Productivity Boosters | Finch Sells

Getting Things Done with Nirvana

Mar 30 2012

If you are an avid reader of self-help books, or a fan of productivity ‘lifehacks’, then it’s very likely that Getting Things Done ranks highly on your all-time list of important reads. David Allen’s seminal business book has proven a massive hit across all ages, drawing widespread acclaim and spawning multiple time-management applications.

In 2007, Getting Things Done was touted by Time Magazine as the ‘ultimate self-help business book of its time‘. Strong words, no doubt, and I agree with them 100%.

If you have ever used Omnifocus, Things or Remember The Milk, you will be familiar with David Allen’s methodology – even if you’ve never read the book.

The latest application to digitalise the Getting Things Done system is Nirvana, and thankfully for any Mr. Shallow Pockets among us, it’s completely free to use.

What is The Nirvana System?

Nirvana follows the same blueprint touted by David Allen in Getting Things Done. Allen’s system relies on two core principles – perspective and control. Any task that occupies our mind, whether it be doing the laundry or launching a high profile website, needs to be recorded and removed as a distraction to free up valuable ‘thinking power’.

Allen argues that our minds are comparable to the RAM in your computer. A complex library of thoughts, reminders, things to do, and things to act on. He believes that we create ‘mental blocks’ by attempting to carry so much information in our short-term memories, and that we can make immediate progress by using a workflow system based around 5 stages.

1. Collect things that command our attention.
2. Process what they mean and what to do about them.
3. Organise the results.
4. Review as options for what to do next.
5. Do it.

So, how do these steps result in improved productivity with Nirvana?

An example, not my real account!

The interface is segmented in to 4 key areas.

Inbox – Where you record tasks and to-do items as they enter your mind.

Actions – Once a task has been entered in to the system, it can fall in to four focus areas.

Next means it is the next required action to move a project along.
Waiting means that the task cannot be completed until a certain requirement is met (e.g. your colleague sends you the files you need to work with).
Scheduled means this is a task that you have planned to do on a certain date.
Someday is for all those arbitrary tasks that would be nice to complete, but can’t be worked on in the present. It’s an incubation folder for all the tasks that you might do on a lazy Sunday afternoon in the future.

Focus – Once you’ve decided what tasks to work on for the day, you can star them. It’s essentially your to-do list. If you have scheduled tasks for the future, they will appear here once their ‘doing day’ has arrived.

Projects – Here you create projects for every conceivable group of tasks that you might want to work on in the future.

Launching FinchPremiums.com was a project with about 60 tasks that I slowly chipped away at, focusing on 6-7 every day.

Similarly, planning a trip to America is a ‘project’ in the sense that several processes have to happen before you can tick it off as done and dusted. Buying tickets, choosing hotels, finding a dog carer and etc.

To get maximum value out of Nirvana, you should first add a project for every single “I want/need to do this” that enters your mind. Most people will have at least 50 projects that they’re working on at any given time, from arduous 3 year work projects to preparing a fancy dress outfit for the weekend.

You can assign the projects to the same subsets of Next, Waiting, Scheduled or Someday. Maybe you don’t want to plan a trip to America, but you do want to travel round the world by the time you’re 40. One is a next action, the other is for someday.

The key to freeing up your mental RAM is to get the thoughts documented and contained within Nirvana so you don’t have to carry them in your short-term memory. The ultimate goal is to free your mind so that you can focus only on the task at hand.

The GTD system is a very effective framework, and Nirvana makes it easy to follow. But to do so successfully, you’re probably going to need to spend an entire weekend getting your projects added to the application. Not only that, but you will need to define the next actions for each and every project.

It’s no good saying “I’d really love to do this project“. Your projects must have next action steps so you don’t have to waste valuable mental energy thinking about what you need to do next when you come back to them. You just do it.

Tasks can also be set with contexts and priority ranking. You can group tasks based on where they need to be done (at home, in the office, at the store), or even how much energy they require.

So if, like me, you find yourself sagging on a Friday afternoon with only an hour to go before you’re done, you can filter for tasks that match the requirements of ‘in the office’ and ‘low energy required’. This is one of my favourite ways of getting the most out of my least productive time.

There’s nothing worse than sagging at the end of the day and feeling overwhelmed by the lofty ambitions of what you hope to achieve in the bigger picture. Setting low energy tasks gives you small victories to keep you moving forward.

Nirvana vs. The Competition

How does Nirvana stack up against the rest of the apps based around David Allen’s system?

Arguably the biggest player in the GTD marketplace is OmniFocus, an excellent and comprehensive application that has the added advantage of being compatible with iPads and iPhones. Sounds great, and it is great… if you’re an Apple fan.

My phone is a Samsung S2, and I have no desire to get an iPad…so no benefit there.

The desktop version of OmniFocus only works on Macs. While I do have a Mac, I also spend a lot of time on my laptop which is Windows-based. Needless to say, there’s very little point in having a life management tool if you have to be in front of an iProduct to use it.

Nirvana has an advantage here. It’s accessible on both Windows and Mac. There doesn’t seem to be a smartphone application for it yet, but you can email tasks to your Nirvana address and they will show up in the system.

I’ve never used Remember The Milk, and I’m not a big fan of Things. You’ll have to let me know if I’m missing out.

Whereas most of these applications are not 100% free, Nirvana is, and it’s lightning fast to get started with (5 fields and you’re in). For anybody who wants to try the GTD system, but doesn’t want to spend $80, I highly recommend checking it out.

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The Perils of ‘Saving It For Later’

Mar 21 2012

If you’re anything like me, you will have a desktop that resembles a barren wasteland of hastily named Jpegs, ‘To Sort’ folders, and a trash can that hasn’t been emptied since 2009.

To the naked eye, it looks like I have some serious hoarding issues.

Who collects dating site logos, I mean, seriously?

I have a bunch of text files filled with nothing but numbers – future projections of traffic stats, conversion rates and earnings. They meant something at the time. But two weeks later, I’ll be damned if I can remember what my calculator was smoking.

Call it poor organization, call it a cluttered desktop, call it whatever the hell you want. I prefer to blame the perils of my worst enemy – the little voice in my head that says “Oh, nice. I’ll save that for later.”

How are your bookmarks doing?

If I had a dollar for every bookmark I’ve saved for future reference and never touched again, I’d probably sell this blog on Flippa, migrate to the Caribbean and never speak to any of you ever again. It’s insanity.

Just forraging through my links today, I found some genuinely very useful articles that could help my business moving forward… if it only it were 2009.

If I were to teleport in to your office and glance to the side of your keyboard and mouse, what would I find? If you’re like me, I’d find a notebook tainted by coffee stains. After picking it up and scanning through the pages, I’d find the 101 ‘light bulb moments’ that you scribbled down in excitement, only to bury under new pages never to be referenced again.

Let’s be real. ‘Saving it for later’ means you’re probably not going to see that shit ever again.

And that’s a shame, because it’s retaining the occasional light bulb moment that separates the creative minds from those who are equally creative but hopelessly inept at proving it outside their own heads.

How Can We Get Organised?

It’s quite simple.

If you are the kind of person who stores snippets of a thousand bright ideas, make sure you’re storing them somewhere that you’re going to reference, and act on from time to time.

Unless you set aside a specific time to venture in to your bookmarks, re-read what you’ve saved, and decide whether you want to act on it – the whole gesture is futile, a bloody stupid waste of time. Worthy of a slap in the tits.

The same applies to the notepad on your desk.

I am distancing myself from notepads altogether. They are a nice organization tool in theory – “Mhm, moleskin, I bet this changes my life!” – but in practice, as soon as you’ve turned the page, the scribbles might as well have jumped through the fire exit of your mind.

Instead of using a notepad, I’ve started to record my brainfarts on to post-it notes. This may come across as vapid, or slightly psychopathic, but it’s also very effective.

As soon as I’ve splurged the idea on to my post-it, I’ll drop it in a transparent box next to my Mac.

At the end of every day, or sporadically during the week when I’m having a downtime, I will empty the box and decide whether I want to save the idea for a future project (in which case it gets filed under Maybe Projects), or burn it while fisting myself in the bollocks for even contemplating the lunacy.

You could argue that replacing a notebook with post-it notes is a tiny change, and it is. But the principle has nothing to do with how you document your brainfarts. It has everything to do with remembering to set aside time to trace back and act on them.

Too many light bulb moments get lost in the back of notebooks that serve no purpose other than to make you feel organized. ‘Saving it for later’ only makes sense when your collection tool is not interchangeable with the trash can.

It’s something to remember as you click and drag your entire desktop contents in to a new ‘To Sort’ folder!

If your ‘To Sort’ folder runs six directories deep, your sorting skills probably extend only so far as fiddling with your balls on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. No shame in that, but it’s not particularly smart.

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Why Monday Mornings Are Crucial For Affiliates

Mar 05 2012

If there’s ever a time to show up for work, that time is Monday morning.

Whilst most of the world is happy to celebrate Thank God It’s Friday, anybody with a role in project management or self-employment is likely to be thinking the opposite, “Where did my week go?”

For that reason, I love Mondays. It’s another chance to deliver a flying clothesline to nagging targets, making sure they don’t live on to become 2017’s New Year’s Resolutions.

Monday mornings are doubly important because they set the tone for the rest of the week.

Start Monday badly and momentum is a bitch.

I’m ashamed to admit that lazy Mondays have cost me entire weeks in the past. If I start the week drifting aimlessly between tasks of equal importance but little long-term value, morning turns to lunch, and lunch turns to dinner. Before you know it, I’ve wasted an entire Monday with nothing but a headache and a sense of underachievement to show. It’s easy to spend the rest of the week playing catch-up.

Fortunately, if you start Monday well and make good progress before lunch, momentum conspires to help your cause. Productivity is contagious, but so is flicking from Facebook to YouTube and back again. Momentum can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

In affiliate marketing terms, Monday is the day that I launch my new campaigns for the week ahead. It’s wheels in motion day.

There’s nothing worse than launching on a Friday, waiting an entire weekend for your ads to get approved, then drifting in to a state of nonchalance with new ideas and brainfarts dominating your thoughts by the time they go live.

Get campaigns launched on Monday with the view to having them optimised and profitable by Friday.

I know a lot of affiliates ponder how long they should continue optimising before scrapping a campaign. Well, Monday to Friday is a nice time-frame. Assuming the ads are live by Tuesday, you have 3 days to accumulate data that should tell you whether you’re striking out on a terrible idea, or getting ready to smash a home-run.

Simply launching a campaign and getting your paws on some data provides an excellent momentum boost on Monday morning. You’re committing to positive action. It doesn’t stop there though.

Creating new ads does not constitute a launched campaign. A campaign is launched when the ads are approved and collecting data. Another guilty trait of mine has been to spend forever researching, eventually launch my ads, and then get declined for whatever reason. Instead of taking another hack at the submission process, I’d let the campaign rot in the planning stages forevermore. With no data, every idea is a fail.

So what’s the opposite of a Monday morning well spent?

In my opinion, that award goes to replying to emails. For the love of the anti-Christ, why do people wreck their morning coffee with this awful practice? Okay, admittedly, some people are in the business of servicing customers. But the majority of affiliates have no excuses.

It’s a damaging trait that many of us picked up in day jobs where we didn’t have the luxury (or Hell) of using Sunday evenings to clear out our inboxes.

I can guarantee that if you make replying to emails your number one priority, you will spend the rest of the day chasing tails and batting off distractions. It’s impossible to make any progress that could be deemed worthwhile if you’re wedged firmly up your Gmail’s arse.

More importantly, dealing with emails scrambles your ability to focus on one particular goal, which should always be your intention on Monday morning.

Successful affiliates are excellent at spotlighting their biggest goals and putting the most effort in to the most rewarding work. If that means being impossible to reach on the phone, through email and by instant messenger… then so be it. Most of us are pretty skilled at living like hermits. Celebrate it.

Monday morning is the perfect time to batten down the hatchets, leechblock Facebook, and unleash Father Zen on your most important project. Don’t take your lunch break until you’ve achieved something significant. It’s not an exaggeration to say that failing to do so may cost you the rest of your week.

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