Systems of Doing

Some of us love a good system or procedure by which to run our lives, whilst others tend to approach life and its daily tasks a little more organically.

Not only are we all different, but often the different seasons in life call for different approaches to ensure we achieve all we set out to do.

It’s not uncommon for us to discuss a specific method of productivity in All Stitched Up!, in fact most recently we unpacked the Pomodoro Technique in issue #302. This week, however, we’re going to touch on a number of different systems and point you in the direction of where you can find more information if it sounds like the one for you.

It was Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s article, ‘Is there a Perfect Productivity System?’, that not only reminded us of some techniques we’d heard about before, but also introduced some we were not yet familiar with. Whilst it would be an impossible task to list all the productivity methods out there, Anne looked at the ones that are currently the most popular, encouraging the reader to either follow one in its entirety, or design their own system from a combination of two or more.

Getting Things Done | Created by David Allen, the GTD system encourages you to create a list of everything that’s on your mind; break the tasks down into manageable steps; categorise and prioritise the tasks; continually reflect on and refine the tasks accordingly; engage in the doing of actually getting your task list done. David’s TED talk is the ideal place to find out more.

Zen to Done | Unlike the GTD system, ZTD focuses on a single habit at a time. It’s creator, Leo Babauta, based the method around his philosophy that, ‘It’s about the habits and the doing, not the system or the tools.’ There’s even the Minimal ZTD for those who like to keep things as simple as possible.

The Eisenhower Matrix | Got a task list so long you don’t know where to start?! The Eisenhower Matrix may be just for you as it helps you to prioritise your tasks based on whether they are urgent and important; important but not urgent; urgent but not important; neither urgent nor important. Once those decisions are made, you can then decide whether the task gets done now, is scheduled to be completed later, is delegated to someone else or simply deleted from your list.

The Moscow Method | Another way to prioritise tasks is to create a list of all your tasks, then categorise them as must, should, could or won’t. The musts get done today; the shoulds are important but can wait until tomorrow if necessary; coulds are not urgent, but we should tackle them if possible; the won’t tasks simply need to be deleted from our lists.

Although the methods listed above are but a few Anne unpacked in her article, the moral of her story was that once we’ve ‘explored the principles behind several productivity systems, (we) can extract the aspects that will fit the way (we) work.’

What about you? Have you found the one ‘perfect’ system of productivity for your needle and thread that fits you like a glove, or have you created your own through a combination of different methods?

We’d love you to email news@inspirationsstudos.com and let us know the productivity hacks you use… and you never know, we might just incorporate your hack into our lives because we need all the assistance we can get to help us get through everything on our seemingly never-ending Stitching To Do Lists!