Getting things Done

Are you stressed out? Do you have a lot of things on your mind at the moment? You might want to take just a couple of minutes to read this - it might help you out.

I'm a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done book, and have adopted many of his techniques to increase my personal organisation, efficiency and productivity. If you're stressed out at the moment from all the 'stuff' you need to deal with, I can really recommend taking a little bit of time out to read it.

A key concept in his Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology is coralling your 'stuff' into one big pile before sitting down to process your way through it all. This includes all the 'stuff' in your head - every little 'to-do' in your head, even if it's just remembering to buy milk on the way home tonight. If you've never tried it, I can't recommend it enough. It's an amazingly relaxing experience to have all of that stuff out of your head.

David Allen recommends that you write down each of these thoughts on a piece of paper and put it into your giant intray. This is a great idea, but has two flaws. One is that it is environmentally pretty unfriendly, and the second is that it's not exactly portable. The only time you'll be able to process your way through it is at your desk. Then I very recently discovered ThinkingRock which addresses both of these problems beautifully. ThinkingRock is a small Java based application created by Jeremy Moore and Claire Lemarechal that you can run on your desktop, laptop, or from a USB stick, and take a virtual intray with you. It's an excellent way to implement GTD, and best of all it's free.

Even if you think you don't have any time management issues, I'd really give this a go, both the book and the free software.

Top tip to help import lists into your CRM database - Vertical Text Selection

After a conference or seminar I often want to import the attendee list into a CRM database. If the organiser has been kind enough, this can be a straightforward exercise when provided with a tabulated format such as tables in a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, or even HTML tables. Sometimes though you end up with a list where you can see the columns, but they are formatted with spaces instead of tabs or cells, and you get stuck having to either re-type it or do a lot of cutting and pasting.

I used to have a fancy text editor that allowed me to make vertical text selections to save me from this frustration, and until now I thought that was the only way to do it. That was until I read this great tip from Windows Fanatics:

In Word, if you press the ALT key while left clicking the mouse, you can select text vertically as well as horizontally. This could save you hours of re-typing information!