CIO | GTD for CIOs

Start 2015 off with a Yearly Review

December 20, 2014 1 Comment

This is the time of year we all do self-reflection and resolve to improve ourselves in the new year. As most everyone knows making resolutions like “I’m going to lose weight” rarely are successful. The main reason for this is these goals are not put in a context that will allow for long-term success. Once the initial “eat better and get to the gym” wears off and we are stuck in the daily grind of our lives we revert to our old habits.

If you really want to resolve to accomplish something and truly make a commitment with yourself, then you need to create an environment for long-term success. This means adopting GTD and incorporating your desired outcomes into your trusted system.

I recommend you do a “Yearly Review” to reflect on last year and project into next year. Then if something comes out of that self-reflection that you really are willing to commit to, you need to incorporate it into your system and work your system every week via the Weekly Review. By using this approach (as opposed to a new year’s resolution) you will have a much better chance of long-term success.

The year-end review is similar to a weekly review but at a much higher level. Here are the questions I ask myself:

Looking back on 2014:

What were your wins for the year?
What were the risks you took?
What is your unfinished business from this year that will carry forward to 2014?
What are you most happy about completing?
Who were the people who had the greatest impact on your life this year?
What was your biggest surprise?
What did you give back to your community?

Looking forward to 2015:

What would you like to be your biggest win to be this year?
What are you planning to do to improve yourself?
What would you be most happy about completing in the coming year?
What would you most like to change about yourself?
What are you looking forward to learning?
What do you think your biggest risk will be?
What about your work, are you most committed to changing and improving?

Then, I do a thorough review of my Someday/Maybes to see if there is anything on there that I want to commit to accomplishing in the new year. Perform a review of your higher-level horizons like your Areas of Focus to see if they still reflect your commitments and responsibilities accurately.

Next, it is critical to assess how you have allocated your time over the course of the last year. This is critical because time is your most valuable asset. There are only 24 hours in a day and therefore you need to make the most of each one of those hours. To complete my Year-End Review I schedule my calendar for the new year. I schedule all of my recurring meetings to stop recurring at the end of the year so I will have a blank calendar in the new year. This way I get to reassess the value of those meetings.

Open your calendar and look back at your recurring meetings. Were they worth the time you invested in them? I’ll bet they started out with the best of intentions and actually provided value but over time, they decayed into less value. Take a critical look at your recurring meetings and ask yourself if they continue to be worth the time investment. Ideally, you will delete these from your calendar. If you’re not comfortable with removing them, then maybe you can reduce their recurrence from daily to weekly or weekly to every other week or monthly.

The next thing you need to do is to schedule your priorities. This is absolutely critical! If you don’t schedule your priorities, your calendar will get filled up with other stuff and you wont be spending your time on the highest value items. Schedule the things that really matter first. For me, this is my family time, my weekly review, priority projects, 1:1s with my direct reports and any major commitments I may have.

Schedule these items in the morning and don’t make them more than 90 minutes. Why? Because if you schedule them in the morning and you get “overtaken by events” and have to do something else you can bump a lower priority item off later in the day. Also, there is ample evidence showing that people’s energy, concentration and effectiveness is greater in the morning than the afternoon. There is also lots of evidence that after an hour and a half people’s effectiveness drops off significantly so if you have a large project you are much better scheduling multiple 90 appointments than to try to slog thru a multiple hour task.

Schedule multiple 30 minute appointments to process you “inboxes.” For most people this is email but if your honest with yourself you have multiple incoming queues of stuff. If you follow GTD then you have your “unprocessed” queue of stuff. You may have an “inbox” on your desk, you may have incoming calls, you may have RSS feeds, you may have the incoming stream of social media or other incoming queues of “stuff” that needs to be processed. Schedule time to process your stuff to zero.

Once you have added these items to your calendar, then whatever free blocks of time are left can be filled with meetings and other lower priority items.

Do a Year-end Review and I guarantee you will feel better and start 2015 off on the track to success!

Filed under Calendar, Yearly Review Tagged with CIO, GTD, yearly review

Additional tools to keep up with information overload

December 2, 2014 2 Comments

In my last post, I discussed that as a CIO in today’s fast-paced world it has become increasingly difficult to stay on top of all the relevant news and information I need to be successful in my job. I explained how I use Feedly to process hundreds to headlines per day with ease.

Unfortunately, not all content I need to stay on top of my game comes as a RSS feed or the sources do come as RSS feeds but they are to “spamy” to consume that way. So, I use additional digital tools like Apple’s Newsstand & Podcast apps, and Amazon’s Kindle & Audible apps to augment Feedly.

Newsstand

Every morning I read the daily newspapers like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post on my iPad before I go thru my Feedly feeds. Why? Because the WSJ is the source for business, the NYT is the national paper of record, and the WP is the source for political and world events. With the digital versions I can scan the entire paper in less than 3 minutes and drill down on any stories that interest me. Now, I have all the relevant information from the analog paper world that matters in less than 10 minutes. No way you could do that with the dead trees versions!

Once a week, I scan the weekly magazines like The Economist, BusinessWeek,Time, Newsweek, The Week, GolfWeek and Sports Illustrated to glean the deeper perspective of the stories and issues of the week. Once again, the digital versions of these magazines lend themselves to quickly scanning the headlines and only drilling down on the relevant articles in a way that would be impossible with the analog versions.

On a monthly basis, I scan the Harvard Business Review, Hollywood Reporter, Inc., Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, PC Magazine, PC World, MacLife, Money, Sound & Vision, Golf Digest, Golf, ESPN, Men’s Fitness, Mens Health. Consumer Reports, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Sunset, I3 and Productive magazines to complete my insights on what is going on in the world.

Podcasts

Some content is only available on podcasts so that is how I consume it. Generally, I listed to podcasts in one of two situations. either I am at the gym doing resistance training and stretching, or I am in the car on my daily commute.

There are some wonderful tech podcasts like A16Z, The Cloudcast, Cloud Computing Weekly, Gigaom Structure Show, and McKinsey on High Tech podcasts.

There are also some great business and management podcasts like Manager Tools, Career Tools, On Leadership from the Washington Post and HBR Ideacast.

I like to listen to Freakonomics Radio just to get the weird and humorous side of things.

And finally, I listen to productivity casts like GTD Connect, GTD Virtual Study Group, The Productive Life, Beyond the To-Do List and This is Your Life with Michael Hyatt.

Audible

Audible audiobooks is another way to keep up with “reading” books by listening to them.

I usually listen to audiobooks in the car and really enjoy it. I can fly thru a book relative to reading it because I have more built-in “listening time” than I do free “reading time” built into my week. Just commuting to work gives me 5 hours a week to listen.

Audible has a great business model where you buy credits and exchange them for books. The net effect of this is you get books that you want to “read” in such a way as to encourage you to get a new book every month. This encourages you to keep listening to new content at a fairly rapid clip in order to use your credits.

Like you would expect from Amazon, Audible does a great job of data analysis from your wish lists and previous purchases from both your Kindle and Audible accounts to recommend titles on sale that you really want.

Kindle

Some books are not available on Audible and are only available on the Kindle. For these types of books and for pleasure reading, I tend to get the Kindle version.

I like the ability to read them on my Kindle Paperwhite reader when I am lying in bed because it is so light or outside in the sunshine when the glare on my iPad makes it difficult to read.

Amazon bought a web site called GoodReads which is a social network for people who love to read. Amazon has done a good job of integrating Audible, Kindle and GoodReads so GoodReads knows about your purchases and can automatically import them.

When I hear about a new book to read I add it to my “To Read” shelf and then when I am ready to read/listen to a new book I just go to GoodReads to see what my next purchase should be. Because it is social, you tend to follow other readers and get recommendations and reviews that enhance the experience. This is one are where the wisdom of the crowd really helps.

The one common thread between Feedly, Newsstand, Podcasts Audible and Kindle is once the content makes the shift from the analog world to the digital world, it becomes much easier to consume content faster and more efficiently. This is critical for keeping up with today’s fast paced world.

Filed under Tools Tagged with CIO, GTD, information overload

Use Feedly to keep up with information overload

November 19, 2014 2 Comments

As a CIO in today’s fast-paced world it has become increasingly difficult to stay on top of all the relevant news and information I need to be successful in my job.

The days of reading a local newspaper, subscribing to a few trade journals, magazines and watching the news to keep up are long gone. Similarly, surfing the web to try to keep up with everything is not a viable option as it just takes too much time and it is too easy to get trapped in a rabbit hole of non-productivity.

So, what is the modern way to keep up?

I have found using Feedly is the best way to keep on top of all the news and developments I need to be successful in today’s business and technical world. With Feedly I can scan hundreds or thousands of articles from dozens of different sources quickly and efficiently.

Feedly dramatically reduces the friction in information consumption.

With Feedly I can quickly scan RSS (Really Simple Syndication) headlines to determine which ones I want to click on to get more information. Once I click on a particular item of interest, I get a short synopsis of the article and any accompanying pictures. 9 out of 10 times, this snippet/picture combination is enough to convey the relevant information so I do not have to click on the link to actually read the original article. This is the key to the massive time savings I get by using Feedly to process incoming information.

Feedly is free and it is very powerful. A paid version, Feedly Pro has the features you really need to fully experience the full productivity boost. A subscription to Pro costs $5/month or $45/year and it is worth every penny. It is available on the web, Android, Blackberry, Chrome, iOS, Kindle, OS-X, Windows 8 and Windows Phone. That pretty much covers it from a devices perspective.

Choosing feeds is easy. Just search Feedly for your profession/career, your favorite people, your interests, your hobbbies, your passions, your favorite brands, magazines and newspapers, etc. and it will list the feeds available on the subject. When choosing be sure to notice the number of subscribers and the number of posts per week. The more subscribers the better. More posts is not always a good thing. Some feeds are “spamy” and post too many articles relative to the overall value.

My feeds or sources are handled in a very Darwinian way. If a particular feed is not providing relevant information I delete it. If a feed produces too many posts per day that are not relevant, I delete it. Frequently I subscribe to a feed to try it out only to decide it does not make the cut and is delete in a week or so. This results in a very fluid list of sources that is constantly changing.

I currently subscribe to 81 feeds, which result in over 600 posts per day and I am able to process them in less than a half hour. This allows me to keep up on all the news and events from sources I consider relevant to my career and life.

Here is an example of the list view in Feedly:

If I want to keep the article for reference or for some kind of follow up, then I just select the “ Evernote” button and it send it directly to Evernote to process later. This is one of the most important aspects of my overall GTD system. Processing in Feedly and sending to Evernote is a huge time saver.

As I process, if the article is something I want to share with others I use the “Buffer” button which will tweet it on Twitter and post it to LinkedIn on a specified schedule. Sometimes, I want to email someone directly and all I have to do is select the email button. Simple. Efficient. Friction-free.

Here is an example of an item that was clicked on to reveal more detail showing the Evernote, Email and Buffer icons:

The key to long-term success with Feedly is incorporating it into your daily habits. I usually process my feeds the first thing in the morning when I am at the gym on the elliptical trainer. It works out great because it has a reading stand for the iPad so I can easily use my hands to process my incoming queue of headlines while listening to an up-beat playlist of music. I also use Feedly on my iPhone and Nexus phones regularly.

I consider this a critical part of my overall continual learning experience, so I take it very seriously. So, I treat my incoming RSS Feeds just like my email inbox and try to process all my feeds to zero every day. “Feedly Zero”

I pride myself on knowing information before others and daily processing of RSS feeds is the key to making this a reality. It gives me a competitive advantage in work and life. I am extremely impressed when a colleague tells me something relevant that I do not already know about. If it happens once in a while then it is just luck or timing but if they consistently know relevant information before I do, then it shows me they have an effective system for processing information and I try to learn how they do it.

With Feedly, I can subscribe to a wide variety of sources and quickly scan what is going on in the world. How do you process information in today’s fast-paced world?

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with CIO, feedly, GTD, information overload, rss

How to decrease the stress in your life

October 12, 2014

There is a reason David Allen’s first book is called “Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress Free Productivity.” The reason is because practicing GTD provides the most systematic and effective way to manage all the commitments you have to yourself and others. GTD’s key benefit is freedom – freedom from the sources of distraction and stress in your life.

Not sure you believe me? Well there is scientific proof. Check out Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity by Francis Heylighen and Clément Vidal which goes into great detail on the science behind GTD and why it works.

Many people confuse GTD with time management but David argues that what is required is not time management but really self management – what we do with ourselves in any situation or context. It involves dealing effectively with all of the things we have to do and want to do, both personally and professionally.

GTD is about capturing things we collect and create, deciding what – if anything – we want to do about them, organizing the results of that knowledge work into a trusted system we can review appropriately and making intuitive strategic and tactical choices about what to do at any point in time from our options.

In this way, GTD provides a comprehensive approach for increasing productivity while decreasing stress. GTD is a process that accelerates productivity without requiring more effort. In fact, most people experience a great decrease in stress while increasing the amount they get done.

Why? Simply put, it’s because our brains are optimized for fast decision-making, not for storage. Trying to juggle too many things in your head at the same time is a major reason we get stressed out when there’s a lot going on.

The best way to stop mentally thrashing and start being productive is to get all your “stuff” into your trusted system. Once the information is out of your head, it’s far easier to figure out what to do with it. Once you get all your stuff out of your head and into your trusted system you experience a profound sense of relief.

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with CIO, GTD, stress, Stress Free Productivity

Fall off the GTD Bandwagon? Here’s how to get back on!

September 23, 2014 1 Comment

Everyone who tries to practice GTD at one time or another “falls off the bandwagon” and this is usually do to not doing a Weekly Review for a few weeks in a row. Subconsciously, your brain knows you do not have a complete list of your commitments in your trusted system so it not longer trusts your system. So, your brain starts trying to remember your commitments and as a result, it all comes off the rails.

In GTD the vital first stage is Collection. Whenever we lose steam in our GTD flow, I feel like the most powerful collection exercise is what David Allen calls “the mind-sweep.” Whenever I feel “out of control” with everything going on in my life and I have fallen off the GTD bandwagon, I try to step back and do a mind-sweep to regain control. It works every time.

The idea behind the mind-sweep is to identify and gather everything that is making claims on your attention or is likely to affect the larger areas of responsibility in your life – everything that’s quietly burning cycles, stealing focus, and whittling away at your attention – so that you can then decide what (if anything) must be done about each of those things. David says “put your attention on what has your attention.”

If it’s not being directly managed in a trusted external system, then it’s resident somewhere in your psyche and that is a bad thing. The point is you need to make sure that everything you need is collected somewhere other than in your head. So, just as you learned Collection as the first step in implementing GTD (and to subsequently maintain your system), it’s precisely the place to start when you’re trying to properly get back into it.

By doing a mind-sweep you’ll discover your head is flooded with stuff that you aren’t or haven’t been doing anything about. Not coincidentally, this is almost always stuff that represents some kind of incompletion, functional fuzziness, or procrastination on your part.

The Mind-Sweep

What you need to do to get your GTD mojo back is to do a mind-sweep. It is really simple. Start with a single sheet of printer paper and a pencil, set a timer for 15 minutes, and just begin scraping every conceivable commitment, anxiety and “open loop” from the corners of your brain. Review this list of “triggers” to help you identify all your stuff. Try it, it works!

Anything that’s on your mind now?
What do you have to do today?
What happened yesterday or the last couple of days, voicemails, emails?
Glance at your calendar back 1-2 weeks, events, presentation, family events
Glance at calendar next 2 weeks
Need to do anything to prepare for the season (vacation, planning, family, social events)
Anything for work projects or things that should be project that you haven’t identified as such?
Any “problems” that you may need to turn into a project
Do a sight walk around in your mind’s eye (look around your office, home, etc)
Meetings, people, projects, opportunities
All the people in your life right now
Conversations you need to have/want to have
Are your job responsibilities clear?
Fun/things to do with the family
Personal/professional development…anything you want to get better at
Personal/direct family relationships, good friends, network, pets
Anything around creativity or creative expression?
All my gear/tools okay?
Any medical open loops?

Begin with the hopelessly-behind project that’s making you insane right now, then proceed methodically through every thought that makes you cringe, groan, pause, ponder, or exclaim; these are the runaway background processes that are responsible for subconscious stress and you need them out of your head.

Think about it like brainstorming. Don’t judge the items or think about them in any way, just get them on paper. Remember, this is your opportunity to convert the fuel for subconscious stress into items that can later be made actionable (or deferred or delegated or killed etc). But you can’t do anything about it until it’s been captured and evaluated in your trusted system.

For the sweep to really do its best work, you must call upon extraordinary willpower to stay in collection mode. Remember the day you finally “got” how GTD worked by firewalling your planning time (Weekly Review) from your doing (Processing) time? Same idea here. No straying or switching back and forth between the two. Remember, your brain is smarter than you, and it can’t be tricked into thinking that things are taken care of when they actually aren’t. I would even suggest eliminating use of the two-minute rule during your mid-sweep.

Now that your 15 minutes is up, look at the list and process it. Most of the items on it will be projects of some sort. Get them into your trusted system and you will immediately feel the joy of getting them out of your head – guaranteed.

Filed under Best Practices Tagged with CIO, GTD, mind-sweep

Do you have a “Stop Doing List?”

September 4, 2014 3 Comments

The bestselling author Jim Collins gave the keynote address this morning at BoxWorks 2014 and he did a fantastic job of motivating and inspiring me.

While he gave many worthwhile stories and concepts that are very relevant to CIOs and GTD practitioners, he ended with a simple question that I am going to incorporate into my trusted system.

He asked the crowd how many people had to-do lists and everyone’s hands went up. Then he asked who had a “stop doing list” and very few hands went up.

I am going to incorporate this into my Weekly Review because the “stop doing list” will become a mechanism for disciplined thought about how to allocate the most precious of all resources: time.

At the top of my “stop doing list” is going to be agreeing to low-value commitments. Many times I regret saying “yes” to a request of a colleague, friend, family member, salesperson, vendor, charity, conference, etc.

Deciding that I’m not going to do something is one of the most challenging aspects of self-management. Most of us hate to say “no” — to ourselves and to others. But there are practical things we can do to make that process more positive and dynamic.

This dovetails perfectly with GTD because if you do have a complete and trusted inventory of your current commitments, at every level, your ability to decline potential new ones will automatically be enhanced. Knowing when to say yes or no is a big part of stress-free productivity.

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with boxworks, CIO, GTD, stop doing list

CIOs continue to resist Bezos Law at their own peril

August 20, 2014

I just returned from CIO Magazine’s CIO 100 Symposium and Awards where the “Top 100 CIO’s” were recognized for their achievements. I was shocked to find that even among this elite group of CIOs there were still a significant amount of CIOs who were resisting the cloud. They had a multitude of reasons or rationalizations as to why they were not embracing the cloud.

When asked what I was most proud of I said “getting out of the datacenter business” and returning the on-premise square footage to the business. Many heads nodded in agreement but there were also many CIOs who thought I was crazy. In discussing why they felt this way I came to the conclusion that many CIOs rose up thru the technical ranks and they derive their sense of self esteem and job security around their historical success of owning and understanding the technology. The cloud was perceived as just too risky for them to give up control.

Many CIOs rationalized they were in the cloud by stating they had a “private cloud” and when I pressed them on what they meant by that they told me about how virtualized their datacenter was as if VMs somehow equaled cloud. I asked them what the attributes of a cloud was to them and they kept coming back to VMs. Virtual Machines are rapidly becoming yesterday’s news as Containers like Docker are becoming the most efficient way to run workloads. But even this misses the point entirely as I pointed out in a previous post “What does Bezos’ Law mean for CIOs?”

Then, today I read this article by Greg O’Connor, “Bezos’s law signals it’s time to ditch the data center” and it further laid out the case for embracing the public cloud and getting out of the datacenter business. In it Greg points out:

“Previously, I posited that the future of cloud computing is the availability of more computing power at a much lower cost. I termed this “Bezos’s law,” and defined it as the observation that, over the history of cloud, a unit of computing power price is reduced by 50 percent approximately every three years.”

“Now comes new cloud computing data based on Total Cost of Infrastructure (TCOI), proving cloud providers are innovating and reducing costs in areas beyond hardware. The result is a more compelling case for cloud as a far cheaper platform than a build-your-own data center. Further, the economic gap that favors the cloud provider platform will only widen over time.”

This seems so obvious to me but clearly many CIOs don’t get it. I stand by my statement that “Bezos Law is today’s version of Moore’s Law and CIOs who do not recognize this will be rapidly replaced.”

Filed under Information Technology Tagged with Bezos Law, CIO, cloud

How to Leverage an Assistant to Manage Your Calendar

August 3, 2014

My previous post was dedicated to effective calendar management and in this post I want to focus on leveraging an assistant or executive admin to manage your calendar. If you are a CIO or a senior executive who is fortunate enough to have an assistant, then you know how they can improve your effectiveness. I’ve am blessed to have an incredibly great assistant who makes me significantly more productive and frees me up to focus on higher-level tasks.

If you have an assistant, I strongly suggest you encourage them to take ownership of your calendar. Make sure he or she understands your priorities and who can — and should — be allowed to override your planned day. Then, let your assistant begin managing your appointments for you. He or she should have 100% control of your calendar and your staff should know they must go thru them to get time on your calendar.

This can be challenging as people will try to circumvent the assistant and go directly to you by popping their heads in your office, calling or texting your mobile phone directly, sending you an email or IM, etc. You must support your assistant by not allowing this to happen. Politely, remind the person who want to get on your calendar that they must go thru your assistant. Otherwise, you circumvent their authority as the arbiters of your calendar and will create confusion and have a sub-optimal situation.

Schedule time to meet with your assistant every morning to do a short “Daily Review” of the upcoming day and the rest of the week to see what is ahead. Look a few weeks out so you can both be on the same page as to what the immediate future holds. Review your current priorities and help them understand the relative importance of potential meetings, lunches, dinners or other requests for your time. Some are truly ASAP while others can be in the next couple of weeks or even in the next month or so.

Make sure your assistant gets enough information for you to make an informed decision as to wither a particular appointment is worth your time or not. What is the agenda? Does is have to be a meeting or can it be handled via email or a phone call? Is there travel involved? If so, how much travel time should be allocated to ensure you will be there on time? What preparation should you do prior to the meeting?

Finally, work together to determine when to say “no.” There will never be enough time in the day for all the people who want time on your calendar and ultimately that means your assistant will have to figure out what appointments NOT to schedule.

How do you leverage you assistant to manage your calendar?

Filed under Calendar Tagged with assistant, calendar, CIO, GTD

Effective Calendar Management

July 28, 2014 2 Comments

We all know that in the big picture of things time is our most valuable asset and because your calendar is your trusted system for managing your time, it makes sense to optimize your calendar. Here are some strategies for effective calendar management.

Only use your calendar for date-specific appointments

David Allen explains in Getting Things Done, that the only things that should appear on your calendar are date-specific appointments. That means things like doctor appointments, meetings, and anything that can only be attended to during that time. I’ve actually started to refer to these more as “agreements” than “appointments” because agreements mean that much more to me. Rescheduling an appointment is something that can be done, but rescheduling an agreement seems more daunting and less viable. By using the term “agreement” (which acts as a trigger), I’m less likely to even think about altering what I’ve committed to with someone else…or even myself.

Schedule your personal time

During your weekly review it is important you make appointments in your calendar for things in your life that don’t relate to work. Is your partner out of town so you have to cover him/her on something? When do you need to drop the kids off at school? Do you have a doctor’s appointment? Does your daughter have a recital? Are you traveling? All of these things are the “big rocks” that should be added to your calendar before anything else. You also need to make time for your own well-being, whether it is going to the gym, going for a run or simply reading a book. If you don’t block out time in your calendar for personal activities work will “eat up” all your time and you will end up with failed relationships, poor health and increased stress.

Align your schedule with your priorities

Most business professionals are extremely busy, but all too many spend their time doing the wrong things. We all have the same amount of time on our hands. What sets successful people apart is the way they prioritize what to do during that limited time. So, the most important thing you need to do is to schedule your priorities. If you don’t schedule your priorities, your calendar will get filled up with other stuff and you wont be spending your time on the highest value items. Schedule the things that really matter first. For me, this is my family time, my weekly review, priority projects, 1:1s with my direct reports and any major commitments I may have. You will never be able to do everything you set out to, so you need to make sure you don’t leave the high-impact things undone.

Schedule your priorities early in the day

Schedule these items in the morning and don’t make them more than 90 minutes. Why? Because if you schedule them in the morning and you get “overtaken by events” and have to do something else you can bump a lower priority item off later in the day. Also, there is ample evidence showing that people’s energy, concentration and effectiveness is greater in the morning than the afternoon. There is also lots of evidence that after an hour and a half people’s effectiveness drops off significantly so if you have a large project you are much better scheduling multiple 90 appointments than to try to slog thru a multiple-hour task.

Schedule multiple 30-minute appointments to process your “inboxes”

For most people this is email but if your honest with yourself you have multiple incoming queues of stuff. If you follow GTD then you have your “unprocessed” queue of stuff. You may have an “inbox” on your desk, you may have incoming calls, you may have RSS feeds, you may have the incoming stream of social media or other incoming queues of “stuff” that needs to be processed. Schedule time to process your stuff to zero. Once you have added these items to your calendar, then whatever free blocks of time are left can be filled with meetings and other lower priority items.

Be ruthless in assessing the value of recurring meetings

Another thing you need to do is to assess how you have allocated your time. Open your calendar and look back at your recurring meetings. Were they worth the time you invested in them? I’ll bet they started out with the best of intentions and actually provided value but over time, they decayed into less value. Take a critical look at your recurring meetings and ask yourself if they continue to be worth the time investment. Ideally, you will delete these from your calendar. If you’re not comfortable with removing them, then maybe you can reduce their recurrence from daily to weekly or weekly to every other week.

How do you manager your calendar to ensure you are doing the most important things?

Filed under Calendar Tagged with calendar, CIO, GTD

Why I still use RSS

July 9, 2014 1 Comment

A colleague of mine just got turned on to the power of Feedly and it got me thinking about RSS and it’s evolving role in my information diet.

I have always been a reader and voracious consumer of information. I subscribe to numerous magazines and newspapers via Apple’s Newstand on my iPad. I love to read a good book via Kindle on either my iPad or my Kindle Paperwhite. I also listen to books on Audible on my commute and podcasts when I’m working out at the gym.

But, it has become increasingly difficult to stay on top of all the relevant breaking news in today’s fast-paced world. Surfing the web to try to keep up is not a viable option as it just takes too much time and it is easy to get trapped in a rabbit hole of non-productivity. I have found using RSS feeds is the best way to keep on top of all the news and developments in order to be successful in today’s business and technical world.

Many people have given up on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and it is definitely on the decline since Google dropped Reader. However, I still use RSS because I can subscribe to a wide variety of sources and quickly scan what is going on in the world. I consider this a critical part of my overall continual learning experience. I treat my incoming RSS Feeds just like my email inbox and try to process all my feeds to zero every day.

I have tried many RSS readers and since the demise of Google Reader, and now I use Feedly on all of my devices to consume RSS content. I do not use any of the “pretty” feed aggregators that try to make a custom magazine because it is just too inefficient for the volume of feeds I process every day. With Feedly I can quickly scan the headlines to determine which ones I want to click on to get more information. Once I click on a particular item I get a short synopsis of the article or post and then if I want to actually read it I click on the link and it takes me to the web site where I can read the original article. If I want to keep the article to read later or for some kind of follow up, I just select the “Send to Evernote” option to process later. If the article is something I want to share with others I use the “Send to Buffer” option to tweet it and post it to LinkedIn. I usually process my feeds the first thing in the morning when I am at the gym on the Precor elliptical trainer.

I currently subscribe to 60 feeds which result in over 500 posts per day and I am able to process them in approximately 20 minutes. This allows me to keep up on all the news and events from sources I consider relevant to my career and life. I treat my feeds very Darwinian way in that if a particular feed is not providing relevant information I delete it. This results in a very fluid OPML file (OPML files are the list of RSS feeds a reader program uses) that is constantly changing. Frequently I subscribe to a feed to try it out only to decide it does not make the cut and is delete in a week or so. I also remove feeds that have dedicated iOS apps like Techcrunch, CNet News, The Verge, Boy Genius Report, Engadget, etc. because I prefer to view that content in the native app due to its optimized formatting.

I pride myself on knowing information before others and daily processing of RSS feeds is the key to making this a reality. It gives me a competitive advantage in work and life. I am extremely impressed when someone on my staff tells me something relevant that I do not already know about. If it happens once in a while then it is just luck or timing but if they consistently know relevant information before me it shows me they have an effective system for processing information and I try to learn how they do it.

How do you process information in today’s fast-paced world?

Filed under Processing Tagged with CIO, feedly, GTD, rss

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