Resources to Improve Your Personal Productivity
The #100percentdigital Faculty-Staff Learning Community met on Wednesday, February 25, 2015 to tackle to-do lists. This post captures the strategies, tools and voodoo discussed in meeting.
Box Note for Opening Activity: https://stedwards.box.com/s/7ntsdyelxrhtru61y85zzo2dovwgbfsd
Conduct a time audit
Quickly assess your personal productivity and see what tasks/programs/projects occupy the most time of your day. This can create a great baseline to see where you need to focus your personal productivity strategy.
- “10 Time-Tracking Apps that will make you more productive in 2014” Fast Company. Accessed February 25, 2015. http://www.fastcompany.com/3024249/10-time-tracking-apps-that-will-make-you-more-productive-in-2014
- Honorable mention: the app Hours
Popular Productivity Systems for Task Management
The fanciest of iOS apps will only work when you place your trust in an effective personal productivity system to manage your tasks and projects.
- Getting Things Done – Task management systems that asks people to make lists to capture all the “stuff” they have to do and give priority to the next action that needs to be taken on a project. The founder of this method, David Allen, has an unusual background including time as a karate instructor and New Age guru.
- The Pomodoro Technique – More of a time management strategy. Simple process: dedicate yourself to spend a set amount of uninterrupted time (a “pomodoro” typically is 25 minutes, but find what works for you) to work on a single task. Take a short break and repeat. After four “pomodoros”, take a longer break to recharge.
Popular Tools for Personal Productivity
These digital tools support personal and group productivity.
- Box
- Remember the Milk
- OmniFocus
- Things
- Trello
- Nozbe
- Wunderlist (personal or group project management)
- Basecamp (group project management)
- Gira (group project management)
Slide Deck: Productivity Methodologies
PDF: Productivity Tools for Task Management