Tricks to GTD…

…an acronym for ‘getting things done’…love it!  Here are a ton of tips and strategies for making more time for doing the things you love.

I’ve recently read ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’ and many of the things listed are included in the book…hmmm, what came first, the chicken or the egg?  Regardless, it’s good stuff.  The first strategy I’m going to try is setting a timer for tasks.  Parkison’s Law says that a task will expand to fill the time available for it. If you give yourself one hour to complete a task, that’s how long it will take. If you give yourself an entire day to complete a task, you will find ways to fill up the entire day working on that one thing.

…I’ll keep you posted!

Email is taking over my life!

…from friends, from co-workers, from on-line accounts, from family, from automated newsletters, from me (…yes, sometimes I send emails to myself as reminders of things to do)…wherever my email originates from, it lands on me…and it’s heavy because there is so much.

Email is awesome – don’t get me wrong – but it is also one more thing to manage and organize. If you don’t give it some systematic attention, you’ll always feel buried.

My friends over at Rian Design clued me into Inbox Zero. The strategy they present…RULZ!!!! Merlin, the genius who “created” the system, talks about “going through” your inbox with skills, tools, and an attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way. I’ve been using the system for about (2) months and…it works!

The system is beautifully organized and explained in a series of blog posts. I recently saw the presentation he gave to the folks at Google teaching them how to manage their inbox.

Hello world!

I decided to start writing a blog while on a recent trip to Mammoth. For (4) days, my husband and I stayed at Juniper Springs as a, “…get away just the two of us…” type of trip. It was awesome! Among other things, I had time to think about how I am living my life and what types of changes I would make in order to make life more ‘user friendly’, organized, efficient, or…optimized. I spend a lot of time doing a lot of different types of things. Perhaps by my sharing what goes on over here, ya’all can chime in and help me tweak the things that need optimizing.

This blog will be sauce pan that collects all the juicy details of my life that, when cooked together, make for satisfying nourishment. You see, when systems are in place and when there is organization to the day-to-day “grind” – more time is freed up for me to do all the things that “feed” me.