Matthew Lang

A question prompted by Nicholas Bate in his Jagged Thoughts for Jagged Times series.

In the New World of Work the relentless quest to get us to communicate and communicate now, most forcefully illustrated with the increasing provision and use of so-called productivity tools such as instant messanging means there is no time to think.

And therefore there is little of worth to communicate.

I've highlighted that last section as it's got me thinking again about the value of Twitter.

I'm finding it difficult to warrant my time spent on Twitter. I rarely do anything on Twitter these days. My biggest gripe is that to gain any kind of audience you need to take part more. Which in turn means tweeting on a more frequent basis. Yet I don't like just throwing anything out there unless it has some thought to it. I could tweet more often but is it worth it? Am I just adding more noise?

Trello is a great tool for managing projects and products. Before we dig deep into Trello though I'm going to do a quick overview of what Trello is and how it works.

Trello revolves around three concepts. Boards, lists and cards. Before we move on further we need to understand what a board is. If we think of a board as a physical object then it's best to think of a Trello board as a drawing pin board. You know those boards you see in schools and universities that display announcements? That's exactly what a Trello board is. It's a place for a collection of related information. This sounds a bit vague but Trello isn't a tool used for a specific purpose.

On the board we can create lists that span the board. You can create as many lists as you need but it helps to keep the number of lists to a handful. By doing this you can fit the whole board in most of the screen sizes you use. Too many lists results in some lists being off-screen and you need to scroll to get to these. Call me lazy but that just seems like such a chore.

Finally there are cards.

These represent individual items of work. It could be a task, a feature, a todo list or a prompt of some kind. The card themselves contain a title and a description. They can also contain checklists, attachments and comments.

This is the basics of the Trello board. We didn't touch on features like calendars, email settings and labels, that's for tomorrow. It helps to have an understanding of the basic building blocks of Trello. It's just three concepts but it helps to understand these before going deeper into Trello.

With our business health guide Nicholas Bate.

Love the artwork on the front wheel.

via Javi Ballestero

On a side note, Fixie Friday has been scaled back to the first Friday of each month. It's been hard finding new fixie builds lately. It still hasn't diminished my love for fixed gear bikes though.

This is it. The last part of the Grass Roots Productivity process. Doing the work. Unfortunately there’s no quick fixes or hacks to this one. You either do the work or you don’t.

It doesn’t need to be as black and white as that though. There are things you can do to help you have a productive day. I always come back to Peter Bregman’s book, 18 minutes. He has a simple rule for getting something done.

If you really want to get something done, decide when and where you are going to do it.

— 18 minutes by Peter Bregman

When you decide where and when you’re going to do something you add structure to your day. This structure leads to a plan day for the day is more manageable. If you’re like me then the location will rarely change for most of your work. Time though is one thing that's a big impact on our day. So decide when you want to do a task so that you can split your day into more manageable chunks.

I’ve tried in the past to pick off items from the top of the list at the start of the day. This is the wrong thing to do. It often leads to confusion and the wrong things getting done at the wrong time. I’ve learned now that scheduling actions into my calendar ahead of time is a better way to get things done.

Doing the work is all about self discipline and honesty.

Discipline yourself so that you do the work set before you. Schedule in your calendar the tasks that matter. For every one task that needs to be done, there's four other that could be done. Never mind the other four and focus on the one.

And when it comes to reviewing your progress, be honest with yourself. If you could have done better then aim to improve your work and your progress on the next block of work.

This is the step where many people falter when it comes to using a process, but only you can make it work. So do yourself a favour and do the work.