Five habits keeping me productive and happy

As some of you might already know, I’m a complete sucker for all things GTD. That being said, a lot of stuff in the productivty community isn’t really universal, it’s either only applicable to a designer, a programmer or something else in that direction. Since I’m (no longer) either a designer nor programmer, I have used a lot of time trying to adapt various productivity tips to my work. My workday is 25% meetings/lectures, 25% project management/concept development, 25% sales/writing pitches and 25% management. Being an entrepreneur you need to keep a lot of hats at hand, ready to change every second.

Another thing that has taken me years to really understand is that “productivity” doesn’t mean making more things faster, it means making more things happier. Work shouldn’t be a tedious tasklist, it should be fun and in flow.

Over the last couple of months I’ve jotted down some “habits” of my productivity, which I had planned to present for my colleagues, but once these evolved it seems more suitable to put them up on the blog.

1. Inbox Zero

I’ve been using the Inbox Zero technique since end of 2007 and pushing it ever since. It’s one of those great methods that are easy to learn, but takes years to master.

We use Google Apps for mail, calendar, docs and more at Wemind, and Gmail is a fantastic client for Inbox Zero’ing. I check my e-mail about 10 times a day on the laptop and about 20 times a day on the iPhone. Everytime I open my inbox, I read through the mails from the top. I read the mail to the end and decide what to do with it. Could I reply within a minute? Then reply and archive! Should someone else take care of it? Forward it and archive! Will this have to wait? Give it a star and archive it (doing this on the iPhone Mail.app is simple, just move the mail to “Starred E-mails” when using Gmail as IMAP).

I read through starred e-mails every morning before meetings begin and every evening before going to bed. This ensures I never have more than 10-15 starred e-mails at once. This might seem easy, but keeping down the level of starred e-mails has proved to be a difficult task!

2. Scheduling your publishing

A lot of people believe that social media is fake, if it is scheduled. I don’t agree. For me atleast, I’ve been neglecting both this blog and my Twitter account for a long time. Simply because updating them wasn’t compatible with my worklife nor productivity scheme.

Having recently discovered CoTweet I’ve begun an experiment with scheduling some of my tweets. I usually write about 10-15 tweets every sunday, and sets them to publish over the course of the coming week. This enables me to have a dynamic Twitter profile which actually updates periodically. Of course, you still have to take time to reply. The OnDuty function in CoTweet helps me do this, by sending an e-mail to me if I have unanswered @-replies. I’ve seen a major rise in followers since this experiment began (I might soon have doubled the amount when reaching 600 one of the these days).

Inspired by scheduling my microblogging, I chose to try and schedule with WordPress again. The last 5-6 posts on this blog were scheduled! The workflow for this is also writing posts on sundays, which usually are quiet days with room for thought. I still haven’t gotten to the level of blogging I want, my goal is to schedule 3 blogposts every sunday.

So why schedule? Simple answer: Information overload. Imagine updating your Twitter profile with 30 thoughtful tweets in 30 seconds and putting 3 large posts on your blog at the same time. People might respond to the last, but don’t expect your readers/followers to be able to manage that kind of overload. Not all tweets have to writen in the moment, for example if you know you’re going to be in a meeting which you want to share, you could easily schedule the announcement.

3. Things

Finding the right task manager is harder than you might expect, and I’m not one of those people who believe that a one-size-fits-all application will ever exist. As I started this blogpost by mentioning, different jobprofiles have different tasks and thereby different solutions to productivity. I believe I have found the application for me though, and it’s called Things.

Things is a desktop application for my Mac, but also a mobile application for my iPhone. These two sync everytime they are near.

I organize taks by projects (only major projects, such as Klub Blod or Rejseliv) and areas (administration, sales, concepts, lectures). Once a new task comes up I try and get it onto the Inbox as fast as possible. When reviewing starred e-mails two times a day, I also review items in my task inbox. I then tag them up with keywords, set a deadline and apply it to either a project or an area. This way I always have a clean list of today’s tasks. I occasionally drop a task from the today list to “someday”, which means it won’t pop up again, but when I have time, I can review my someday list.

4. Always Away

This is a simple one, but I always keep my Messenger/Facebook/AIM/Gtalk/other IM on “Away” mode, which elimates 80% of “Hi! How are you doing?” requests doing my workday.

5. Flow

I can’t push the importance of flow enough. This is the single most valuable productivity technique for me.

Flow, to me, is finding a state of mind that enables you to focus all your energy on delivering at your best. This might seem a bit fluffy, but it’s the best way for me to explain it. An example of me being in a flow state is usually a weekday after midnight when everything is turned off (expect for the laptop ofcourse), and I know nothing can disturb me. I can then put all my energy in to making slides for a lecture, writing a proposal or answering starred e-mails. I would say that I’m in a flow state about once a week for an hour or two, but when this happens, I can finish work in these two hours that would take me two weeks when not being in this state.

I have yet to try and master this (if you can), but even though I feel like a newbie when it comes to flow, it’s still the one thing helping me most.

What’s your habit six or seven?