A new year, which has already been there for about 3 weeks, now gives me the opportunity to set some goals. While you could also do this on another date, the New Year seems to be the perfect timing for New years resolutions.

I didn’t document my shipping list for 2010 so I can’t do a retrospective, but I’ll not make that mistake twice. So for all my loved ones, all people that know me, and also all readers of my blog I will have a shipping list for 2011. But it will be a SMART Shipping List. SMART stands for

While I know not my whole shipping list will be SMART, I’ll try to create an as SMART as possible list.

Participate more in the SharePoint Community

By creating blog posts, tweeting, present at the BIWUG. This is a continuous process and is easily measurable by the number of blog posts and presentations I delivered. I would like to present the first time at the BIWUG before the summer holiday.

Find and have more peace of mind.

While I understand and realize this is a really difficult objective, I have put it on the SSL. I would really like to have more peace of mind, and need to rebalance my work life with my family life. This will not be easy since I will participate more in the community and insist on participate more in my family life. I’ll know when I have more peace of mind when I’m more relaxed, happy in life and not too stressed. And I would like to reach this by what I will (try to) ship in 2011 Valentine’s Day.

Lose some weight and do more sport.

I would like to weight around 73 to 74 kg again (that’s about 161 lb). My current weight is around 76 kg (167.5 lb) now. To get that result I’ll eat healthier and will start running again. This year will not be a marathon-running year, but I would like to set a good time for 10 km (6.2 Miles) by September. And that good time would be around 50 minutes.

Get certified CMAS 2* diver

There is a relation with the previous objective and this one. Although you don’t need a real good condition, I see that if I look at a lot of other scuba divers, I’m pretty sure that it will help. My target date to have the certification is September, but I must assure myself that I’m a 2* worthy before summer holidays.

Read more books.

This year I would like to read 1 book every 3 weeks. I might read more, at least that’s what I hope, but I set the limit of 1 book per 3 weeks to have a achievable objective. I consider audiobooks also as a book and since commute quite a lot (about 3 times a week for 2,5 hours), this seems like an achievable target.

Do a SharePoint 2010 project.

While I’m working on a very interesting project at this time (preparing the global deployment and starting up SharePoint governance) in the chemical sector, I would like to do a SharePoint 2010 project. The timeline is very clear, it has to be this year, and I mean to start it, not to deliver it.

Get back on the GTD train, be more productive.

While I am convinced that GTD (Getting Things Done®) is a very good system to manage my actions, I fall of the train regularly. This year should be the year that I stay on board and actually become a good GTD practitioner. I’ll do my best to stay on board by rigorously do my weekly review since I discovered this is my weak point. I’ll perform the weekly review every Friday after lunch. A part of this weekly review is cleaning up inboxes, so an extra sub-objective is to achieve on a regular base #inboxzero.

 Use Bing as a default search engine.

While Google rocked for ages, Bing seems to be a good alternative. So starting this week, I am using Bing as my default search engine. I will force myself to use Bing for at least 1 month.

 

The next step in the process work flow is organize.

You organize everything in a set of lists which you can use to track the items awaiting your attention. It doesn’t matter where this list is. You can have it on a computer, a PDA, IPhone, on paper, on your legs. It doesn’t matter (except for yourself, especially if the list is on your legs :-) ) where you keep these lists, as long as you have it. I’ll provide my setup in a later post.

Next actions

All next actions are gathered in this list. You can (and please do so:-) ) provide a context to these next actions. This context are extra information for how/where/which they can be don, such as :

• In the office
• at the phone
• at the computer
• at the store

An example is at the phone. Imagine you just had a great lunch meeting, but your stomach is demanding more attention and all your blood and power is concentrated to digest your great meal. Maybe this is a good moment to do some phone calls. Some low level, low brainpower phone-calls. Then you take your next action list and filter on the context ‘at the phone’.  The execution of actions is also related to your physical and mental energy. If your energylevel is very low, like you have the thinking peformance of an insect, what do you need to do.. Low level next actions. You can refill your stapler or give your plants in the office some water, or organise your email, or desk. (you can be sure that at a certain moment, when you are full of energy, and need to staple some important documents for and important business criticall meeting you run out of staples … Use your ‘braindead’ moments good :-)

Project

If something you have to complete takes more than 2 next actions, it is  aproject. It might be someway difficult to get used to this idea (it was for me), but it helps a lot. Theses projects should be reviewed regulary to make sure every (current) project has a next action associated with it, and hence can be moved forward.

Waiting for

On this list all actions are stored that have been delegated to someone else. So before you can proceed the project this is tracked in this list and you should check it periodically if an action is due or needs a reminder to be sent.

Someday/Maybe

These are possible later action things. Somethingyou might do, but not now, maybe mater, maybe not.  You might do this someday, but not right now. For example “look for a holiday to Venice” or “learn Microsoft SharePoint development”

The calendar

Your calender is important to keep track of all appointments and commitments. The calendar contains the big stones you can put into a bigg glass. When you fill the glass with big stones, there is still plenty place left to keep filling it with little stones, and eventually with sand. So don’t fill in your calendar for 100% , because you will get interuptions that will mess up your schedule. Don’t plan more then 60% of your day.

What else is on your agenda? Everything that would ‘die’ if you don’t do it at that time. for example deadline driven next actions

 

It has been a while since I blogged something. The main reason is that I was very busy. But being very busy is not a good reason. We will always be busy, all of our lives. I was just caught in the busy-trap. Busy doing what? Well, Iat this moment I am contracted in a large company in the energy market as a Domain Expert SharePoint (since 2008), and I run (with an associate) a company in IT (Retail, business to business). I am also married and have got kids. So what was I actually doing? To be honest, sometimes I didn’t knew what I was doing, or what I was not doing and should be doing. Does this sound familiar?

A long time ago, a good friend of mine named Marcel told be some things about Getting things done and 7 habits of highly effective people. At that moment, I wasn’t ready for that life changing information, so I did absolutely nothing with it.

A few months ago I read Getting things done , ‘The Art of Stress-Free Productivity’ from David Allen. This was that a life changing moment. After reading this book, I started looking on how to implement this in my life. This was definitely not a simple assignment..

Anyhow, these moments were life changing and therefore I will share this very useful information with you :-)

I’ll do my best (and added it as a Next Action to my action list) to post on a daily base something about why this thing matters for me.