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When it comes to organizers, many people prefer the old-fashioned paper versions. David Allen presents the idea of a paper organizer shaped to suit your own needs (which makes it a quite different vehicle than a purchased Day Planner or similar item). As Allen says, paper-based organizers have the advantage of offering “better and faster visual overview and context.” In other words, you can find what you want instantly.

Allen suggests buying a simple 3-ring binder, filling it with lined paper, and adding dividers for the categories you want. You could also consider adding pre-printed forms for calendar pages and contact-info pages.

He suggests 8 tabs:

1. Notes/In: A portable in basket for capturing random notes—meeting notes, thoughts, a record of phone conversations, etc.–for later processing.
2. Calendar: Specific information for the day, as well as information about future appointments and plans.
3. Action Lists: Single actions that need to get done when you have discretionary time.
4. Agendas: Items to bring up when you meet or talk with individuals or groups.
5. Projects/Goals: This section should be reviewed once weekly to ensure that you are staying on top of your active projects.
6. Project Planning/Notes: Supporting material for projects.
7. Reference/Misc: A general “catch-all” section.
8. Telephone/Address: Basic Rolodex of names and addresses.

But for this to work, it should be set up to reflect your own work, life, and needs. For me, these 8 categories would be overkill. For you, they might be perfect. Don’t be shy about deleting categories you don’t need and creating new categories that work for you.

An interesting interview with busy Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was published a few days ago by Lifehacker.com, in which the Woz reveals a few of his productivity tips—some of which are surprising.

For instance, he says the biggest benefit he gets comes from his Segway, which he uses everywhere he goes. Another tool he relies on: a Verizon wireless card since he doesn’t want to depend on hotel Wi-Fi. He has only one computer (a MacBook Pro). He travels with both an iPhone and a Blackberry, although he uses neither for email unless he has to (he prefers answering mail via a big keyboard). Perhaps the biggest surprise is that he manages his email with discontinued software (Eudora); it works for him, he’s got it set up the way he likes, with every feature he needs; he sees no reason to change.

There’s much more: how he uses RSS feeds; his preferred Browser; his work with Fusion-io; cloud-based computing; hacking. He also has advice for young techies starting out, which basically boils down to Know the Technology.

It’s a good read about a likable, highly successful guy.

Want to get a rep for running a tight and effective meeting—one that gets results and doesn’t waste your co-workers’ time? Follow these simple steps:

1. Thoroughly prepare for the meeting. Draw up an agenda and distribute it in advance of the meeting. Build in reading time for any supporting documents, sending them out a day or two ahead.

2. Only invite those specifically concerned with the topic/s. Doing so keeps you from wasting other people’s time (for which they’ll be mucho grateful) and lets you run a lean and effective meeting machine.

3. Give advance notice of the meeting’s start and end times—and stick to them! If people come late, don’t stop the meeting to help them catch up (this almost guarantees they’ll be on time at the next meeting). And ending the meeting when you say you will helps to prevent getting bogged down in minutia.

4. Consider an informal ban on tech gear (cell phones, PDAs, laptops, etc.) to keep everyone focused on what’s going on. For more information, see our post entitled “Should You Ban Technology From Meetings?“

5. Ask everyone present for input, getting all viewpoints on the table. Isn’t that the point of a meeting? Listen equally to all, without insulting those with whom you disagree. This shows co-workers that you need and respect their opinions. Also, once participants give voice to their own opinion they’ll be stakeholders in the meeting, and thus less inclined to view the whole thing as a waste of time.

6. Keep a tight rein on the meeting’s focus. Don’t allow the conversation to wander off into unrelated subjects. Just quietly say: “Let’s stick to the subject at hand.” Also, since you’re a person who ends meetings on time (See #3), you can blame the agenda when you cut someone off: “That’s interesting, Mike, but let’s save it for another time. We’ve got to stick to the agenda if we’re to end on time.”

7. After all points have been covered: (a) review what was discussed; and (b) create an Action Plan with assignments and a timeline.

8. Before participants depart, ask if they found the meeting constructive. Also ask for suggestions to make the next meeting even better. You’ll get some good, workable tips—and, once again, you’ll be upping that stakeholder element.

9. Send an email to all participants and relevant others that sums up the meeting. And—why not?—be sure to copy your superiors.

10. All of this is for naught if you don’t follow through. Establish a system that helps you keep track of the Action Plan’s tasks and all related assignments.

One of the greatest and most common productivity problems is procrastination. Everybody procrastinates—everybody. Admit it: no matter how efficient or organized you are, you procrastinate once in a while. Some of us are occasional procrastinators. According to researchers, however, about 20-25% of the population procrastinates chronically!

The word procrastinate comes from the Latin procrastinatus, formed from pro (forward) and crastinus (of tomorrow). In other words, “put it forward to tomorrow” or “do it tomorrow.” A modern defnition, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: “To put off doing something, especially out of  habitual carelessness or laziness.”

Here are seven solid tips to help you overcome procrastination:

1. Adopt the three words “Just do it!” as your anti-procrastination mantra. Instead of thinking of all the reasons why you don’t want to do something, well—Just do it!
2. Believe in the fact that procrastination is a habit, and that it’s one you can break. Tell yourself that, if you try really hard not to procrastinate for two weeks, you’ll end up being much less of a procrastinator. And if you keep it up for two weeks beyond that, you might well beat your procrastination habit into the ground.
3. If you’re putting off a task, try breaking it into small action steps in the order they’re best done. Then take one small step, and then another, until the task is done.
4. If you are really dreading a task, try doing it right away or first thing in the morning—don’t give yourself time to think about it. Maybe you can plunge in by accomplishing the easiest part of this unpleasant task first; once you do, you’ll find it easier to continue. Or maybe your inner wiring would respond to doing the most difficult part first. Experiment. Find what works for you.
5. Plan to celebrate or otherwise reward yourself when you complete something you’ve put off. Throw a party, treat yourself to a double-scoop ice cream cone, or skip the gym after work.
6. Go public with your goal, telling your friends and co-workers about the task you’ve set for yourself. Doing so sets you up to be accountable to others as well as to yourself.
7. Above all, be positive. Do not say “I am a procrastinator” to yourself (or others, because that’s how they’ll view you). Instead, offer yourself phrases like “I get things done” or “I don’t waste time.”

And if you have any doubts that you can pull this off, here’s my advice: Just do it!

When you are fighting emotional paralysis, how do you manage to be productive? The details hovering around this question are fresh and achingly poignant after a five-week emergency visit to my childhood home.

My parents live on a meager income that was dwindling fast due to medical costs from my dad’s recent stroke. The costs cut into my mother’s food budget, but, as a family, we were committed to helping my dad stay home as he wished. At 84, the family patriarch relies on others to wash and dress him, and help him in the bathroom. Some family members are appalled and stay away. The successful outcome was clear. Get financial assistance for my homebound Dad and—to the utter relief of my beleaguered mother—be his healthcare aide.

Believe me, my limited nursing skills were a small part of the stress I endured. I observed my dad’s diminished quality of life and brief lapses into anger or melancholy with paroxysms of pain.  I watched his face contort with effort as he inched his walker along the corridor during physical therapy sessions.

Acting like a GTD robot pulled me through. The first day on the job, I bought a Brother labeler and stack of folders and numbly applied the set of behaviors I knew so well. A big woven basket pushed under a corner table overflowed with paper. The basket was desperately in need of a GTD makeover. I took a deep breath and processed every piece of paper; labeled files for each agency, doctor, rehabilitation center and insurance company I had targeted for next actions.

It was the to-do list from hell.

The agencies set up to assist the disabled and elderly are a bureaucratic nightmare. They require dozens of forms; websites provide conflicting advice; and case workers, when they pick up their phones, half-answer questions. I dialed the same numbers each day until I heard a live voice. “Yes, your dad’s application is approved but there are lots of people ahead of him,” was the rely.

I spent enough time training myself, and coaching others, to visualize successful outcomes and think creatively of how to make them happen. I set a successful outcome to get the case worker to move my dad’s file to the top of the stack because of his age and disability.

A healthcare aide, sent by the New Jersey Department of Aging, arrived on my parents’ doorstep the day I was due to return to California. My dad now has a professional aide 10 hours a week. Because of physical therapy, he can walk to the car without the use of a wheelchair.

David Allen writes, “being able to maintain a positive vision amidst the challenging and often messy day-to-day stuff is a wonderful life skill.” I agree as I sink into an untroubled sleep, which ultimately was the successful outcome I had been aiming for.

Why pay for someone else to do your taxes when you can do them for free? No tax experience needed. All you need is access to the Internet.

1. Receive your w-2 or wage information.
2. Log on to IRS.
3. Find the e file link on the main page.
4. Choose what type of tax payer you are ( most people are individual payers).
5. Click start now to search for a website that will allow you to do your taxes for free.
6. Choose which website you would like to file your taxes on you may need to create an account. It would also be helpful if you have an email address.

TIPS

1. Before you begin, make sure you have your personal information such as drivers license, social security number, etc.
2. If you make $54,000 a year or less you could do you taxes for free.
3. You can have your refund check direct deposited into your account in 3-5 days or mailed to you.

Most files, reports, and papers I want to keep are stored in a two-drawer file cabinet in my office. What I’ve found over the years is that I almost never open that filing cabinet to retrieve anything; it usually opens only so that I can thrust something into a file. About twice a year I go through the files and clean them out…that is, I shred lots of papers I thought I might need and now see that I don’t.

I also have about a dozen handsome “cargo” desktop file boxes of various sizes in which I keep frequently-used papers and other items. My office organization improved immeasurably when I started using these boxes. (I’ll talk about this kind of storage scheme in the near future.)

The really important files—projects I’m working on, the 12-folder setup I discussed a while back—are kept in the only pull-out file drawer in my desk. That makes the files instantly accessible. At the present moment, there are only 8 files in this drawer, so there’s plenty of room I could use for other things. But I wouldn’t dream of doing that. It would just dilute the importance of that drawer in my organizing ritual—and one of the things I’ve learned is that adhering to an organizing scheme that works for you is the key to being successfully organized.

My file organizing ritual might not work for you, and that’s okay. The important thing is to find a scheme that suits your specific style. You’ll probably want to make changes to it as you go along. For one thing, as you become more organized, you’ll find better ways to be organized. Or your work circumstances might change, necessitating changes to your organizing scheme.

Good luck!

A few years ago the idea of multitasking was viewed as a wonderful way to get more done. It seemed logical to conduct business on the phone while driving to work; to answer email while watching TV; to run the month-end numbers while carrying on a conversation with a co-worker.

But over time multitasking has revealed itself as a bit of a fraud, nowhere near the productivity tool it was cracked up to be. Quite the reverse, in fact, since all indications are that people do a much better job when they focus on one task at a time.

According to a wide range of research studies, our brains really don’t “multitask” or carry on simultaneous activities. It may appear to us that we’re accomplishing two or more tasks at the same time, but we’re not. We focus on one thing, then another, and then yet another—all occurring so closely together that we think it’s happening simultaneously. To carry this out, our brains must engage in a stressful mental balancing act that requires constant acrobatics to keep all the balls aloft.

Experiments measuring brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging reveal that multitasking interferes with the brain in various ways. The mental manipulation required for multitasking demands more from areas of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination, while short-changing other areas related to memory and learning.

Every time we do one of those simultaneous switches from one task to another we pay a “resumption price.” That price is the second or two it takes for your brain to figure out what it had been doing with the task before being interrupted. Once it figures that out, you can resume the task. Those seconds add up—and they’re fatiguing. That’s why it can be more productive, and less costly physically, to “unitask” or work on one task at a time.

As we stated earlier, multitasking has been falling out of favor for a while now (witness the spate of state laws that prohibit driving while holding a cell phone). Perhaps you’ve made decisions that reflect a desire to multitask less and unitask more: you’re checking email only at specific times of the day, say.

An increasing number of companies are taking steps against multitasking, too.

One such company is California-based Adaptive Path, which helps organizations develop product and design concepts through experience strategy (clients include Blogger, PeopleSoft, PBS, Creative Commons, MySpace, Agilent, and Cathay Pacific).

Over time, the company’s management realized that meetings were so unproductive that more meetings were required to get things done. Why? Simply because employees were busy multitasking throughout the meetings. They’d glance at Blackberries, surf phones, check email on laptops, and so on. While believing themselves to be in full attendance at the meeting, they were partially somewhere else. “They were distracted,” according to co-founder and co-president Jesse James Garrett.

Adaptive Path eventually banned technology from meetings where important decisions would be made, including board meetings. For some, it was hard to adjust, but, according to Garrett, “It’s embedded in the culture now…Having people’s attention has been really valuable.”