of a multi-
day festival with a smaller performance
series? Take an idea for a skyscraper and
model it in miniature? Work out the flow
of an iPhone app by sketching on paper?
Once you’ve road-tested your idea on a
small scale, you’ll have loads more insight
on how to take it to the next level.
Break each project into smaller chunks that only
take a few weeks or a month to complete.
3. Protoype, prototype, prototype.
Trial and error is an essential part of any
creative’s life. As Ze Frank says, usually when
we execute an idea for the first time, it kinda
sucks. The important thing is to synthesize the
knowledge gained during the process to refine
the idea, and create a new-and-improved
version. Serial idea-makers like Jack Dorsey,
Ben Kaufman, and Studio 7.5 all attest:
Prototyping and iteration is key to transforming
a so-so idea into a game-changing product.
Rather than being discouraged by your
“failures,” listen closely and learn from them.
Then build a new prototype. Then do it again.
Sooner or later, you’ll hit gold.
4. Create simple objectives for projects,
and revisit them regularly.
When working on in-depth projects, we
generate lots of new ideas along the way.
This can lead to a gradual expansion of
the project’s goals, or “scope creep.” This
insidious habit can make it impossible to
ever really complete anything. The best
way to avoid it is to write down a simple
statement summarizing your objective
at the start of each project. (If you have
collaborators, make sure there is agreement
about the objective.) And then – this is the
part we overlook! – revisit it regularly. When
scope creep starts to happen, you’ll notice.
5. Work on your project a little bit each day.
With projects that require a serious infusion of
creative juice – developing a new business plan,
writing a novel, or just learning a new skill – it’s
incredibly important to maintain momentum.
Just as when you run everyday, the exercise
gets easier and easier, the same thing happens
with your brain. Stimulate it regularly each day,
and those juices start to flow more freely. As
Jack Cheng argues in a great blog post, “Thirty
Minutes A Day”: “the important thing isn’t how
much you do; it’s how often you do it.”

24 #03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com Sponsored by


© Illustration by Oscar Orozco
6. Develop a routine.
Part of being able to work on your project
a little bit each day is carving out the
time to do so. Routines can seem boring
and uninspiring, but – on the contrary
– they create a foundation for sparking
true insight. In his recent memoir, What
I Talk About When I Talk About Running,
famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami
writes about how a rigorous routine –
rising at 5am and going to bed at 10pm
every day – is crucial to his impressive
creative output. (In a side note: Alex Iskold
derives a series of lessons for start-up
entrepreneurs from Murakami here.)
7. Break big, long-term projects into
smaller chunks or “phases.”
To help manage expectations and stay
motivated for year-long or even multi-
year endeavors, break each project into
smaller chunks that only take a few weeks
To avoid “blue sky paralysis,” pare your idea down to
a small, immediately executable concept.
magazine
The beautiful all new interface to email will make
processing messages to zero fun and cool.
or a month to complete. The dual benefit
of this approach is: (1) making the project
feel more manageable, and (2) providing
incremental rewards throughout the
project. It’s crucial to pause periodically to
take stock of what has been accomplished
– even if there’s a long way to go.
With projects that require a serious
infusion of creative juice, it’s incredibly
important to maintain momentum.
8. Prune away superfluous meetings
(and their attendees).
Few activities are more of a productivity
drain than meetings. If you must meet
(and this should be a big “if”), make
sure everyone knows what needs to
be accomplished from the outset. If
people are present who don’t help out
with achieving that objective, let them
leave. Qwest COO Teresa Taylor, recently
interviewed in the NYT’s Corner Office,
starts her meetings with the question,
„Do we all know why we’re here?” and
then follows with, „Does everyone need to
be here?” To trim the runtime of internal
meetings, you can also try the standing
meeting.
9. Practice saying “No.”
Creative energy is not finite. Seasoned
idea-makers know that they must guard
their energy – and their focus – closely.
Take author Jim Collins for example. His
books Built to Last and Good to Great
have sold millions of copies. His business
acumen and insights are in demand.
Yet, “even though Collins demands over
$60,000 per speech, he gives fewer than
18 per year.” More than that and Collins
wouldn’t have enough time to focus
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com
on the research and writing that yield
those bestselling books. When you’re
in execution mode, keep in mind that
“unexpected opportunities” also mean
distraction from the work at hand. Saying
no is an essential part of the productivity
equation.
10. Remember that rules – even
productivity rules – are made to be
broken.
Did we say develop a routine? This and
other tips here should only be followed as
long as they are working. If forward motion
has become impossible with your current
routine, try something else. Whether
it’s taking a long distance trip, popping
into the art museum, walking around the
block, or talking to a perfect stranger,
make sure you occasionally shake up your
normal routine. Breaking habits offers new
perspective and helps recharge us to head
back into the fray.
About Jocelyn Glei
J.K. Glei is
the Director
of the 99%,
Behance’s think
tank, which
focuses on what
happens after inspiration, researching
the forces that push ideas forward.
She also regularly consults with a wide
range of creative clients to assemble
strategic plans — addressing concept,
design, execution, workflow and
staffing — to facilitate the launch and/
or growth of content-driven ventures
both online and in print.
Web site: The 99%
99% on Twitter: @the99percent
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 Sculptures by Miguel Guia
Perfect Gifts for the Ones You Love

Sculptures by Miguel Guia

Perfect Gifts for the Ones You Love

www.MiguelGuia.com
www.MiguelGuia.com