I’ve never been a Martha Stewart fan. Sure, I can appreciate the personal touches, ideal care for garments, re-purposing items and gourmet food.

I loved the re-purposing of an armoire as a gardening center that recently appeared on her website. Until I realized that this idea, like so many others, requires that you have items laying around your house and yard that most of us don’t. If I have an armoire, you can bet it’s being used somewhere!

My problem with the picture that Martha Stewart presents is that all these things happen under her own power. She makes the handmade centerpieces while doing perfect laundry while cooking a gourmet meal from ingredients that magically appear in her kitchen.

The truth is that Martha Stewart has people. And that means she doesn’t do it all herself.

I clean my own home. I do the cooking. I garden. I do my own shopping within a budget. And I work outside the home. My free time is largely absorbed by these activities. I don’t have the time to handwash and block silk sweaters, or create place settings out of things I found in my yard. I buy clothes that require minimum care, and things in my yard largely result from whatever the birds helpfully planted. I don’t need someone to give me pointers to do something better or upscale my life when I don’t have the staff to help.

So I will never be a Martha Stewart. And in my book, that is a good thing.

A friend of mine, struggling with organization and an insane schedule, has been balking at setting up basic routines to help her out. “They will limit my freedom and creativity” is something I have heard more than once.

But I believe that having routines actually frees up and creates pockets of creative time. Things I never seemed to have before I implemented routines.

I’ve talked about routines before (see What Would Happen If You Got Sick?). Routines are actually little more than formalized habits, written down.

Why routines? When you have set routines, you never have to worry about missing things that need to be done on a regular basis. By formalizing your approach to tasks, you can count on getting them done.

Our foremothers used to do this as well: I remember a set of towels my mother had, each with a day and task on them. Monday, wash. Tuesday, iron. Thursday, baking. Each day had its tasks laid out.

Why write them down? Most people wouldn’t write down their routines. What I have found, though, is that writing them down is essential if someone has to step in for you. The times my husband has been hospitalized, I have had to pass the care of my child onto others. The routines I had written down meant that her schedule was not disrupted, and she had the comfort of the familiar during scary times.

How To Construct Routines

The easiest way to get into routine habits is to start with daily things. Things you might already take for granted, but may want to expand. For me, I started with the before bed routine. Besides the tasks of getting ready for bed, I also put on items to make things easier for the next morning. I wrote out what I already did, then added what I wanted to do. I referred to the list every day for three weeks, and it was set.

At the same time, you don’t want this to be a list of things you are dismayed at before beginning. So while world domination may be something you want to do, adding it to your weekly routine is a sure way to overwhelm yourself.

The basic actions to create a routine are:

1. Pick the day/time. Pick the period of the routine, whether it be daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.
2. Decide what needs to be done. Write out what you want to accomplish, along with your best estimate of the time it will take.
3. Practice your routines. They say it takes a month to build a habit. The only habit you have to have is to look at your lists every time you do the routine until you have them memorized.

What About Routines That Don’t Serve Us Anymore?

The one thing I’ve never seen in my reading about routines is how to get out of a routine when the actions no longer serve the purpose. We change, our families change, life changes. It is best to review your routines so that you can adjust them as needed.

And if something doesn’t work, or isn’t applicable, throw it out!

Photo by Joe Lanman

“Why?” Several women asked the question at the same time.

Definition of a Time Sink

In electronics, devices called heat sinks are used to pull heat away from sensitive components. Their job is simply to collect the excess heat and disperse it.

Likewise, a time sink is anything that collects excess time and disperses it. Dictionary.com lists time sink as “a project that consumes unbounded amounts of time.”

Good Ol’ ROI

To me it all boils down to Return On Investment (ROI). In order to maximize the enjoyment and results of my time, I have to be very careful how I invest it. Reading provides a lot of recreation for me, but certain types of books do not hold my interest, and so provide little in the way of positive experience. Some activities are a good way to fill time, but I do not particularly enjoy them. And if I’m not enjoying what what I voluntarily do, why do it?

This is where Facebook comes in. To me, Facebook is a time sink.

Why I Don’t Use Facebook

While I do engage in many online activities (such as blogging), getting linked up to people I haven’t seen in years or people I have seen in the last few hours holds little value for my time investment. Does it help my life to know that my neighbor’s favorite movie of all time is “Gone with the Wind”? Does it provide any positive value to my current life knowing what a person I haven’t spoken to since high school has listened to recently?

I’m not knocking Facebook users with this. I’m just saying that for me, Facebook is a time sink.

Photo by aprillynn77

As I looked back through my Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity book, I realized that there are some universal truths in it that can apply, and should apply, for anyone interested in being productive. While I officially no longer practice Getting Things Done, for the majority of my life, I found that I still use a few of the concepts all the time. I decided to hunt out these universal truths.

The Capture

Gathering 100% of the “Incompletes”

David Allen’s point is that “if it’s not being directly managed in a trusted external system of yours, then it’s resident somewhere in your psyche.” That’s a lot of energy that is being used having to remember things again and again.

I used to get the oddest thoughts at the weirdest times…like the time I remembered I needed to restock one of the home bathrooms in the middle of teaching a class. And just what could I do about it at the time? Nothing. Yet the thought persisted, and my overwhelming memory of that class is not my students or what we covered, but of toilet paper.

Minimize the Number of Collection Buckets

This is a matter of common sense. If you have things all over the place, chances are you are going to overlook something. If you minimize the number of places you keep information, you won’t have to expend as much energy finding the information.

This concept killed my habit of writing things on sticky notes and leaving them everywhere. It also killed the one-note-book-per-project habit I got into in college. Now everything is in my PDA and one notebook.

Empty the Buckets Regularly

It doesn’t do any good to put something into a system if you’re never going to take it out. An inbox that is never emptied and dealt with is just as effective as a trash can. As David Allen says, “Not emptying your in-basket is like having garbage cans that nobody ever dumps — you just have to keep buying new ones to hold all your trash.”

I make it a point to empty my inbox and email at least weekly.

These three concepts are fundamental to any productivity system: get things out of your head, where you can’t forget them; put the items in as few places as possible; and go through those things regularly.

Photo by j / f / photos

We all have them. Projects that sit around on our lists with no progress, because we simply cannot find the time to do them. We’ve tried breaking them down to the absolute next granular action, and still that will take a good bit of time. What is a productive person to do?

I am a big fan of the Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management technique known as “little and often”. By this, you chip away at large projects in little doses, and end up make quite a bit of progress. For me, the technique gets me moving on something, overcoming my main source of procrastination.

But some projects cannot be done in little bits. Either leaving them half-done would be detrimental, or require setup/cleanup times that require more than a few minutes to maximize the return on the time spent. Two examples that pop readily to mind is mowing the lawn, and basting a quilt. Both require setup, and the jobs must be completed once started.

Some projects are just not going to lend themselves to little and often in certain phases. Because of that, here are some strategies for getting larger blocks of time to get these projects done:

1. Estimate The Length of Time Needed

The first key to get through this is to figure out how much time you need. For my two examples, I need about two hours to mow the lawn, and about three to baste the quilt. By figuring out what you need, you can look for open areas on the schedule.

2. Decide If It Can Be Broken Down

Some projects may not be able to be done in 10 minute increments because it would stretch the project time out; others need setup/cleanup time that makes 10 minutes impractical. But perhaps bigger chunks could be feasible. For my examples, I can’t break the lawn mowing down, but I can do three one hour sessions over three days on the quilt, because I can live with a quilt taped to my living room floor for three days.

3. Find the Time and Schedule It

Since these are not things that can be sandwiched in between other little tasks, find blocks of time and schedule them for the tasks. I scheduled the lawn care for one evening this week (checking the weather first, of course!) and have scheduled the quilt to start Friday evening.

Benefits of Larger Blocks of Time

While it is not practical to do this with everything, taking some projects in larger, carefully considered time chunks can lead to movement on projects that would otherwise be stalled by procrastination.

Photo by smaedli

I recently had cause to go back and look something up in my copy of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I have pretty much rejected the whole GTD theory for my personal life because of the way I work. Yet as I thumbed through the book, I realized that some parts of the GTD system are really universal and can be applied to any productivity method.

I’m going to re-skim GTD and figure out what are the parts that are universal, and report back on them next week. In the meantime, I’d like to hear from you: if you don’t use GTD, but are familiar with it, what parts do you use?

Photo by j / f / photos

Productivity is about being effective and efficient. That is, doing the right things in the right way. I’ve been trying to apply these concepts not just to managing my work load, but also various side projects in my life.

With spring upon us, my thoughts naturally turn to gardening. Unfortunately, I am one of the world’s worst gardeners, and apparently the only person in North America who cannot grow zucchini. But I keep trying.

This year I return to the All New Square Foot Gardening method to help me be a productive gardener. The basic concept of the system is that you plant specific numbers of seeds in raised beds at specified intervals to maximize plants in the space. I followed the old style square foot method a few years ago, and quickly got overwhelmed. The simplicity of the new method will give me the following:

• No soil remediation. We have a terrible mix of clay and sand in our yard. The old method insisted that you dig down into the soil and replace everything with a complicated mixture. The new method says to lay a weed barrier, build six inch high boxes, and fill it with a simple mixture of three ingredients.
• No weeds. Because you plant in weed-free medium, and you plant at specified intervals, you know where the weeds are if they spring up.
• No tilling. Turning over soil is hard work. By planting in raised beds, you never walk on the soil and compact it, so you never have to loosen it.
• No thinning. I have never understood why you would plant hundreds of seeds, just to pull out 90% of the sprouted plants. With the square foot method you plant what you need.

All in all, I think this method of gardening is truly productive (no pun intended). You do as much work as you need to, no more, no wasted effort, and simplified methods.

I am hoping that applying All New Square Foot Gardening will bring me to the pinnacle of gardening productivity. And maybe net me a zucchini or two.

Photo by hughroper

In the past few weeks several people have asked me for organizational advice. My super-organized mother instilled it in my upbringing, making it almost second nature to me. But one of my friends complained that she hadn’t been trained as I had, and needed to know how I did it, step by step. Over the next few weeks (or possibly longer), I will lay out how I organize various areas in my house to be effective and efficient.

This week I’m tackling the kitchen food, because this tends to be an area that is disorganized and inconvenient.

Step 1: Know What You Have

You are going to need some space for this. Clear off counters, tables, floors, whatever it takes. Pull out all your food items. Look through them.

Step 2: Purge

Chances are you are going to find expired, non-used or other non-usable items. I found that most of my spices were long overdue for replacing, and I had a jar of sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil and a can of salmon lurking in the recesses (neither of which I use normally)

Step 3: Sort It All Out

Put like items together. Spices should go together, and if necessary, consolidated. Grains, pasta, rices, all should be placed together. You might find you have duplicates, like the two bottles of molasses I found lurking together. And while most of my spices were ready for replacing, I found two new jars of peppercorns!

Step 4: Clean Your Spaces

Take a soapy rag and/or a vacuum cleaner to get your spaces clean. This is important, as food crumbs can attract insects.

Step 5: Plan Your Space

Figure out how you use your food. For example, breakfast foods should be stored together. Things for drinks (cocoa, coffee, creamer, tea) as well. Baking supplies are another grouping, as are pastas, sauces and cooking condiments (vinegars, wines and such).

Step 6: Put It Back

Put your food back, moving it as close to where it can be used as possible. I have a cupboard dedicated to baking supplies, which is near the measuring cups, mixing bowls and baking pans. Our drinks are stored in the cupboard below the coffee maker.

By following these steps, you should have an organized kitchen. The best part: once organized, you can keep it that way with very little effort. Put things away when you are done and regularly purge.

Photo by Incase Designs

I ran across an article over at Stepcase Lifehack: “Your Guide to Apps that Eliminate Distractions“. Always distractable, I look out for things like this. — particularly the first two, which lend themselves to distraction-free writing.

Major Writing Distractions

To me, the two biggest writing distractions are things outside my writing program and things inside my writing program. Stuff on the outside of my writing program include pop-up windows, the status bar, and the taskbar. On the inside of the programs, it is the color of the screen and text, icons, formatting and icons that won’t go away. (We’ll just assume that I have already done away with the pop-up “helpers” that come up in some word processing packages).

Limiting Outside Distractions

The first thing I do is to hide all icons on my desktop. I generally don’t keep much there anyway; I put the desktop into a popup menu (see How To Access Important Folders From The Taskbar). Next I put the taskbar into auto-hide mode so I can’t see what is open.

It also goes without saying that when I am trying to get writing done, I don’t run email, a browser, or instant messenger.

Limiting Internal Distractions

The Lifehack article talked about two applications that allow you to limit on-screen distractions: WriteRoom and JDarkRoom. While I like these application concepts, when I first heard about them, I decided to make Microsoft Word do the same thing.

Within the application I am working in, I like the ability to turn off the things at the top and bottom of the screen. I also find it easier to concentrate on my writing if I am writing in the old-fashioned color scheme of WordPerfect for DOS: fixed-width font on a black background with green writing.

Within Microsoft Word, I created two macros that will allow me to toggle back and forth between these settings. The code listings are below:

Sub WP()
    Selection.WholeStory
    With Selection.font
        .Name = "Courier New"
        .Color = wdColorBrightGreen
        .Size = 12
    End With
    ActiveDocument.Background.Fill.ForeColor.RGB = RGB(0, 0, 0)
    ActiveDocument.Background.Fill.Visible = msoTrue
    ActiveDocument.Background.Fill.Solid
    Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
    ActiveWindow.View.FullScreen = Not ActiveWindow.View.FullScreen
End Sub
Sub UnWP()
    ActiveWindow.View.FullScreen = Not ActiveWindow.View.FullScreen
    Selection.WholeStory
    ActiveDocument.Background.Fill.Visible = msoFalse
    With Selection.font
        .Name = "Arial"
        .Color = wdColorAutomatic
        .Size = 10
    End With
End Sub

While these macros make it easy to keep myself focused on writing, it doesn’t take away all the distractions: the little red squigglies under misspelled words, or the paragraph marks and spaces. These can be turned off as well, but I found an application that I don’t have to adjust, or remember to “undo” when I am done with my serious writing.

PageFour

This is my creative writing tool of choice. PageFour is a straight-forward tool made for creative writers. It doesn’t contain a lot of bells and whistles; it contains the functionality of interest to most writers.

Just like Word, I can change the display to be green text on a full-screen black background. However, PageFour gives me some additional features, such as the ability to organize my writing in notebooks; and doing operations across all the pages in these notebooks, like word counts and phrase analysis. The application also allows me to do archives and track changes.

PageFour screen shot

My strategy for distraction-free writing is very simple: get rid of the distractions, and make it easy to see what I am writing.

Photo by tomsaint11

Most of us spend a lot of time at our computers. Switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse causes us to lose time. While you may not think it significant, think about your typing speed and think about how many keystrokes you could press in the time it takes you to reach for your mouse and click on something. Here are three ways to minimize your mouse use, and save time at the computer:

Keyboard Shortcuts

Every Windows application with menus is accessible from the keyboard (if they follow Microsoft standards). The menus are accessible by pressing Alt and then the underlined letter of the menu. For example, most File menus are accessible by pressing Alt, then F.

You could also press the keys together, but by separating the keystrokes, the Alt activates the menu bar, and then your keystrokes will give you submenus and commands without having to resort to using the arrow keys. As an example, pressing Alt, then F, then S will activate Save in most Microsoft applications.

Some people also don’t realize how useful Alt+Tab can be. This cycles through your open windows and allows you to switch applications without having to take your fingers off the keyboard.

You can also set up specific short cut keys to use to launch applications (see More Windows Shortcuts)

Text Replacers

Most of us type things over and over. Whether it is closing lines for email, standard responses, documentation snippets or even entire pieces of correspondence, we can reuse things we’ve put together before. I use a text replacer called ShortKeys. It allows you to do more than a standard replace on the text: it can calculate dates based on the current, and also manipulate text based on position. It saves me a lot of time, particularly in things where the same actions are repeated.

There are other straight-forward text replacers out there as well, which take keystrokes and put in a chunk of text.

Application Launchers

I am trying out Launchy at work this week. This program allows me to access any program in my Start menu by typing its name. It is very easy to use out of the box, and can be customized as well.

All three of these methods allow me to go for hours without having to use my mouse. I find that my train of thought is not interrupted as I search for things in my menus, and I can quickly move through my work.

Photo by B a m s h a d