gtd

There are 4 posts tagged gtd (this is page 1 of 1).

Private outsourcing to India

Too much work? In the New York Times supplement of the Süddeutsche Zeitung there are several articles about Tim Ferris’s model of the 4-hour week and outsourcing to virtual personal assistants, which I had already written about. The posts reminded me of my promise to write more about Ferris’s book, which I haven’t kept yet. Ferri’s approach is mainly to block out everything that is not immediately important. E-mails are only read once a week, messages are not read at all, and people don’t surf the Internet anyway unless you have to for a task. Furthermore, Ferriss recommends that you first have to make sure that you no longer drive to the office every day, but can work from home; as soon as this is possible, you should get a VPA (Virtual Personal Assistant), which can then take over many tasks for you. In addition, Ferris has founded a company himself, through which he can earn a five-figure sum every month, but for which he has to do next to nothing. Everything is outsourced, from production to delivery to customer support. Checking emails once a week is enough to collect $40,000 cash every month and travel the world with it. Basically, we already know everything that’s in Ferriss The 4-Hour Workweek. Hide the unimportant, focus. It is the radicalism that has helped Ferris’s approach to popularity. And the idea of the arbitrage business, in which the cheap labor of others is used to do one’s own high-paying job. And don’t we all know a Ferriss in our area, someone who never responds to e-mails and who makes you wonder how he or she gets away with it, but at the same time admire how he or she gets his or her projects organized? More about Ferriss in his blog (which you shouldn’t actually read according to his specifications). My own experiences with my VPA are mediocre. Since mid-September, I have been outsourcing 10 hours every month, but I don’t give anything from my main job to India. So far, my VPA has mainly helped with book research, although the quality of the results varies. You have to be very precise in describing what you want, which is no surprise when it comes to outsourcing (I’ve dealt with offshore development before), but sometimes the requirements aren’t read carefully enough. My tip: Don’t hand in a large task and then only accept it after completion, but let intermediate results be shown. At the same time, however, there is also a feedback system that decides, for example, on the bonus of a VPA. By the way, as expected, there are no VPAs at getfriday.com that speak German. This will significantly limit the ability of most Germans to use VPAs for an arbitrage transaction; I also think it is unlikely that a similar business model will work here due to the high wage costs. Those who are proficient in English and have a job in which German hardly plays a role will have an advantage here. For the Americans and English, we are talking about a real language advantage here (not a locational advantage), and I would not be surprised if this were to grow into a serious factor for an economic advantage.

The virtual personal assistant

In contrast to the Personal Digital Assistant, which was all the rage just a few years ago, the Virtual Personal Assistant will now become the subject of the next wave. Unlike the PDA, the VPA is made of flesh and blood and owes its increasing popularity to the arbitrage effect that Timothy Ferris draws attention to in his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Not only programming can be outsourced to India, but also the tasks of a personal assistant. Create a market overview? Why waste hours of precious time when a well-trained assistant in India can do the job for a few dollars less? This not only gives you free time, but also allows you to concentrate on the really important things. Ryan Carson has also already had his first experiences with the VPA after reading the book by Timothy Ferris, which he shares in his blog. VPA providers such as Get Friday now have waiting times of several weeks since the 4-hour workweek topped the American bestseller lists. Tasks are sent to India by email in the evening, the next (American) morning the results are in the mailbox. In some cases, the results are so impressively good that one becomes afraid and anxious for one’s own economy, according to a comment by a user of these services in Ferris’ book. Of course, it is nothing new that other areas are also outsourced. What is new, however, is that not only companies do this, but also private individuals in order to regain time for themselves. Because, according to Ferris, it’s not about putting everything off until you’re a pensioner; instead, efforts should be made to design mini-retirements here and now. The question is whether it can be used to benefit beyond English-speaking countries. I have a lot of tasks that I could outsource to a virtual personal assistant, but some of them require the assistant to be proficient in German. An inquiry about this at Get Friday has not yet been answered. However, it is unlikely that this system will scale for Europeans (minus the UK) as it does for the Americans and English.

Productivity: David Allen’s Getting Things Done

I recently introduced Life Balance, which is superior to the usual to-do lists. However, not all activities can be mapped in it: a lot of paper ends up on every desk, countless e-mails arrive in every mailbox every day, and Life Balance offers no immediate help (at first). That’s where David Allen’s Getting Things Done comes in.

Getting Things Done, also called GTD by followers, is the description of the organizational method of David Allen, who helped over 1,000 people to work more organized and thus more productive as a consultant for 20 years. Ultimately, he has created a system that creates clarity in a positive working style about what needs to be done, when and how. At the same time, Allen points out that no system can be universally valid, but it is still better to do anything at all than nothing at all. However, once you have achieved an improvement in productivity at one level, the challenges of the next level put the rules that are only just working to the test.

Allen’s system is based on two points:

  • Everything that needs to be done is put into a logical system that you know you can rely on. This system does not mean the head.
  • For each input (everything that somehow comes in is called input) a consistent decision is made.

Everything must therefore be brought into the system, otherwise the mind is occupied with it and is not free; only if the system is reliable, the subconscious mind trusts this system and does not constantly remind you of what actually needs to be done (and usually at a time when you can’t work on it at all).

So it is quite salutary to first take stock and write down everything that needs to be done. Often they are also obligations that you have imposed on yourself. Here it is important to clarify what the obligation is and what needs to be done to be able to fulfil it. At the same time, it is important how the commitments are written down: besides result-oriented thinking, the most important factor is to write down the next step that needs to be taken. For example, don’t change tires, but call the workshop for an appointment for a tire change. In other words, to-do lists should not be a collection of matters, but rather work steps to be performed.

I was particularly fascinated by the process, which Allen offers for free download as a PDF on his website. Because the first obstacle that has to be overcome is the decision as to what it actually is, what has just come in as input, to grasp: Can you even carry out an action with it? Is it something that could be of value now? Sometime? Depending on what the answer is, there is a decision and an action to be taken. This process alone allows me to work through my desk and my e-mail inbox within a very short time. No more panic or a guilty conscience that somewhere between the mails or the stacks of paper there is an important piece of information or a building block of my project that could trip me up in the next moment.

This is just a brief outline of the GTD system. Anyone who complains about too much work and stress is recommended to read the German edition with the somewhat awkwardly translated title Wie ich die Dinge geregelt kriege, which costs less than 10 euros on Amazon.

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Productivity aid: Creating notes from books and magazines

Sometimes it’s the little tricks and tricks that increase your productivity, and that’s how I felt about this “life hack“, as its inventor Phil Gyford calls it. After reading about it on 43 folders last week, I bought large post-it notes, stuck some of them behind the cover of a book, stuck one on the opposite side of the text I was reading, wrote my notes on what I read, stuck full-written post-it notes on the last page and took a new piece of paper from the front. No extra notepad to carry with you (on which you make other notes in between anyway, so that the notes on the book are fragmented); all you need is the book with a stack of sticky notes and a pen. Once you have read through the book, you can take out the notes, stick them next to your monitor and digitize what you have written. The large Post-It notes cost about 80 cents and are a sensible investment for me for people who have to write down what they have read so that they don’t forget it.