Control the "hydrant", or How not to drown in the flood of information and tasks

With the "hydrant" Your task list is never empty. Because "hydrant" - it's not just information, is a factory of new jobs. Some items in the task list are clear, such as emails from the boss or clients that require attention. But many are not expressed explicitly.

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It does not matter how many hours per day you are involved in a small business. The main thing is that they end in sight. This is the "hydrant".

And this concept is much broader than just a list of tasks. And in the day, unfortunately, is still 24 hours.

lark

If you're like me, all the creative and complex work well It is moving in the morning early. There are many reasons - psychological and physiological, - why this is so. But the "hydrant" your inner rhythms are deeply indifferent. Because, while you sleep, the amount of information continues to increase.

Breakfast, open your inbox, and the flow of "hydrant" shatters the screen that the whole night was under the pressure of the letters in the mail accounts in the "Bitrix», Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Basecamp, JIRA, Trello and the like. In your calendar - meeting the requests and instructions from the boss, partners, customers, subcontractors, colleagues. And the fact that yesterday was not in the task list today lit and requires immediate execution.

"Hydrant" will not wait for you. He loudly demands your time and attention.

Suddenly the clock 11 in the morning - and you've already lost the better part of the day.

How to respond to this situation? Generally offer two options: either to change the behavior or the use of technology. But why not use technology to create a foundation for behavior change?

How to manage the information, tasks and ideas effectively? It should be understood that the continuous flow of information, and in general, it is more streams: Information supplied from e-mails, social networks and media, web sites, newspapers, during the meetings, friends and even your head. Everything can not be covered.

You have to process the messages, decide what to do with them: to respond, use, share, save for later or delete? When to do it? And how to find the time to deal with all this?

Unfortunately, multitasking mode, when you try to get it all at once does not work. You do not control your schedule, you're hard to find spare time, aside from the mail and focus on something for longer than 5 minutes. If so, check out my method of time management for maximum productivity throughout the day - maybe this is what you need.

Three additional tools and techniques

Daily ritual. At this time we engaged in the organization and planning, focusing on the major and minor problems.

The study - Queuing - stock information - Distribution. Remittances from the "hydrant" in the material with which to work. Form a task list, a personal library of useful resources, stable tape information from the social networks and the media.

Bringing cases to the end. We manage a list of tasks and their own time.

Work in accordance with the internal rhythms

Only you will be able to calculate its own set of ways to increase productivity - all that I can only share my.

I stand out the best time to address the most important challenges

In the morning, when my brain works best, I allocate 2-3 hours to ensure that work on the most important task, and not be distracted any more on that. Studies show that workers who are distracted - or are they distracted themselves - at least once every 3 minutes, require a minimum of 20 minutes to dive into the task again.

Start the day worth it with a difficult task, even if that person can start with something easier. Per day required to unforeseen circumstances, additional meetings - and a major priority and will not be executed.

a pause

Whatever it was, usually after 60-90 minutes the concentration decreases, so I share a morning the period of work into two parts, making it a short break, during which necessarily leave the workplace a place.

Scientists argue that a sedentary lifestyle leads to heart problems, poor posture, certain types of cancer.

Even if you sit in one place for only 30 minutes, the metabolism will slow down to 90%.

in the evening

The energy level drops sharply in the afternoon, which is why many prefer at this time to get some sleep. After dinner I try:

• to meet people, I'm sure, that it is hardly able to do a good job at a time, and communication gives an extra boost of energy;
• occupies a small, simple, and organizational goals.

Morning and evening ritual

You need to decide exactly what to do during these hours. This means you need to open the mail, to translate part of the messages in the task list and find time for them, among other projects.

The problem is that messages fills up your mail - real vampires who feed on your time. Analyzing them, spend more time and effort than it seems. And the worst thing that, no matter how it strained, a part of you always wants to check your inbox.

The solution is that incoming should be considered as dangerous animals, which most of the time you need to keep in a cage, but still from time to time to produce, so they do not burst themselves.

I have been working with members twice a day - in the morning and evening rituals. I am so accustomed to this procedure that work with incoming became crazy for the same automated task, both for the need to eat the body and drink.

Between these two periods, I do not worry about whether something in the mail and it was not forgotten whether I have something important - I trust my system. Therefore, closing the mailbox, I go to work with a clear head.

And as the morning ritual is usually short (most organizational issues left for the evening ritual), I pay more attention to the most important task.

Task list

To organize your day and stop the flow of incoming, sucking all the juice out of your life, you need to use techniques and tools.

One such effective techniques is the "Study - Queuing - stock information - Distribution", which translates into a haphazard flow:

• convenient for the task list,
• personal library of useful materials, which are stored for subsequent operation with them,
• a set of materials to share with colleagues.

Ideally, these need to be addressed during the morning and evening ritual. Let us examine this process in more detail.

The study included

inbox - is everything from e-mails and messages on Twitter and finishing your recordings.

First, remember, no incoming does not require an immediate response. We all learned to send and receive quick answers to emails, but it's wrong: anyone who expects it imposes additional obligations on you.

Second, open every email and respond to it - absolutely inefficient. You will be more productive if you do one thing. For example, just browse your inbox. Our brain is not very good links multiple tasks together. When people think that they can easily cope with multi-tasking, in fact, they just quickly switch from one task to another. But this has a negative effect on the perception and concentration.

Therefore, when you open the inbox, simply check them. This is a classic single-process model "to bring the case to the end":

• if you can see the incoming in less than two minutes, and do;
• if you can not, add it to the list of tasks that need to come back later;
• you can simply ignore the file.

Even if you open your list of queued incoming immediately after viewing a message, you still have time to readjust.

View incoming morning only when absolutely necessary.

When in the morning to view messages, ask yourself a question: whether they are urgent? These urgent messages - your enemy number one, as they take away precious time that would like to spend to perform the most important task.

Otherwise, you just need to add to the list select "Check messages in the evening" tasks.

Queuing

Non-urgent tasks that take more than 2 minutes, put in one of the two line sections:

1. What you need to read this: online resources that you need to read and ponder one click add to the Pocket. These materials can come back later and from any device.
2. What needs to be done: the incoming messages using DoIt.im forwarded directly to the task list.

Of course, the list of tasks can be manually, but I believe that it is more convenient application.

Reading and distribution of materials in the personal library

During the evening ritual I go back to the list of tasks and check the materials that are queued for reading. Since I use the Pocket, I can watch them while traveling in the subway while waiting for a meeting or in any other free moment. Therefore, I usually quickly cracked down on the list.

If the material is really worth, I add it to the Diigo - my online library of useful materials. It is possible to arrange the tags, so easy to find a note the next day, a month or even a year. And a special thank you for the opportunity to Diiogo faceted search.

l8r tag (that is later - from the English. "Later") puts the resource in another place, to which I turn during nightly checks the task list.

In addition, Diigo automatically saves a copy of any text that I added in the note field. I can edit this note, paste remarks, ideas which appear at an opportune moment, when I want someone to share material.

Share

Some tags in Diigo allows you to publish a resource anywhere. Thanks for that magical IFTTT:

• with the tag Like the material is sent to my Tumblrkak quoted post
• if you select a tag Tweet headline and a link to the post sent to Twitter,
• You can configure the tags to other accounts: LinkedIn, Facebook ...

Thanks to this method, the entire flow of the "hydrant" is sent to the task list and a personal library, and selected resources, in turn, can be shared. And all this without losing focus.

evening ritual

Since this morning I want to focus on creative work, evening ritual - is the cornerstone for planning for the whole day.

How do I start an evening ritual

By the time after lunch:

• I have already finished the morning to work on the most important task;
• inbound accumulated unread messages that I received when I was busy working on the most important task;
• in the queue in the list of tasks contained Taxco, which I put there in the morning, and common tasks that I perform during the evening ritual every day.

Current daily tasks

As mentioned earlier, in the evening ritual includes such tasks as:

1. View. This is a complete inspection of all: I deal with all possible, even with those materials, the work that will take more than 2 minutes.
2. Read, distribute, share. I work with all the interesting things that I added in the last 24 hours.
3. Control task list. Open turn, objectives and based on the progress made in the work on the most important task, I:

• I decide that I will do this evening, and that carried over to the next day,
• decide which task is the most important task tomorrow morning, and determine how long it will need to be paid,
• of the schedule time to rest (or stand it on then or ever).

There are several ongoing cases, for example to respond to emails received yesterday, or hold accounting finance and others. Some of them appear only in the special day. For example, I check the above Diigo every Wednesday and Saturday.

weekly test

Every Monday in the list of tasks you need to include the item "Make a list of goals for the week." So every night for a week, I keep in mind the goal: come in handy when you need to decide what to do today, and what to leave for later.

Every Friday night, I mentally review these goals and critically evaluate them.

Only then comes the rest time

As the evening easier to manage schedule and more difficult to work on difficult problems, then during the day I am likely to be engaged in view and add tasks and materials in place. But even in this case, at least half of the day the Inbox will be closed.

My day ends objective "Study - Queuing - stock information - Distribution", so a new day turns to start without a load of unfinished business.

We hope that this technique is increasing the productivity will be useful to you.