A master is the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leave other to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself he always appears to be doing both.

- Francoise Rene Auguste Chateaubriand

Get Organized with One Sheet of Paper

The Pocket RoadMap™ is a single sheet of paper folded into six small panels that puts you in control of your life and time. Download the PDF file and print the two pages back to back on one sheet of paper.

Whether you are using GTD or ZTD or any other productivity system the Pocket RoadMap will keep you focused on the most important items each week. Download it for free and give it to your friends. This is a tool your entire team can use.

Video showing how to use the Pocket RoadMap coming soon.

The team will only buy into a vision they create. If the boss does all the planning, they will have to do all the work. Ask the team to identify the three biggest changes that need to happen to make the team more successful. Say nothing and do not critique their choice.

Then ask them to identify the next action necessary to make each of the three changes a reality and have someone other than the boss be resonsible for completing the action in the next seven days.

You may suggest they block off time on their calendar to accomplish the task. Assign one task for each of the three changes. Then sch the meeting for the next week.

Tell each person assigned a task to come to the meeting prepared to answer two questions.
1. was the task accomplished? yes or no
2. what is the next task that needs to be done to move the project closer to completion.

This should take 5-15 minutes of your weekly meeting. The rest of the meeting can be used for each department or team member to explain what is on their plate for the week.

The purpose of the meeting is to focus the team on the most important tasks and make sure everyone knows what the team workload looks like.

Imagine a Zero Inbox. Below are the steps to create one.

1. Open a new email.

2. Ask yourself, “What is it?” and “Is it actionable?”

3. If it’s NOT Actionable, then delete it, store it in a Reference email folder, or incubate it on Someday/Maybe if you think you’ll have action with it in the future.

4. If it IS Actionable and will take you multiple steps to complete, ask yourself, “What’s my desired outcome?” Track that outcome on a Projects list.

5. Now ask yourself, “What’s my next action?” Then you’ve got 3 choices:

1. Do it now (if it will take less than 2 minutes)
2. Delegate it now (if someone else can do it, track on Waiting For if you need to)
3. Defer it to a Next Action list or folder (if it will take longer than 2 minutes and store that email in a place (other than “In”) you know you can easily get back to when you need to take action.)

If it’s got multiple next actions that can be done simultaneously, track each one of those. If you have “future actions” or dependencies, and this is a project, those can be stored with your project plans.

Source: www.gtdtimes.com

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

Mark Twain quotes (American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer. 1835-1910)

How often do you look back at the end of a day and realize though you were busy all day long, nothing important was accomplished. Too often we spend our entire day in reaction mode. One simple action can change that forever.

In the last five minutes of each day, take out a notebook or a 3x5 card. Then look at your calendar for the next day and review your unfinished todo list. Select the three most important tasks you must accomplish tomorrow, the three tasks that will make the day great. Write them on the 3x5 card or in your notebook, then block off time on your calendar for an appointment with yourself to complete them tomorrow.

First thing each morning I look at my three most important tasks (MIT) and start work on the first one. Many times in the first hour of the day I am able to accomplish all three. This makes the rest of the day easy and enjoyable despite what occurs. Try this today before you go home and see how productive tomorrow can be.

We are lucky today to have two great resources from knowledgeable experts to help us focus during these turbulent times. The Fed Chairman Bernanke Spoke to the Economic Club of New York, NY on October 15. Read it here: He made four important points:

1. This is not 1929-32 - we learned from our mistakes. Hover waited three years to respond and then tightened money. Fed acted immediately and loosened.
2. Fed Reserve has doubled in size, giving it a greater ability to impact the economy positively.
3. Everything hinges on the banks lending money again.
4. Therefore the Fed’s money will be used to stimulate the economy, if a bank does not lend money they will not be given money. They will learn quickly to start lending.

What controls the market? What makes the Market go up? Cash flow. What makes the market go down? Lack of cash flow. Cash flow into the economy is cash into the market. The infusion of $800 billion into the US economy by the Federal Reserve will be a stimulus.

The press continues to encourage investors to watch what the institutional and hedge fund managers are doing as an indicator for what they should do. And because they are selling, so should the investor. This is foolish advice, because institutional managers, during the extremes of the market, are never doing what they personally want to do. Because of redemptions during crashes and infusions of new money during rallies they are forced to liquidate or invest against their own best judgment. Investing is counter intuitive. One of the great counter intuitive investors is Warren Buffett. Read his letter to the New York Times here.

If you feel your risk profile has changed and would like to redo your risk profile analysis, we will be happy to help you.

Over the past several weeks we have talked to many people who are worried and fearful. They had no one to help them understand their situation. If you know someone you respect and value who is worried, there is no need from them to be in that situation. We’ll be happy to take them through the same analysis we use with each of our clients, at no cost or obligation, to make sure that they know where they are today, where they want to be in the future, and have a plan of action to get there. We do not what someone you care about to be afraid. Send them an email and say, Client I want to introduce you to Advisor, Advisor I want to introduce you to Client. Here is your contact information, you two should talk.

Follow this letter with a call to the Top 25 repeating the last paragraph.

Lloyd, I just got off the phone with one of our Financial Advisors. He had a meeting with a $50 million prospect Friday. He used, as he called it, “the Lloyd approach” at the meeting and let the prospect talk about himself for an hour and a half. At the end of the meeting, the prospect commented on how his FA at another firm never gave him the opportunity to speak about things the way he was allowed to do that day and felt like the other FA was not proactive in coming up with investment recommendations that were appropriate for him. At the end of the meeting, the client agreed to move his account. Thanks for the inspiration!!!

Congratulations to the advisor. The one topic clients want to talk about more than any other is themselves. Give them the opportunity.

The following confirms the necessity of stopping the distractions:

>In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

>“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

Merlin Mann of 43folders has [linked to several resources](http://www.43folders.com/2007/03/26/nyt-multitasking/) on the myth of multitasking.

By trying to multitask we slow down our minds processing time and the results take longer to achieve.

>How many ways are there to manage your task list? Almost as many as there are people with tasks to do. Here are 20 different ways of tracking your to dos, with examples of each.

>You probably use more than one of these options, depending on what you’re trying to manage and what suits your temperament.

For the complete list [continue reading](http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/01/07/20-different-ways-to-manage-your-to-dos/).

> Over the years I have worked at many client sites and a variety of office layouts. On one project in particular, we had as many as 80 people in a project team, seated via an open plan arrangement. It was pretty difficult trying to stay focused in an environment like this. These days, the projects I’m on are typically smaller, but there are still a number of distractions which frequently interrupt my working groove. So what are some of the things we can do to minimise such interruptions and distractions?

>Here’s my list of [18 ways to stay focused at work](http://www.davecheong.com/2006/08/14/18-ways-to-stay-focused-at-work/)

>I’ve gotten several requests from readers for an updated primer for folks who are getting started (or re-started) with Getting Things Done. I’m happy to oblige with this updated collection of 43 Folders’ most popular, most visited, most-commented-on, and my personal favorite posts about David Allen’s GTD. There should be plenty here to get you rolling. And thanks so much to everyone who wrote to request this.

To see all the links the tools including 8-episode podcast with Merlin Mann and David Allen do not miss the [Recap Page](http://www.43folders.com/2007/01/04/gtd-recap-07/).

*Have you found a great GTD resource? If so, take a moment and share it in a comment with the rest of us.*

Time Required: 15-60 minutes
Equipment: pen and paper

First, List Your Activities

With a blank sheet of paper list, all your activities, as they come to mind.

Example: reading, email, phones calls, scheduling appointments, meetings, travel, time with family, hiking, kayaking, chores, errands, movies, surfing the internet, research, project management, marketing, presentations, and whatever. Make the list as long as you like. I wrote down the twenty most important. Though some clients have written down over a hundred.

Second, Establish a Criteria

Make a short list of the criteria an activity must meet to be valuable to you. The following is the list I created for myself.

Example: An activity must:

1. Be enjoyable
2. Be of value to myself or others
3. Be educational
4. Be a skill of mine
5. Be healthy
6. Be a good use of time
7. Be rewarding (personally in life or financially in business)

Third, Score Your Activities

Look at the first item on your list of activities and give it a total score for all the criteria. If a criteria is true add one, if the criteria is not true add zero.

Example: Reading - enjoy +1, value +1, educational +1, skill +1, healthy 0, time +1, rewarding 0. the total score = 5. Email - enjoy 0, value +1, educational 0, skill +1, healthy 0, time 0, rewarding 0. the total score = 2

Repeat for each item on your list.

Fourth, Rank Your Activities

Rank the list from highest score to lowest. Order ties as you see fit.

Last, Do More By Doing Less

Circle the top five items. Now create a specific Next Physical Action for each of the top five items to begin spending more time involved in that activity.

Circle the bottom five items. Now create a specific next physical action for each of the bottom five items to delegate them to someone on your team or outsource them.

Conclusion

The desired result is to begin spending more time involved in those activities that you value the most, by eliminating those activities you value least. The more comprehensive the list, the more valuable it will be in transforming your time.

I was surprised by the activities at the bottom of my list and immediately created Next Actions to remove them from my sphere of activity. The next day I was accomplishing more that I enjoy with greater energy.

Share Your Thoughts

Do you have an exercise that you do to clear your activity space? Share your experience with this or other exercises in the comments below.

The following are blogs I value and visit on a regular basis:

43 Folders - Productivity
http://www.43folders.com

Life Hacker - Productivity
http://www.lifehacker.com/

Working Smart - Tools and Technology for Business
http://michaelhyatt.blogs.com/workingsmart/

The Daily Rotation - Technology Headlines from Around the World
http://www.dailyrotation.com/

Round the Rock - Kayak Circumnavigation of Newfoundland
http://www.cackletv.com/wendykilloran/

If you have a favorite blog please comment below.