Productivity Tips – #9 Bonus Tip: using 4D and 6D

This blog post first appeared back in March – a precursor to the series of posts about Productivity that I have been posting in recent weeks. I thought it would be useful to post it again as a bonus tip to conclude this series. I am going to turn these 9 posts into a booklet about productivity in the coming weeks. Will post here when it is available.

4D

Over the years I have adapted a number of techniques to help me to increase my productivity. The inspiration for these two techniques comes from the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.

In the book, Allen is really clear about how to clear our inbox of email so that it becomes a useful tool for our work, rather than a dumping ground or glorified filing cabinet. You will probably have heard of the concept of inbox to zero. This idea comes from this concept. We shouldn’t leave things lying around in our inbox. That’s the theory anyway. Of course, that works well when there is a steady flow of emails and we have ample time to deal with them. It all starts to unravel when we are busy for a day and don’t have time to check our email, or the volume suddenly surges. Whatever the reason, at times like this we begin to slide into indecision. The priority becomes finding the key emails that we MUST reply to. Everything else starts to pile up in the inbox.

Then, it becomes really easy to just keep dipping in and out of our email, not really focusing on anything else. This is where the 4D technique comes in. It’s really important (as I’ve said in earlier posts) not to keep looking at email every time something comes in. That just causes too much distraction. Find the optimal number of times for checking email – it may be twice a day, early in the day and towards the end.

Then, to optimise the time we commit – maybe half an hour – make sure that we are applying the following 4 options to what to do next:

• Do it (if it takes less than two minutes)
• Defer it to your task list
• Delegate it (if you have people to delegate to)
• Delete it

Being this ruthless about every email allows us to process large numbers of emails at speed. For the emails that need to be deferred, I have an action folder to send them to so that they don’t stay around in my inbox.

Nothing that is processed should stay in the inbox.

6D

That process will work for sorting the email inbox, but one thing it will also do is swell the task list with things that take longer than 2 minutes. Potentially we are now creating another space for procrastination. Sitting down at the start of the day with a huge task list can be daunting. Like the rabbit in the car headlights we can easily become frozen, unable to tackle the volume of stuff that faces us.

One key issue here is to ensure that we are being clear about what is important and what is urgent. That helps us to sort through and get to the things that we should be doing.

But there will always be tasks that are piling up and really need doing. This is where the 6D technique comes in. Sitting down with a pile of tasks on a list, we apply the 6D approach:

• Do it now if it’s a short task
• Do 5 minutes on it to get it started
• Defer it to the diary and book in time to do it
• Determine what it is (sometimes we put vague things on the task list and don’t really know what we need to do)
• Delegate it
• Delete it (has the time passed? Is it still relevant?)

Using these 6 steps to look at each task can really help to tidy up the task list and get us moving again. Let me know what you think of these techniques. They have served me well, and may work for you. Or you may want to adapt them to your own particular circumstances.