Organize IT 1st Birthday Interview: Part 1 [Organize IT]
As promised a few weeks back, here is the first part of the Organize IT birthday interview where I asked a number of my favourite productivity bloggers three carefully chosen questions (at least I like to think they were carefully chosen). It certainly gave me a chance to see how effective Gmail is for sorting emails. This is my first attempt at an interview of sorts, so I hope it’s up to standard. The first question I asked was, “what events or experiences initially made you want to be more organized and productive?” Please share your own responses in the comments. Hope you enjoy this series!
Stephen Smith: “Moving to a new city, state, job created a ton of confusion and I needed to get everything back on track.”
gtdfrk: “No specific event but a general experience: just having closets, drawers, boxes and hard disks full of “stuff”, never being able to find something when I needed it, forgetting things and generally being sick of “stuff” dominating my life. Plus the annoying and hard to kill habit of procrastination, mixed with a general feeling of not being in control. Sounds pretty bad, huh?
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I can sort of relate to this, with regards when my girlfriend moved in with me. Productivity was not always an issue for me, so over time all the drawers, cupboards and storage filled up with all sorts of unorganized junk. Nowadays I’m all for streamlining my home and de-cluttering. It’s a great feeling, to be able to go straight to what I want.
Mark Shead: “I’ve always been interested in productivity. Growing up on a farm, I think it was a little frustrating for my parents because I was always coming up with crazy ways to try to make the work go faster. These ideas didn’t always work out. I remember one incident that involved using a lawnmower engine to harvest a bunch of potatoes that didn’t quit turn out as I had envisioned
As a grew up, I realized that many of the things I wanted to do in life would be out of reach of the average person. I wasn’t particularly interested in working for 35 years at a job and then retiring to spend time doing things I enjoyed. Eventually this led me to starting my own company where my pay is determined by my productivity, not by the number of hours I invest. This gives me the freedom and the risk to make what I’m really worth instead of trading a low salary for the security of a large company. This shift in focus from ‘how many hours did I work’ to ‘how much value did I provide’ has been one of the biggest influences in how I view my personal productivity.”
This is very motivational, sounds like you are quite proactive! It’s always good practise to evaluate your methods and discover more effective ways of doing things. If something doesn’t work out, you have not wasted your time, because you still learn something from trying it.
Leo Babauta: “The driving force is my desire to be with my family. I think there was a gradual realization that I wasn’t spending enough time with my family, and working too many hours. I realized that I could work fewer hours and get the same amount of work done if I could become more organized and productive.”
Rosemary Honn: “There was lot to juggle as a working mom/wife in my younger days. That motivated me to attempt to be more effective.”
Dwayne Melancon: “The impetus was when I had a particularly busy and chaotic time at work, and felt my work/family balance was out of whack. I recognized that I needed to get better at structuring, segmenting, and prioritizing how I spent my time or things would never get better.”
Leo, Dwayne and Rosmary wanting more balance with their family time, is an example of the great things that can come about from getting on the productivity ladder. It’s personally made me much more focused on projects and goals that are actually important to me and moved me towards where I want my life to be.
Matthew Cornell: “For me it was very clear: reading Getting Things Done. Until that point I didn’t think of myself as disorganized or needing help, but adopting the ideas blew me away. They made such an impact that at first I wasn’t sure it was the book. I actually created a timeline showing events of the previous year to see what else it could have been, but I concluded it was Allen’s work.
I was blown away, and decided to a) start blogging, b) throw myself into two years (and counting) of defining my own ‘Masters in Productivity’ and c) quit my job and start full-time consulting in personal productivity. January was my first month, and so far it’s been great. Freeing up my mind using the method literally had a life-altering impact. That’s why I teach others.”
Donald Latumahina: “It is my background in computer science. I was amazed to see how people in computer science always try to do things in more and more efficient ways. They relentlessly optimize their algorithms to gain even the slightest possible improvements. I then thought that the same thing should also apply to my life. I should relentlessly optimize my life.”
This is a clever comparison. I’m always looking to tweak and optimize my current system and increasingly I monitor my progress, performances, how much I get done etc by scoring myself. For instance, by giving myself a 7 for home-owner role one week, I have a motivational target for the next week.
GTD Wannabe: “I realized I wasn’t getting anything done. Although I always thought I was pretty organized, I thought I would try to get even more organized. Searching for productivity on the internet brought me to the GTD family”
Rolf F. Katzenberger: “I’ve always tried to be productive, but for a long time I was trapped in conventions; shiny utensils, one way to do it right, ridiculously complicated organizing structures and the like. It all looked like a matter of discipline. About 5 years ago, I became Director of IT & Organization at an SME and my personal organization system broke down. It wasn’t the volume of tasks (I had been leading a software development department before, so I knew the heat) but rather the variety of obligations that was exploding. Luckily, in the autumn of 2002 I stumbled across David Allen’s Getting Things Done. That was an eye-opener! Since then, I’ve been kicking out all these byzantine organization schemes.”
Original post here: SpiKe
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