8 Great Uses of a Snow Day (Or Other "Found Time")

My former boss used to talk about the wonderful feeling brought about by "found time."  Found time is when you unexpectedly gain free time -- because of a cancelled meeting or a postponed lunch date -- and get to decide how to use it.   As over-scheduled as most of us are, a few hours of found time can feel pretty luxurious.

Much of the East Coast is getting some found time this week in the form of a snow day (or three).  Why not make the most of it? While I wouldn't suggest doing ALL of these things in one day -- after all, you should relax -- I guarantee that taking on two or three of these activities will make you feel more energetic and accomplished than, say, a whole day spent watching HGTV (ahem).

1. Do one task you've been putting off. Crossing something off your list will feel so good, you might even be inspired to do something else. For me, this will be finding out how to change the address on my driver's license.  I moved two years ago, so I expect that finally doing this will feel pretty good!
2. Plan your charitable giving for the coming year. Many of us only make donations at the end of the calendar year or when disaster motivates us to give.  But nonprofits need our generosity year-round for the work they do day in and day out.  Think about how much you are able to donate this year, and consider donating now or in installments over the course of the year.
3. Pick a small area to declutter. What space in your environment aggravates you, embarrasses you, or slows you down? It could be your desk drawer or your sock drawer, the pile on the kitchen table or that black hole where you toss instruction manuals.    Pick a manageable area that you can declutter in an hour or less, and get it done.
4. Check in with your New Year's resolutions. It's February: how are those resolutions going?  It's okay to refine your resolutions or  drop one altogether.  Just be intentional about it!  If you did any end-of-year reflection, revisit your notes from that process.  What's changed already since 2010 began?
5. Do a brain dump. When was the last time you got everything off your mind?  Sit down for 15 minutes and write down everything that is taking up your attention right now - from upcoming birthdays to grocery lists to the broken dining room chair.  Then, identify the next action needed on each item, and put it in your trusted system (a sure-fire process brought to you by David Allen).
6. Create something. Make soup from scratch, build a shelf, assemble homemade Valentines, crochet a scarf for your dog.  There is little as satisfying as creating something from start to finish in one sitting.  Short projects provide instant gratification and don't hang over your head like that sweater you started knitting two years ago.
7. Set a date.  Not to get married (though a blizzard engagement would make a nice story) but to get together with that person you've been meaning to see.  Look at your calendar, find three dates that would work for lunch or for coffee, and suggest to that long-neglected colleague/cousin/college buddy that you finally get some face-time.
8. Write down ideas for how you'd like to use your next block of found time and put your list in a find-able place.

Bonus activity: Subscribe to my blog, via the email box on the top right, or by pasting www.studentofchange.com in your feed reader of choice (I use Google Reader).

What are your favorite uses for found time?  If you have a snow day today, how will you use it?

It's 2010. Do You Know How Many Emails Are In Your Inbox?

The new year presents an opportunity to revolutionize your relationship with email.  Many of us allow email to pile up and overwhelm us in a way that we would never permit to happen with physical clutter.

The good news is it's not that hard to develop healthier email habits.  Here are some ways to start: Start treating your email inbox like an inbox -- not a filing cabinet, calendar or reminder system. Would you keep 10,000 messages on your voicemail if you could?  Or allow five years worth of information to pile up in your physical inbox?  It's probably not the greatest idea to use your email inbox in this manner either.

The key to an inbox -- any inbox --  is that things come in, and are regularly processed out.  About a year ago, I went from 36,000 emails in my work inbox to ZERO.  Productivity guy Merlin Mann has written and spoken about how to do this -- his system is called -- wait for it -- Inbox Zero.

Unsubscribe from junk mail clutter. As a Gmail user, I find that I get very little spam.  Most of the "junk mail" I get is from lists I actually signed up for but no longer care about, or from one-time purchases that enrolled me in a lifetime of sale alerts.

Treat this stuff like what it is -- clutter -- and purge it.  Rather than ignoring or deleting each message as it comes in, open it, scroll down to the teensy-tiny print at the bottom of the message and hit "unsubscribe." And, when you make online purchases, think twice about opting-in to sale notices and updates.

Use your own email habits to lead by example. Hate getting work emails at 11:30 PM on a Sunday night?  Stop sending them yourself.  Your colleagues build their expectations about your availability based on how available you make yourself.  Most things can wait until morning.  Others will catch on.

Be intentional about checking your email. If you are being interrupted by the "ding" of incoming email every five minutes, you are allowing yourself to be interrupted about a 100 times during your work day.  Try turning off your automatic email notification for a couple of hours, for a day, or for good.

Check your email when you actually have the time and head-space to process what you'll find in your inbox, and when it won't serve as a distraction from the work you are doing.

What are your best strategies for keeping email under control?

My GTD Year in Review

This time last December, I was working in an office crammed with stuff.  Conference programs, old speeches, copies of travel receipts, notebooks brimming with ideas from half a decade ago, and drafts of reports long-ago published were filed and piled around me.  I wasn’t a hoarder – I just considered stacking things to be a valid organizing system. Since I was generally able to find what I needed when I needed it, I didn't consider myself disorganized.  Psychologically, my stacks served as a symbol of the important work that I was doing – work so important that it kept piling up and didn’t wait for me to get around to filing it.

At the same time, I knew my stacks weren’t really doing me any favors.  They took up valuable real estate on my desk, limiting my ability to spread out when I needed to do “big thinking” on projects. Occasionally I would fail to do something or be somewhere because the information I needed was buried and forgotten in a stack. I would sort through my stacks, filing and shredding from time to time, but the stacks never went away.  They were weighing me down.

Enter David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, recommended to me by a number of trusted colleagues.  GTD is a system for collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing all of the “stuff” that comes into our lives.  Though there are many different products & commentaries on GTD, the place to start is David Allen’s book, which is a cheap and quick read.

I embarked on the first stage of GTD during the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  For five days, I went through every piece of paper, every receipt and takeout menu. Armed with a label-maker, a stack of fresh file folders, and an inbox, I followed David Allen’s instructions and began to bring order to my office.  By the first week of 2009, I was back to work with an organized workspace and a new system in place.

My desk and my mind clear of clutter, I was able to clarify my priorities and take care of first things first.  Trusting that every email, meeting request, or task I agreed to do would be captured and processed in my system, I was able to shed the nagging feeling that something was falling through the cracks.   My follow-through on the commitments I made radically improved, and I developed peace of mind that I was doing what I should be doing at any given moment.

This summer, as I prepared to shift from full-time office worker to full-time student and part-time consultant, I brought GTD more fully into my home.  I set up a home office and have maintained a zero-tolerance policy on stacks of papers.  The only place that papers are allowed to pile up is in my inbox (which gets regularly emptied), meaning that on more days than not, my desk actually looks like the picture above.

I now allow myself the time to do the regular maintenance that I need to keep my work, and my life, moving in the direction I want to be going.  When I wasn’t giving regular attention to all of the things that needed attending to, stuff quite literally stacked up. I used to feel that I couldn’t afford to spend time “organizing” – work and life moved too fast.  Now I realize that I can’t afford not to.

This is not to say that life feels totally under control and my time spent is always aligned with my priorities – far from it. But GTD has helped me develop a “new normal” for myself.  And this calm, organized normal feels a lot better than the overwhelming stacks of unaddressed stuff I was living with before.

Free Getting Things Done (GTD) Resources

In the future I'll probably write about Getting Things Done (GTD, for short), David Allen's bestselling book about productivity and stress reduction.  I am a huge fan -- not a day goes by that I don't actively use GTD's core principles. The best place to start with GTD is to read the book, which costs about $10 and is a quick and engaging read.

Once you're ready to learn more, check out this list of free GTD resources available from the David Allen Company.