CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Tips from the Trenches: Getting Things Done

Web Worker Daily: "In your quest for better efficiency, you’ve probably read books like “Getting Things Done” and “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” and tried to implement the strategies contained within them. Yet you know you can do better in managing your day and being more efficient.
For this post, instead of quoting yet more theories from books, I asked some experts and fellow Twitter users to share their real life tips for getting things done."

3 comments:

tiffhunsicker said...

I especially like the tip about getting up a half hour earlier than necessary. It is true, you can get an awful lot done in a half hour, plus I think that just being up and not having to rush out the door because you just rolled out of bed makes the start to your day a lot less stressful. However, sometimes this is a hard task to accomplish. When that alarm goes off and you know that you don't HAVE to get up yet, it is really tempting to just hit the snooze button, especially if you were up working late the night before, which we all know happens way too often.

Annie J said...

This article has PERFECT timing. We just had Joe Pino's time management lecture today, and a lot of what is on here is either exactly what he said, or in the same vein and elaborating. I think the tips are really dead-on. Especially tips about getting up at least once an hour, focusing on one thing at a time, and setting acheivable daily goals. Nothing is more demoralizing than waking up in the morning, setting yourself a HUGE to-do list, and coming back at night realizing you only got one thing done.

Unknown said...

I really should pay more attention to some of these. I find that I sit down in front of a computer to do "work," but then the time passes quickly as I accomplish nothing. Instead, the tip of taking a break of 5 minutes every hour goes well with the tip to make a to-do list of manageable items: When I get up to take a break, I should feel like I've accomplished something from that to-do list instead of just wasting the time emailing, surfing the web, etc.

I'm not a huge fan of the getting up half an hour early, because in my experience I can't accomplish anything in that time. I can maybe check email, but I'm not awake enough to reply, so I have to go back to email later to take care of that.