Do you ever feel a little overwhelmed - or a lot? Do the mountains of to-do’s seem overwhelming or the projects seem daunting?

Sanity comes from being able to maintain productivity in highly demanding environments. If you wonder about the magic of how people take on huge projects and complete them so effortlessly, there is a simple secret:

Take it apart and distill the “goal” or “project” down into easily achievable parts or milestones. This has two overall positive results:

1. Sense of accomplishment: You feel like you are really in a zone of productivity when you can check off item after item you have completed.
2. Ensures project success: By completing each milestone you take one step close to completing your quest and diffuse possible obstacles to success.

However, one key component of the “break-down” is that you maintain your milestones in relation to your overall vision. That is, all of your roads (milestones) must lead you to Rome (your goal).

You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing the small things, so that the small things go in the right direction. - Alivin Toffler

All too often, in a project and in life, we allow ourselves to lose focus of our vision and focus on the problems at hand. This causes us to replace our original goal with a smaller much less meaningful goal that was originally a milestone - a  stepping stone in our project.

Only when we practice overcoming our milestone tasks in the context of achieving our grander plan, do we truly progress towards a path of accomplishment.

PS - a friend of mine over at KnowTheNetwork had some tips.

What tips do you have?

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Corey Smith got me thinking about process and procedure. I thought about this a while and this is what I came up with in summary. Short, sweet, and to the point.

I suppose procedure was intended to franchise process, but as we all know franchises have never been credited with creativity - just pure productivity.

So which do you prefer, procedure or process? Creativity or productivity?

David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, has become quite legendary in technology circles as almost a de facto bible of “how-to’s” on being productive and organized.

I have picked this book up for the second time because my life needs another injection of organization - and SANITY…

I have added the link in my sidebar, for those of you interested in what I’m presently reading.

It has been about 2 years since I read the book, and ironically I never finished the book. It’s OK, you can chuckle now.

I got to the last section of the book and stopped. I was supposed to “git ‘r dun” but I realized I had to work on some fundamentals recommended in part 1 and 2 before I could really take on the final section.

So, I embark upon a bold new journey - not to follow this as a religion, but to pick-up just another few tips to help me stay sane and hopefully stay nimble in my responsiveness.

I must confess, I am already encouraged; as I was reading the introduction, David confessed this book was the culmination of 20 years worth of trial and error, and scientific study “in the trenches”. That tells me learning these tips and tricks is not magic. They do take some training and dedication.

Well, I’m off. Wish me luck, and I do encourage you to pick-up a copy and give it a read. It has some really wonderful ideas.

For those of you who are interested as well, David Allen has just released the sequel to this book, Making It All Work. I’m putting the link in ”My Amazon Picks in the sidebar.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

When are you most [tag]productive?[/tag] Do you find yourself battling 7 fires at once with a [tag]BlackBerry[/tag] in 1 hand while talking into your [tag]bluetooth[/tag] headset, typing a reply to a friend over IM with another hand, and nodding vigorously at someone standing in your doorway? Is multi-tasking a term that applies to people slower than you?

[tag]Robert Scoble[/tag] posted a nice short blog on the subject, and it was a breath of fresh air coming from some I consider a tad bit insane to stay as connected as he does. What did Robert have to say on the subject?

Want to get something done? Turn off [tag]Twitter[/tag]. Turn off [tag]Facebook[/tag]. Turn off [tag]blog[/tag] comments. Turn off [tag]FriendFeed[/tag]. Turn off [tag]Flickr[/tag]. Turn off [tag]YouTube[/tag]. Turn off [tag]Dave Winer[/tag]’s blog and [tag]Huffington Post[/tag]. Turn off [tag]TechMeme[/tag].

Turn off the distractions.

Today, people are guilty of allowing their attention to be distracted in too many different ways. If it isn’t normal mass media consumption like television, music, or games it’s the business media consumption like [tag]e-mail[/tag], smart [tag]PDA[/tag]’s, and Instant Messaging.

Robert points to “attention management” as being the key. You have to simply choose your goals for the day reasonably. If you know you always have emergencies come up in the day, plan that time in.

A friend told me that he always over-budgets his time by 20%. That may sound like a too much padding, but if you think of the time it takes your mind to shift gears so many times, it really isn’t. Have you ever finished a day where you felt like there was a lot going - you were doing ’stuff’ - but you looked back and really didn’t get anything accomplished?

So here’s my favorite quote from this article: Linda Stone coined the term, “”continuous partial attention” which describes the kind of world we live in…”

Are you a victim of productivity pollution? How do you get clean and stay clean? For all you Twitterheads out there, get David Allen’s book Getting Things Done.

I just ran across this post shared by [tag]Veronica Belmont[/tag], posted by [tag]Merlin Mann[/tag], via [tag]Dan Saffer[/tag], and originally written by the Mercury News… (what a trail of breadcrumbs). It suggests going topless to meetings to be more productive…

Frustrated by distracted workers so plugged in that they tune out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going “topless,” as in no [tag]laptops[/tag] allowed. Also banned from some conference rooms: [tag]BlackBerrys[/tag], [/tag]iPhones[tag] and other personal devices on which so many have come to depend…

What a concept - unplug to really get connected to the people you interact with.