Take Back Your Life!
This past week I’ve been reading a book about how better to organize my life, and it is fantastic. Take Back Your Life, by Sally McGhee explains how to use Microsoft Outlook, synchronized with a PDA, to keep track of objectives, projects and tasks. And I can honestly say that it works.
One of the first steps, McGhee says, is to work out how many collection points we use. That is, how many locations do you collect information and tasks from? I was amazed to discover that I had 28 different locations. I’ve now reduced this to eight, which is far more manageable.
Next up, download the to-dos that you carry around in your head. I had eighty-one. No wonder I felt stressed, with so much to remember. I now have them typed up in my newly reorganised Tasks list in Outlook.
Thing is, I now have a full In-tray, and a bulging Tasks list because I’ve not reached the chapter on how you actually schedule these into your Calendar to make time to actually do them!
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January 9th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
[…] One of the best books I’ve ever read about organisation is Take Back Your Life by Sally McGhee. I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll mention it again. There is a great section on email inbox purging, and sometimes the best method for email that’s been in the inbox for months is to hold down the delete key and keep it down until all has been forgiven. […]
February 6th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
[…] I’ve written before about how wonderfully helpful I’ve found Sally McGhee’s excellent book Take Back Your Life. She helped take my almost-there system and with a few key twists turned it into something that is incredibly effective. So that I can now manage and track all my projects and tasks with Outlook and my Psion PDA. […]
September 18th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
[…] I found it in a book called Take Back Your Life by Sally McGhee, as documented on my blog entry of 25 January 2005. […]