The Zen of Results Free E-Book
Personal productivity is one of my passions. As one of my little experiments while I'm out of the office, I put together The Zen of Results E-Book. I turned a slide deck into a PDF to see if it makes it easier to share. It's brief (17 pages) and quick to flip through. More importantly though, it captures the heart of how you can improve your productivity, in a principle and pattern based way. It's a lightweight approach and it's easy to tailor for your situation.
The Approach in a Nutshell
Here's the keys to the approach:
- Scannable outcomes to guide your activities and tasks.
- Life frame to organize and balance the important hot spots in your life.
- Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection to guide your week.
- Daily Outcomes to guide your day.
Thoughts on Productivity
I'm not a fan of productivity for productivity's sake. Instead, I care that I'm working on the right things, I care that the time I spend working, is as efficient and effective as possible. I also care that I can carve out time in a way to achieve work/life balance. I care more about outcomes than activities and I work backwards from the end in mind. To put it another way, I put more emphasis on learning, improving, and enjoying, than simply going through the motions or putting in my time. I'll also add -- I like my downtime and my free time ;)
What The Zen of Results is Based On
I'd like to say it's based on Getting Things Done, but somehow we just never crossed-paths. Instead, it's born from a combination of the school of hard knocks, masters at Microsoft, software development practices, and my mentoring experience. when I first joined Microsoft, I was overwhelmed. I was on a sink or swim team with lots of trials by fire. I wanted to swim. Long story short, I learned from anyone and everyone around me. In fact, I started seeking out people in the company and comparing email practices, storing information, and how to become more effective. I learned a lot.
Software Engineering Meets Project Management Meets Productivity
When I joined patterns & practices some years ago, a few things happened. I had to figure out project management in the context of a competitive environment where the ultimate judge is results. Not just the results of what you produce, but how you produce results. How many dead bodies and what sort of wake do you leave behind?
Meanwhile, Agile was becoming increasingly pervasive and I had the benefit of working with folks like Ward Cunningham and Peter Provost. They taught me lot about the principles and concepts behind Agile. Somewhere along the way, I had figured out how to catalog, manage, and prioritize an endless stream of potential activity from various sources: my teams, my manager, my inbox, my head.
I learned that improving an hour, improved a day, improved a week, improved a month. I learned the value of sharing lessons learned. I learned the value of biting off what you could chew. I learned that it's better to finish what's on your plate and go up for seconds versus overflow your plate up front. I weaved in my timeboxing lessons from performance and my compartmentalizing lessons from security.
I used my lessons from my manager to focus on strengths over weaknesses to keep a high level of energy. Bottom line, the sum is more than the parts, but it's an integration of software development, project management and personal productivity with an emphasis on meaningful work for a meaningful life ... by design (that's my inner engineer talking).
Enjoy!
Comments
Anonymous
December 10, 2008
Nice work, JD. Your passion to do your best, as well as help others reach their potential, is not only outstanding, it's a credit to humanity (was trying to avoid hyperbole, but you're really doing something great here)Anonymous
December 10, 2008
Thanks David! I think I'm on my path and giving my best where I have my best to give ... so it helps keep me going.Anonymous
December 11, 2008
This is great work, thanks for sharing. I'm a big fan of the daily to-do list, and this process looks to be a good extension to my current productivity routine.Anonymous
December 11, 2008
Software Engineering. Project Management. EffectivenessAnonymous
December 11, 2008
@ Kevin Great to hear! I tried to focus on incremental adoption. The sum is more than the parts, but it's easy to adopt a pattern or pactice at a time.Anonymous
December 13, 2008
There's nothing Zen about this. This is completely derivative of Franklin-Covey's time management system.Anonymous
December 13, 2008
@ matt Nothing Zen? It's what you make of it. Mindfulness comes to mind. I'm not an expert on the Franklin-Covey system, but if you say there's a parallel then that I must be on the right track! It reminds me once again - all roads lead to the same place. That's the beauty of focusing on principles, patterns, and practices. I actually expected to hear it's a derivative of Scrum or agile, but I'll take a look at the Franklin-Covey stuff to see if I can figure out a good mapping.Anonymous
December 13, 2008
@ matt Nothing Zen? It's what you make of it. Mindfulness comes to mind. I'm not an expert on the Franklin-Covey system, but if you say there's a parallel then that I must be on the right track! It reminds me once again - all roads lead to the same place. That's the beauty of focusing on principles, patterns, and practices. I actually expected to hear it's a derivative of Scrum or agile, but I'll take a look at the Franklin-Covey stuff to see if I can figure out a good mapping.Anonymous
December 13, 2008
Jason shares how he implements the Zen of Results workflow as well as a dialogue around some stickingAnonymous
December 22, 2008
I tested Evernote with my time management system, The Zen of Results .  Evernote is like ITunesAnonymous
December 31, 2008
This is completely derivative of Franklin-Covey's time management system.Anonymous
December 31, 2008
@ markovich That's the beauty of principle-based solutions. Everybody sees how whatever approach their using fits in. Personally, I just use whatever works in practice.