Here, I am giving you 10 from among those that seemed to me the most relevant, with a link to a summary of the book in which I found them:

1. If something requires less than two minutes to do, do it immediately. This will increase your productivity considerably without much effort because if something takes less than two minutes 1) it takes almost as long put it into a to-do list than to complete it, 2) given that it is small, these things can quickly add up to a number that is hard to manage, 3) bog your mind down uselessly when they are not on a to-do list and 4) not doing them can have consequences that are disproportionate with regard to the time it takes to complete them. Be careful all the same, sometimes you must map out large spans of time to focus on a project, time which cannot afford to suffer interruptions.

2. Try this trick when you can’t sleep at night. Lack of sleep is a terrible way to lose productivity, as well as the reason for being out of sorts, in a mad mood, lack of focus and other maladies which can have even more dramatic consequences on our relationships with others. To fight against occasional insomnia – for chronic insomnia, it is better to seek medical treatment – try this trick to free your mind and stem the continuous flow of thoughts which begin to invade it:

• Keep a pen and paper beside your bed.
• As soon a thought enters your mind, write it on a piece of paper and write next to it the very next action you must take to progress to the level of this thought.

For example, if you say to yourself “I must send this quote to a client,” write:

Quote customer – find supplier costs in the catalog

If it’s “I think that our marriage is on the rocks,” write:

Marriage – Talk about it with [best friend]

You get the idea. As long as you put your thoughts down on paper, and the first actions to take, you will feel more at peace, and these ideas will leave your brain alone, because they have no further reason to bother you since you have made a decision. For more detail on these two pieces of advice, read the review about GTD.

3. Cultivate a “Let’s go and look!” attitude. Sometimes a quick visit to the field can teach you more than a week spent analyzing numbers, sitting comfortably at your desk. The next time that someone comes to make you aware of a problem, stand up and stay “Let’s go and look!” This will save you precious time.

4. Abstain from using bad language in the workplace. This advice can seem incredibly old hat in this modern, liberated world, but it stems from pure common sense: not using bad language will never offend anyone. Using it sometimes might offend someone. Abstain and you will perhaps avoid conflicts or difficult situations that will eat up energy and time. For more details on these two pieces of advice, read the review of The unwritten laws of Business.

5. For everything you do, ask yourself “Why am I doing this? Is it necessary?” Sometimes we carry things out entirely by force of habit, without asking ourselves whether it is necessary or if it necessarily needs to be done by us as opposed to someone else. This can be a big reason for wasting time and energy, because we end up doing things that aren’t worth the time we spend on them or quite simply aren’t useful. Ask yourself this question regularly when you carry out a task: “What would happen if I skipped this?” If the reply is Nothing, then you should put a stop to the activity, if not, ask yourself: “Would it be better if someone else carried out this activity?” Your reply will give you an indication of what you should delegate.

For more detail, read the review of “The Effective Executive.”

6. Just Begin.

Whatever you can do or dream that you can do, begin. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

Goethe

7. Close the loop. Have you ever dealt with someone who tells you “we will call you if we run into problems?” Two weeks go by and still no call and you begin to ask yourself if everything is really all right. When people don’t close the loop, they leave others waiting, which is distracting and can even subtely change the relationship. Don’t be like them. Keep others up to date. They will be grateful to you for respecting their time and will repay you one way or another.

8. Don’t let your Blackberry become your master. You should not let technology keep you connected 24 hours a day just because it allows you to. You would not give a hammer or a wrench the power to decide when it should be used. Don’t give this power to your phone or your PDA. Define a schedule and limits for using them. Turn them off when you are in meetings or working on something else that involves other people or demands concentration. Let people know that you don’t check your emails or phone messages after a certain time or on weekends. Thus you will define a clear boundary between times when you are working and others will let you be more focused on what you are doing.
For more detail on these three pieces of advice, read the review of Cut to the Chase.

9. Backup your electronic files regularly. There are two types of users in the world: those who already make backups, and those who will do so some day, usually after having lost weeks or months or years of work. Having worked for more than 8 years in the field of information services, I can only confirm that backing up is one of the subjects most frequently neglected, especially by small or specialized companies. It always amazes me to see that someone who has spent 20 hours writing a report or a document won’t even spend one minute backing it up… I have already seen enough number of people who were left with only their eyes to cry after losing essential data due to negligence – including one student who lost his master’s thesis one month before having to present it – to be disgusted by so much unnecessary suffering. Backup often and backup a lot, backup too much even: it is better to backup too much than not enough. Check Carbonite, an excellent online automatic backup utility that is not expensive.
For more detail, read the four part summary of Bit Literacy.

10. Recognize when it has all been said.

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This week, as promised, I am focused on implementing GTD. The least I can say is that it’s not simple. Especially due to the number of available electronic applications, and because I want to, and must, have a system for collecting and processing that is reliable, which I can count on, and which meets my requirements. I have identified my primary requirements and needs as the following: The system must allow me to:

• Identify all my important personal and professional tasks, as well as my ideas, and categorize them by type (office, home, professional, personal, etc.), level of energy needed, importance, due date.
• Be able to take notes and enter the tasks into the system from anywhere, at any time.
• If I use an application it must allow me to access my system at the office and at home, and ideally from any computer, anywhere.
• Avoid rewrites as much as possible, which cause errors and waste time.
• Minimize paper as much as possible and opt for digital. Digital is the easiest to store and minimizes the problem of physical space, it is transferable, convertible, and easiest to safeguard. It also allows searching by key words and it is much easier to edit data already entered. What’s more it is ecological – generally. And yes, I am a geek convert and I like the latest technology .

My primary requirement is to be able to carry my system with me, so that I can enter things into it and consult it anywhere. Ideally, I don’t care to use a system of temporary notes which will force me to have to re-enter the notes into my system, and most of all force me to remember to enter them, I therefore reject Moleskine’s idea of a notepad, even though I discovered this excellent article on the art of transforming your notebook into a machine for GTD for less than € 20. So I am going to look for a digital device that includes an application. As luck would have it, I broke my PDA a few days ago and my cell phone is an old Nokia on which Smartphone functions are limited and not very useful. I have a laptop which I lug around with me every week, but I generally only it take it on my personal travels and I have no wish to open it up – and take it out of hibernate mode which takes several minutes – just to write a quick note or look something up.

Okay, I will use this as the right time to invest in a portable tool that can become my GTD companion – and must also fulfill other functions.

After some thought and looking into different articles on the web, I see two possible solutions:

• Get a new PDA with a plug-in to add GTD capability to Outlook. But okay, when the phone and PDA are combined, having a device like that in my pocket is still a burden and somewhat pitiful. But I have a GPS Fujitsu Loox N110, which is light and easy to carry, that I could perhaps tinker with and convert it into a PDA. That would at least have the advantage of being cheap, but it will take me some time. Then I will need a tool to add GTD capability to Outlook – there are plenty of those, Jello Dashboard, which is free – and especially to synchronize this new capability with a PDA – good luck with that, most plug-ins don’t support all this functionality, in the belief that most GTD users sit in front of their PCs all day! But it would be good to find, the advantage being that I use Outlook 2007 a lot at the office and at home for email and the calendar, if I could use this application for GTD it would allow me to bring everything together in a single interface. Alternatively: I could also get a Smartphone with Windows Mobile capability and then synchronize it to Outlook.
• Get an iPhone and use Remember the Milk. Remember the milk (RTM) is a free, user friendly software program that seems to be rather popular on the web for using GTD. Furthermore, RTM offers a complete tutorial on its blog about integrating GTD using RTM. Until recently the problem with RTM was that you couldn’t access it online, but it is nonetheless possible to synchronize with a PDA or a Windows Mobile Smartphone and especially with an iPhone. Why especially with an iPhone? Yes indeed, I have I always wanted this little toy, first because I have always liked Apple’s products – I have a 1^st generation iPod nano which is still working after 2 years, and I just love it -  because it’s very sexy and it has a lot of integrated capability that is very useful, which means you don’t have to mess with three different devices. What’s more the unlimited web package that is generally associated with it will let me continuously synchronize with the RTM online database, although a scheduled synchronization might even be enough.

In my heart I am leaning more towards the iPhone+RTM solution, but I need a few days to think it over. If you have any ideas about it, I’m listening . I would also like to testdrive the input system first, because I would like to be able to write notes and ideas easily on this electronic device, and I know that if the interface is not intuitive and fast, I won’t use it – I learned the hard way with PDAs, when I thought that I would enter my tasks and notes, but the difficulty in using the device made me give up on the idea.

A great little gadget isn’t it?

II – What I have already done.

• Email.

I have had a system in place for managing email for a long time and I think it’s efficient. Fortunately, in light of the number I receive every day. I use Outlook 2007 and I have primary folders labeled “clients,” “vendors,” “employees” and sub-folders underneath them, one for every important client, one for every important vendor and one for every employee, with a rule system which directs emails automatically and organizes them in the correct folder. It takes 30 seconds to create a folder and a rule once you know how to do it and then Outlook automatically files mail from your client or vendor for years without you having to do a thing. What’s more, with Outlook 2007’s automatic search feature, the need to file emails has all but disappeared: you can find mail in seconds, wherever it is!

I took the advice of Timothy Ferriss (author of The Four Hour Work Week) and I deactivated the feature for automatically downloading emails: right now it’s something I do manually, to avoid be constantly interrupted.

As for dealing with email, it’s very easy and in fact I have been using the GTD method, almost entirely, for years without knowing it. When I get mail, I read it and:

• Either I delete it immediately.
• Or I leave it alone, which means it’s automatically filed.
• Or I reply to it, if it takes less than two minutes and if I am able to.
• Or I mark it as unread so that I can come back to it later.

Ah yes, it is totally possible to change an email you have read to unread and it’s even quite simple.

In Outlook (it works the same in most email applications), right click on the email, then select “Mark as unread”

. Simple right? Then Outlook displays the number of unread emails that I have in each folder and displays the name of the folder in bold, which lets me know if I have any actions to take care of.

: Folder containing 1 unread message

: Folder containing no unread messages

The thing that I don’t do, in keeping with GTD, is to integrate the emails that I reference into a system and categorize the actions that need to be taken. Outlook can do that easily by assigning a category to the email and a due date reminder using the box and flag which are found on the left of the mail item and the date you received it .

The flag lets you assign a due date to the email and the box lets you assign a category.

But I don’t use it at the moment and I am doing very well without it. As French reader Laurent put it, you also don’t want to get caught up in micro-managing your time, which will have the opposite effect of costing more time. At most I am going to integrate actions into the system for emails that require a certain amount of time to deal with and a follow up, for one reason or another.

• Calendar

I haven’t used this sort of calendar for a long time:

so i use the Outlook calendar function, synchronized to a PDA, which let me easily edit the calendar and assign color codes to my action – which lets me see at a glance what my day and my week look like.

But anyway, it’s been a lot less useful since my PDA stopped working .

However, I will keep this electronic calendar, which will either be completely integrated with my GTD system – via the Outlook plug-in – or into which I will copy and paste the possible actions to be entered into the RTM.

• Desk

Ever since I translated this article which describes how to organize your desk using the GTD method two months ago on my blog Habitudes Zen, my desk has literally gone through a metamorphosis. Before it was often cluttered with paper and different things which had no business being there.

Now, it is empty and serene: only essential items remain. My monitor, phone, a note-pad, a pen holder, some accessories which I use all the time, like the company seal and a postal scale, and a red “to-do” folder. All the papers are in it that I get and don’t destroy, don’t file and don’t see to right away. Then, when I have a little time, I open the folder and deal with the things in the pile.

The system could be further improved upon – I don’t file papers in any particular order, for example- but it is still a big improvement over my last “system,” an improvement which cost me practically nothing in terms of effort and time to set it up.

Today, when I arrive at my company, the simple sight of my clear, tidy desk lifts me up, motivates me and calms me down, all at the same time.

My main desk. Only essentials and a “to do” folder. Oh yes, it is red.

My other desk, completely empty and reserved for meetings and for dealing with the paperwork.

My filing system, located just to the right of my desk, is barely used at the moment. It will eventually be completely incorporated into my GTD system.

Forgive the quality of the photos, I just used my old Nokia cell phone to take them .

In any case, I really appreciate the clarity of mind that comes from the sight of a clear desk, uncluttered by a ton of things that block my visual field and my brain. I really don’t understand reader French Olivier Maxime who, by way of criticizing pearl No. 7 in my previous article – rightly insisting on the importance of tidying up your desk – sent me a photo of Einstein’s desk:

Einstein’s desk. Do you think it’s a good example to follow?

As I told him, I don’t believe that taking inspiration from the defects of great men can help you find your genius .

• Filing

Similarly, I have a filing system which has worked pretty well for many years: a binder for vendor invoices – current purchases and resale purchases, with a divider to separate the two – a binder for company invoices – I keep them electronically, then print then all together at the end of the year to give the accountant – a binder for customer contracts and a binder for all documents relating to employees. I try to keep everything else electronically when I can, by scanning paper documents and converting them into PDF format.

• Two minute rule

This is the simplest thing to apply in GTD: if something that arrives in your inbox requires less than two minutes to do, do it immediately. It’s really quite nuts, but I do it as soon as I think of it ever since I read the book and it really makes a difference: I instantly get rid of all the little tasks that would otherwise build up and overwhelm me.

III – What I Have Left To Do

A lot of things . But here is the list of my next set of actions for implementing GTD.

1. Choose the best tool that really meets all of my requirements, see part 1.
2. Empty every draw in my desk and apply the GTD sort method (destroy it, put it in the “to do” folder, file it, delegate it).
3. Same goes for the filing cabinets and shelves.

The GTD method clearly takes a long time to implement, but I think that it’s a wise investment of time and will pay off for me later on . Only time will tell.

What about you? Have you tried to set it up? How did it go?

[Translated by DeansResource]

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