Notes from our Lifehacks session

Books mentioned

• Getting Things Done by Dave Allen
• The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman

Videos mentioned

• Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
• Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann

Two broad groups identified: the GTD types and the Scruffy / Erosionary types.

Three principles to the scruffy methodology.

• Erosion: In this case, erosionary people put tasks and projects into their flow and if they don’t get round to them in a certain period of time they just drop off the bottom. The tasks naturally erode over time if they are not done.
• Piles: Rather than filing away items neatly, scruffies create piles around their workspace so that their environment is constructed of possible actions that can engage them at the apposite moment.
• Streaming: Scruffies rely on streams where possible to consume information and manage activity. There is no expectation that they can consume/act on all the items in the stream. Instead they let them flow past and pick from them at will. There is no filing or organization; it’s seen as a more biological process.

Some key principles of the GTD types:

Universal capture

• Employ some kind of trusted system or bucket into which everything goes (eg. omnifocus)
• Work on the principle that you only want to have to process information once. In this case repetition is redundancy

Inbox 0

• If it can be done in less than 2 min – do immediately
• If it is actionable – put in action folder
• Anything else is reference

Focusing time

• 90 Minutes of focus with everything off, followed by 30 minutes of IM, Email etc.
• Use a timer to do work sprints, to train yourself to take advantage of small windows of time

Understand and measure how you use your time

• Use some system for measuring time, often how you spend your time is different to how you think.
• Use rescuetime as a useful service for this

A laundry list of Life Hacks that the group discussed:

• Using Task list in Gmail as deadlines for responding to email
• Action, read/review, projects, & reference folders in email and desktop.  Including a “someday maybe” folder
• Create a Data directory = parent directory of all other directories or folders.
• Migrate information from data to archive
• RSS feeds – use Google Reader separated into sub groups
  • A – low noise, high quality
  • B – targeted blogs, low noise, high quality, low quantity
  • C – higher noise, move through as fast as possible
  • D – code examples

• Space pen with blank index cards always handy
• Leaving a meeting that is not necessary for you to be there. Having an office policy that if you aren’t adding value or learning something then get out of the meeting and find something that does
• “send and archive” add-on on Gmail
• Smart Playlists on iTunes – Nested playlists to create your own radio station
• Don’t create folders, use search instead
• Use timers to track time
• Bring your own lunch, you eat faster and can the use the time for a walk later
• Use professional tools to organize my personal life, use Google docs for trips, kid responsibilities
• Always write grocery list in the order that things are in the supermarket
• Carry a notebook everywhere, post-its in the front constitute index cards, cut hole for pen in notebook
• Forward mailing list emails etc to another inbox. Being able to mute conversations is important.
• Evernote: useful for notes to yourself, eg. Picture of a printer cartridge I need, a cheese I like. Mostly used for pictures
• Get to inbox 1 million, deal with them as they come and then if they are past page 1 on gmail then they might as well not exist. Erosion technique
• Put tasks that have to be done into Gcal as all-day items that repeat forever until they are done
• The idea of saying No is very important. Don’t accumulate stuff you don’t want. Say No to upward delegation when you don’t have the time for it
• Create routines even for when you see ‘once a month friends’ I’ll see you the third Tuesday of every month – ritualize as much as possible.
• Use keyboard shortcuts: I’m not an artist if I’m using the mouse I’m wasting time.
• Exercise everyday: to burn calories don’t train longer, do bigger movements in a shorter period of time. Check out Kortina’s workout of the day app for killer workouts on this theme
• Read email only when I can process it, so do it at night or on weekends
• Take time out during the week to balance work during the weekend
• Buy’s 4.95 uniqlo tshirts at 36 at a time and avoid having to do laundry
• Turn ringer off on phone, never pickup so now people don’t call
• Hired analytics guy. Means I can focus on asking questions without the dirty work of the number crunching
• Use pivotal tracker for group project management
• Stop reading news
• Stop talking to people who affect the way I think, so I don’t talk to many people any more, avoid the group think and the people who just say the same thing over and over
• Once a year take a reading vacation, go off somewhere and read a bunch of books
• Never travel without wifi
• Standing meetings
• Single points of accountability
• Hard stops on meetings
• Baby sleep training – keeping journal of feeding times, adapt how baby sleeps over time
• Audio books – good for commute
• Next Action – actually think about the next action when you put it into your to-do list
• You can take a document and save a pdf to your iphoto and then sync it to your iphone. Good way to keep documents
• Ask for help
• Instapaper on iphone
• Taught myself by downloading onto iphone and listening while running
• Press M keeps thing unread in Google Reader
• Use negative filters so anything not with my name or project is automatically archived
• Use chatroom to harness collective intelligence, someone bored can answer your question
• Firefox extension Searchkeys
• Importance of items that naturally degrade over time. Things fall off the front page and no longer feature
• Publish calendar without exposing details of meetings, so other people can pick a time, saves scheduling nightmares
• Daily focus on what are the big things you’re trying to do
• Manage alerts – turn unnecessary alerts off. Email check every 30 minutes