Stress-free productivity does exist

Everyone likes tools. Tools excite us. They empower us. They slow us down. A tool that is not sharp doesn’t allow you to do so much. A very sharp tool allows you to stab yourself.

Have you ever seen on Twitter or Facebook a comment that you would like to discuss, but you have not done so because there are a lot of people supporting it with retweets and likes?

You may have already noticed that we don’t all function in the same way. What might work for you doesn’t suit your co-worker. Similarly, you may find irrelevant some of the methods others use. The way in which each of us think, learn, communicate, process information, carry out actions or make decisions greatly influences one’s personal productivity.

Whenever a FacileThings user cancels his subscription, or simply doesn’t renew it, I try to find out the reasons. If they answer my email and the reason is something that is not working properly, or it’s not easily understood or they just don’t like it, it becomes an opportunity for me to improve the service and avoid that other users end up with the same (bad) experience. However, one of the most usual answers I get is something like “using the application meant doing things in a different way than I am used to”.

In GTD we name those things we have captured and are still not processed as “stuff”. And we do it on purpose, to denote their abstract nature, since we haven’t yet paused to think what they really are—although we may have a preconceived idea. Then, when you are processing or clarifying your stuff, the key question is “Is there any action required?”