A few weeks ago, my colleague Larry Miller and I were talking about the need to plan ahead on an upcoming project rather than, as he said, “answering the doorbell.” In the few weeks that have followed, I have been deluged by an almost constantly ringing doorbell. And while it’s good to be busy, if all you do is answer the doorbell then you never make it inside to the party.
To step out of the metaphor for a minute, I am talking about the downside of our almost constant connectivity: information overload. I have struggled with the inbox, the cell phone, the blog aggregator, even the Twitter stream in the past month. In thinking of how to overcome all of this I was reminded of a couple of good time-management speeches I’ve seen that are conveniently available online. The first was sadly given by the late Professor Randy Pausch. It’s not his now famous “Last Lecture” but rather another brilliant talk he gave on the subject of time management at the University of Virginia. The other is the presentation called “Inbox Zero” from well-known productivity guru Merlin Mann. From moving the clutter from your physical desktop to your monitor screenspace via multiple monitors to managing high volumes of email, both offer concrete strategies for managing your most valuable asset — your time.
And with these two favorites begins our informal producitivity project. Have you seen a great lecutre on time-managment or productivity that we can include? Send it to us via email or comment below and we’ll create a master list of all of these tools here for us to utilize.
