Over­think­ing, analy­sis paral­y­sis, brood­ing, reflect­ing, delib­er­at­ing — what­ever you call it, it’s the neme­sis to pro­duc­tiv­ity. Have you con­sid­ered using a pro­duc­tiv­ity sys­tem such as David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), but you feel over­whelmed and par­a­lyzed before get­ting started? Do you debate whether the sys­tem is right for you? GTD works great for many peo­ple and they swear by it, and oth­ers believe it’s too com­plex or lim­its their creativity.

Pro­duc­tiv­ity sys­tems should be based on per­sonal moti­va­tion, needs, and objec­tives. It’s impor­tant to find the sys­tem or tool that’s right for you — and some­times this means start­ing small or invent­ing your own sys­tem by using a vari­ety of best prac­tices. And if you find you’re spend­ing more time man­ag­ing your sys­tem than get­ting things done, it’s time to sim­plify or re-think it.

To help you get started with the basics, we’ve cre­ated this quick sum­mary. Keep read­ing to be up and run­ning with­out the over­head and expense of a heavy pro­duc­tiv­ity sys­tem — no sem­i­nars or train­ing ses­sions — just prac­ti­cal advice.

1. Cap­ture Everything

Pro­duc­tiv­ity gurus, such as David Allen, have coined the term “ubiq­ui­tous cap­ture” for the prac­tice of cap­tur­ing every­thing. The idea here is to always carry some sort of tool to cap­ture ideas, to-do, mes­sages, dia­grams, notes, etc. because we sim­ply can’t remem­ber every­thing. There’s sev­eral tools for cap­tur­ing these items from a sim­ple note­book, index cards, a jour­nal, a note-taking app, to an all-in-one orga­ni­za­tion app, such as Life­Topix. This is fun­da­men­tal to pro­duc­tiv­ity suc­cess, and it also helps you remem­ber and act on your spon­ta­neous cre­ative ideas.

We rec­om­mend to go even fur­ther, and cat­e­go­rize these items. Asso­ciate these items to their value — whether it is emo­tional, strate­gic, cre­ative, tac­ti­cal, health-related, etc. This will help you deter­mine their impor­tance within your life.

2. Under­stand “Impor­tance” vs.“Urgency”

Know­ing what’s impor­tant, rather than urgent is essen­tial to move the nee­dle for­ward. For exam­ple, imag­ine you’re in charge of Engi­neer­ing at a large cor­po­ra­tion and there’s a need to develop an inno­v­a­tive, new plat­form that’s a gamechanger in the indus­try. You know this project is an essen­tial ele­ment to suc­cess. If you’re a leader and you ignore this objec­tive and instead jump on small tac­ti­cal improve­ments, you’re putting urgency ahead of impor­tance. Or per­haps, you’re a mom rais­ing young chil­dren. You may feel that it’s urgent to vac­uum your house every day, but the impor­tance of read­ing books to your chil­dren will cer­tainly pay off in the long term.

Sched­ul­ing unin­ter­rupted time every day, week, or month to knock out these big projects will help you move the nee­dle to achieve your most impor­tant goals and objectives.

3. Break Big Projects into Tasks

Mark Twain wrote, “The secret of get­ting ahead is get­ting started. The secret of get­ting started is break­ing your com­plex over­whelm­ing tasks into small man­age­able tasks, and then start­ing on the first one.” This seems obvi­ous, but many of us fail to break these big projects down into man­age­able, action­able tasks — and the result is procrastination.

Large projects seem daunt­ing and it’s dif­fi­cult to get started. For exam­ple, imag­ine you’re plan­ning a pool party and you need to pre­pare the swim­ming pool for the event. Per­haps you’re hav­ing a hard time get­ting started. To fully under­stand the scope of the project, the tasks you can del­e­gate, the length of the project, and the tasks you can let slide, it’s impor­tant to break the project into man­age­able chunks.

After break­ing up the project into tasks, it might look some­thing like this:

Project — Pre­pare Pool for Party

• Treat pool with chemicals
• Back­wash pool
• Vac­uum pool furniture
• Pow­er­wash pool deck
• Net pool
• Fix vol­ley­ball net
• Vac­uum pool
• Sweep pool deck
• Lay out towels
• Fix bas­ket­ball hoop

When you con­sider every­thing that needs to be com­pleted for the entire party, this list gives you the infor­ma­tion to make smart deci­sions about out­sourc­ing, del­e­gat­ing, and let­ting some tasks fall to the wayside.

4. Pri­or­i­tize Your To-do Lists

A to-do list is a list of tasks to com­plete within a spe­cific period of time. The most impor­tant items should be listed first. Project man­age­ment pro­fes­sion­als rec­om­mend apply­ing the 80/20 rule or “Pareto Prin­ci­ple” to many ele­ments of busi­ness — includ­ing your to-do lists. In the early 1900s, Ital­ian econ­o­mist Vil­fredo Pareto cre­ated a math­e­mat­i­cal for­mula that described the unequal dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth in his coun­try. He observed that approx­i­mately twenty per­cent of the peo­ple ruled eighty per­cent of the country’s wealth. In the 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran, a man­age­ment con­sul­tant, attrib­uted the 80/20 Rule to Pareto, call­ing it the Pareto Principle.

When apply­ing the Pareto Prin­ci­ple to pro­duc­tiv­ity, it reminds us to stay focused on what mat­ters the most. For exam­ple, con­sider the above exam­ple for prepar­ing the swim­ming pool. Using the Pareto Prin­ci­ple, the­o­ret­i­cally, approx­i­mately two of those tasks are of high value. If you choose to com­plete those two tasks, you’ll get a much big­ger return than if you’ve com­pleted sev­eral of the lower value tasks.

5. Keep Every­thing in One Place

What­ever tool you choose, make sure you cap­ture every­thing in one place. It’s impor­tant to use one app or plat­form that’s the hub or sin­gle point of access for all of your data. With­out this, you’re wast­ing time locat­ing the infor­ma­tion you need. For exam­ple, if you’re using five dif­fer­ent iPad apps for your pro­duc­tiv­ity sys­tem that aren’t inte­grated or asso­ci­ated, your con­stantly search­ing for infor­ma­tion and the data is pre­sented out of con­text. When data isn’t related, it’s dif­fi­cult to locate trends, such as a rela­tion­ship between prac­tic­ing med­i­ta­tion and improved productivity.

6. Sched­ule Using a Calendar

A cal­en­dar is best suited for time-based items, such as appoint­ments and events; and many pro­duc­tiv­ity experts believe that to-do lists should be kept sep­a­rate from your cal­en­dar. Using a com­bi­na­tion of both a cal­en­dar and a to-do list is ideal because they serve dif­fer­ent pur­poses. Your tool should allow you to cre­ate a to-do list sep­a­rately from your cal­en­dar, but present it on your cal­en­dar if you choose to do so.

Another tac­tic for using your cal­en­dar effi­ciently is to block off time for focus­ing on your tasks or projects. When col­leagues sched­ule meet­ings, they will see that you’ve blocked off that time. Make the most of it — keep a jour­nal to help iden­tify the pro­duc­tive times of the day and sched­ule these blocks of time to com­plete your list of to-dos. These pro­duc­tive times can be based on your children’s nap times, your nat­ural rhythms, the slower times of the day at the office, or other envi­ron­men­tal factors.

7. Reduce Distractions

There’s many ways to reduce dis­trac­tions, but they vary depend­ing on your life. If you’re at home and rais­ing chil­dren, man­ag­ing dis­trac­tions might be more dif­fi­cult because the day can be quite unpre­dictable. Regard­less of your sit­u­a­tion, jour­nal­ing to learn the nat­ural rhythm of the day will help you find the best times for work­ing on your projects. Dur­ing this time, if your sit­u­a­tion allows it, turn off the phone ringer, shut down email and social media noti­fi­ca­tions, and resist from surf­ing the Inter­net or watch­ing tele­vi­sion. Focus for 90 to 120 min­utes, and take a 20 minute break. See our post about Ultra­dian Rhythms for more information.

If you work from home, make sure you work in a quiet, soli­tary place. Con­sider if you’re out of sight, you’re also out of mind and less likely to be inter­rupted by fam­ily mem­bers and pets. At the office, shut your door or wear head­phones to sig­nal that dis­trac­tions aren’t accept­able. Let your cowork­ers know when you’re not avail­able for dis­cus­sions or socializing.

We hope this helps to get you started with a pro­duc­tiv­ity sys­tem in no time. Please com­ment and let us know your top tips for get­ting up and run­ning quickly.