Carlos Matallín

The way I work

I can’t believe it! Two consecutive weeks posting in the blog! Don’t panic, I decided to find time and write something whenever I had some free time so I could post at least once per week. Do you like the idea?

For some time now I wanted to share some tricks and recommendations I follow in order to enhance my productivity and as some great people have shared theirs recently and others asked me to do so, it wasn’t a really hard decision to take.

There are many resources out there that explain what is GTD, and this kind of methodologies focused on productivity. Of course, if I had to recommend you anything about it besides all the links I provide in the post I would say you to read Getting Things Done by David Allen, take a look at Wikipedia which always helps, and if you speak Spanish (surely, though you are reading in English now) subscribe to Think Wasabi, it has some great articles about productivity.

Now that we are in context I have to tell you that all that is bullshit.

Well, not really, but if you want to get your things done stop reading about it and DO them indeed. Now. No matter what. In fact you shouldn’t be reading this (well, we are not perfect). Furthermore all these methodologies impose some rules that aren’t applicable to everybody and if you are longing to be more productive at your work you must set your own rules (rules that work, obviously).

Knowing this I will relate my rules and what works for me. My method consists in three basic pillars which is the same as saying that my method consist in three basic apps: Gmail, Things and iCal (or Google Calendar). The first one for email, the second one for tasks and the last one for appointments.

Gmail

If you have an Internet related job, or you have to be connected almost all day like me, email is surely one of the most important sources where almost every task come from. The way I get on with email is very similar to what Eduardo Arcos does; anyway I will explain how do I deal with them.

First of all I follow the Inbox Zero rule as it was a commandment. “Thou shalt not have any email unprocessed”. It has a lot to do with the broken windows theory. And almost more important than that, only check email some times a day: early in the morning, before lunch, after lunch, in the evening, and just after going to sleep. So, ¿how do I process all that mail?

1. At the very moment I receive new mail I read it if it’s important, short or doesn’t need much of my attention; otherwise I mark it as unread and apply some labels in case it wasn’t filtered previously.
2. If the purpose of the mail isn’t carried out, it remains in the inbox waiting for an answer or if it request an action from me (as a reply or whatever), it gets starred. At the right moment the subject is accomplished it gets archived.

Moreover I have some labels that let me know at a glance what my correspondence is about. The important labels with children categories are preceded by @, the important and single labels begin with #, and the rest receive an automatic alphabetical order; all this with some color to make it more friendly. With the last changes of Gmail I can even hide the still or finished projects!

And to complement this and be more effective on this bulk processing I have some powerful filters that automatically label my emails and in some occasions archive them so they don’t disturb me (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, mailing lists and such).

Things

There are a lot of software for productivity for all platforms, anyway this is the best. Period. It’s only available for Apple computers but, I think this is more a feature than a bug because if you want to be productive you must make use of tools that help you to be productive, and if we are talking about Operative Systems, Mac OS X has no rival, perhaps some flavor of GNU/Linux.

In a nutshell Things let you organize your tasks in a very efficient way giving a lot of importance to focus on the context you are working in that precise moment. That’s all, you have areas, projects, tasks and you can arrange them in the predefined contexts that GTD methodology suggests in order to follow its principles: Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do. That way you have the Inbox tab to collect and the Next to put there your tasks organized by projects. Furthermore you have some more options like Schedule and Someday.

iCal / Google Calendar

And finally as I don’t trust my memory for dates and rendez-vous, I must write them down somewhere. Previously I used Google Calendar and now I make use of Mac OS X integrated calendar, iCal. I don’t really have any preference for one, maybe if you have an iPhone you prefer iCal better than an Android phone and vice versa.

If you have read until here I love you but still aren’t convinced about being productive or don’t think this will work for you or didn’t felt like reading all this, I strongly recommend this video which explains more or less the same (but hey, it’s a video, and it moves!).