productivity

Another treat in my interview series (kickoff post, all posts), I'm very pleased to share highlights from an hour with Dr. Marilyn Paul, author of the best-selling It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys (The Seven-Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized) (personal and consulting sites).

One of the great things about my series of interviews with top productivity consultants [1] (along with lots of new ideas) is discovering thinkers I've not previously heard of. I'm pleased to share a short email interview with Nicholas Bate (site, blog), who came to my attention when I received a surprise box of books and playing cards [2] from London, including Being the Best: The A-Z of Personal Success, JfDI!

Continuing my interview series with the top experts in personal productivity comes another deep and wide-ranging conversation, this time with Sally McGhee, CEO of McGhee Productivity Solutions and author of Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized.

A light post this week, I wanted to share a few select formulas for productivity and self help I've been collecting. Hopefully some will resonate. Let's hear yours! -- matt

Event + Response = Outcome

From The Success Principles [1]

Flow = Work + Play

From Psychologists now know what makes people happy

Productivity = What x When

From Nicholas Bate On being productive

Effectiveness = Creativity x Order

Continuing my interview series [1] with the top experts in personal productivity, I'm very pleased to share highlights from my conversation with Chris Crouch, creator of the GO System and author of Getting Organized: Learning How to Focus, Organize and Prioritize. Chris's company runs a certification program and sells products like an implementation kit. You can find some of his articles here.

Update: There was some confusion about the format for Chris's interview, so I had to pull this older version.

matt

One of the most popular topics here is reading efficiently, including How to read a lot of books in a short time and A reading workflow based on Leveen's "Little Guide". Using Leveen's terminology, I have a candidates library of at least 50 books (i.e., purchased and in my bookcase), and a pre-candidates list of around 600 (kept on Amazon, but it's not perfect). So I really want to read a lot (actually, to learn a lot), but the problem is my eyes are bigger than my stomach, and I've fallen behind. This is in spite of outsourcing voice note transcription [1].

A few things got me thinking about why we try to be more productive. The first was a stimulating (and emotional) discussion of value, fees, and life purpose in my recent post A conversation with Laura Stack, the Productivity Pro. Toward the end a reader brings up the important of "Why?"

The second thing was Laura Stack's post How to Be More Productive: Have you become more productive or just learned how? She's clearly given it some deep thought.

Finally, early on I wrote It's not about productivity..., and I'd like to revisit the idea. So what follows are a few "Is it all about..." thoughts. No answers here, just a some starter possibilities. Your thoughts on this are very welcome.

Time?

As I announced last week [1], I'll be interviewing the top experts in the field of personal productivity, and I'm pleased to start out with a bang - I had the pleasure of talking with Laura Stack, AKA the Productivity Pro, last week.

We've all been there: Overwhelmed with the day-to-day aspects of life - incoming stuff that's relatively easy to handle - we focus on it, excluding the "big things." After a while it feels like the trivial many have sunk the vital few (from the Pareto principle - see Koch's book The 80/20 Principle for an in-depth discussion).