Quickly getting things done

Much of the challenge today is in getting things done quickly. With the inclusion of technology in our lives although many aspects of work and life have been eased, yet the global population is still striving at productivity.

With zillions of productivity themized software and applications for your desktop, laptop, mobile the struggle is still on. What could be the reason? To me its more to do with what we want get done.

In my observation we end up taking up tasks that are too demanding, labourious, time consuming and at best having a lot of dependencies. Be it the prodution of courses that I do for a living or be it simply having a social life and netwroking. In real, we have without realizing increased the volume of things that we wish to get done without realizing that the burden of deadlines that we set on them is generally unrealistic.

Some of this is also because we have lost or at best overlooked the ability to view the world the and its dynamics the way it should be. In an environment when we are talking of social networking and collaboration we are failing to see the real meaning of these words and absorbing less and less of the concept behind them.

I found this good video on the YouTube on time and how we are oriented to it and the way it primarily determines how we function.


What is important to learn from the video is how we get to focus on things that we undertake. Close friends and well wishers tell me all the time that I canstart something but lose out on it cause I fail to finish it. Its true in a way not only for me but for several people. One main reason is the shifting sand of priority that we attach to our daily tasks. What was high priority yesterday is not a priority today but something else is. And we shift our focus and attention. And merely add to to factors of our ever growing list of stress factors.

What should we do? We can make use of the PCF tool. Its a simple way of categorizing the tasks that we have in our kitty to manage them more effectively and likewise make ourselves more productive and have that stress move away from our system.

PCF is short for Past (tasks), Current (tasks) and Future (tasks). Typically its suggested that the sum of future tasks should be 70% of the total task list. In other words, total PCF task should stand in the ratio of 30:70. How to calculate this? Its simple really.

Here is a sample:

Total Tasks = 10
Past Tasks = 1
Current = 2
Future Tasks = 7

Formula = Sum of (past tasks + current tasks) : (Total Future Tasks)

The idea is to have ZERO past tasks; and only future and current tasks.

As a closing thought TOYOTA uses this very effectively.