Productivity in the face of distractions

I’m guessing that some of you might have had an iPhone or android phone for Christmas. And you might have made some New Year’s resolutions about being more productive and less distracted by Facebook or Angry Birds. And have – what with Portfolio funding and everything – ‘quite a bit on at work’. Me too. So rather than another blog about bid-writing I thought I’d cover the other two.

Over the years I’ve been on several ‘Time Management’ or ‘Personal Effectiveness’ courses for cultural managers over the years. While there is the odd lightbulb moment – such as making your phone calls at the start of the day so the person you are trying to reach has all day to get back to you – generally I come away with a couple of pages of notes that get filed in ‘Training Notes’ and after a couple of months are forgotten about.

So I thought I’d share the only really effective system out there I’ve found, and some useful tools to get you using that new smartphone for more than status updates. Getting Things Done is a system by David Allen for organising tasks and dealing with information. It’s a worldwide cult with social media groups, seminars and training courses dedicated to what is known as GTD. All I needed though was his book of the same name. At the heart of his system lies the most exhaustive list-making process you could conceive of: from what you want to achieve in your life to things to do on the bus to work. Once you have everything onto lists, you can start to tackle them in the most productive manner.

Back to that phone (or laptop). There are two free applications that can really help with a GTD-style approach to work. Evernote is the place to store the myriad of documents that come our way. It organises pdf’s, OpenOffice docs, Powerpoint presentations. jpegs and virtually anything you can upload into a series of notebooks. Everything is time-stamped and taggable, so finding Achieving Great Art for Everyone or the Gulbenkian Annual Report six months after you last looked for them is the work of moments. It’s browser-based so you can access it anywhere you can get on the web, and there are good apps for both the iphone and android. It’s the nearest thing yet to a virtual filing cabinet. Go for the paid version and it uploads Word documents too.

It’s not really about ‘to do’ lists though, and that’s where Springpad comes in. This is a productivity app centred around lists. You can create tasks, notes, events and organise them into notebooks (I have Work General, Board, Funding etc and a notebook for each project we’re doing). Each task can appear in several Notebooks – and you can organise them into tasks to do on the web, tasks with particular people and so on. Your Springpad page shows you your notebooks on start-up. On the Springpad blog there are several descriptions of how you can set it up to organise a GTD-style approach (I do have ‘Next Actions’ and ‘Waiting For’ notebooks). Tasks can be given deadlines, and you can see your tasks in date order. The events section synchronises with Google calendars to create a shareable online diary. The synchronisation with your phone is excellent – and you can even delegate within Springpad by emailing someone a task you then put, for example, in your ‘waiting for’ notebook.

Finally, none of these will actually write that G4A for you. No, there’s not an app for that. But the Pomodoro system might actually help you focus for long enough to get it done. It’s a system that breaks time down into 25-minute chunks and asks you to focus on one thing and one thing only for that time. Then you get a break, then do something else for the next 25 minutes. Four Pomodoros and you get a longer break. You can use an old-fashioned cooking timer, but there are loads of apps – I find Pomodroido the smoothest-working one for an android phone.

I am in no way associated with any of the above products, and there are lots of similar apps like Remember The Milk or Astrid, but these are the ones that have stuck for me. I’d love to hear about any else other people have found useful.