Have you broken any New Years Resolutions yet? Go on be honest…

Well I’m pleased to say that I haven’t.  Why? Because I haven’t set any.

For 99.99999% of people NYRs are pointless and don’t work; they know this already!  This is because they expect a big change to occur at a preset date and time which is such a shock that the mind cannot manage and so the NYR is broken.  Also people love to put something off until later; it means they don’t have to do it now.

Instead of NYRs I set objectives for the year, some of which I know (or hope) I’ll complete before the end of the year.  Although I don’t like new years resolutions I always get the natural urge to look at the year ahead with a sense of “new year, new start, and a hope for better”; and I think that’s fine.

Like most people I find change hard (unlike most people I’m not afraid to admit it).  Lifestyle changes are hard, we do things the way we do them because over time it suits what we naturally want (whether that’s good or bad), our energy, mindset and outlook on life. 

The trouble with NYRs is that once you break it you’re back to your old self.  With Objectives it doesn’t matter if you break the rule because you’ve got time to recover.

So, if you’ve broken your NYR(s) already convert them into objectives and then work out what you need to do to achieve those objectives and get on with step 1 (or what we in the GTD world call the Next Action).

Until the next post…

I’ve been a Blackberry user for over two years now and love the ability to email and browse the web with a querty keyboard wherever I can get a signal. I know there are lots of phones that have similar capabilities but Blackberry’s seem to do it for me and although I’m happy to concede that there are probably better phones/PDAs I’m happy with the blackberry I have; the model before it was like a brick but the one I have now is more slim line.

Email management is a big thing in the productivity world and having an inbox that follows you around can be a distraction and in my case certainly has been.

I have a lot of email addresses and I’ve always had a policy of never getting rid of any just in case someone wants to use it to contact me. Up until recently I’ve had most of those email addresses configured on my blackberry which quickly became a pain. I was getting email and hence an interruption that I didn’t really need there and then. Job site emails, social networking alerts, etc… , which I don’t need now, I can read later in the day or tomorrow.

So I’ve done two things that should alleviate the interruptions;

1) Email address re-org. There are two email addresses which real people can contact me on and whenever an automated email from the many sites I subscribe to uses either of these two email addresses I’ll create a next action to reconfigure the offending site.
2) Set the phone to ‘ring only’; if your communication is urgent then call me. I will probably revert back to configuring my blackberry to ‘buzz when a mail comes in’ when I’ve sorted out the rogue email senders ?

That should reduce the interruptions and hopefully will help me stay productive.

Do you have a Blackberry or other mobile email inbox?  How do you manage this whilst staying productive?  Leave me a comment.

Until the next post…