Create a GTD® Dashboard in Office 365 to Get Things Done #SPBiz15 #SPBiz103
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Slides from the SPBiz Conference presented on June 17, 2015. For more details see: http://wendy-neal.com/2015/06/create-a-gtd-dashboard-in-office-365-to-get-things-done-spbiz15-spbiz103/ Abstract: With today's hectic lifestyles, completing tasks reliably and on time can be a challenge. Wendy will show you how you can build a GTD Dashboard that helps you keep track of all the tasks and projects in all the different areas of your life in one place. Based on GTD (Getting Things Done®) principles, the dashboard will help you focus on only the areas of your life and types of tasks that you need to concentrate on right now, while keeping all the other tasks and clutter hidden from you until you need to see and act on them. This session is perfect for consultants, project managers, executives, small business owners, and really any individual that juggles numerous tasks and projects among multiple areas of focus and are looking for a way to provide some organization and order to the chaos. In this session, you will learn: 1. Basic GTD (Getting Things Done) principles and how to apply them to help you get things done 2. What you need to build your own GTD Dashboard - lists, libraries, views, workflows, etc. 3. How to apply some usability improvements to the forms to enhance the user experience 4. Some tips on integrating email with your GTD Dashboard to achieve the elusive "Inbox Zero"
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Create a GTD® Dashboard in Office 365 to Get Things Done #SPBiz15 #SPBiz103
- 1. Online Conference June 17th and 18th 2015 WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Create a GTD® Dashboard in Office 365 to Get Things Done
- 2. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Wendy Neal McGladrey Email : wendy.neal@outlook.com Twitter : @SharePointWendy Facebook : facebook.com/wendynealblog LinkedIn : linkedin.com/in/wendyneal Google+ : plus.google.com/+WendyNeal Senior SharePoint Consultant Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA Website: • wendy-neal.com Contributing Author: • CMSWire • ITUnity • SharePoint-Community.net Contact Details
- 4. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Agenda Basic Principles of GTD® Components of the GTD Dashboard GTD Dashboard Demo Tips for Achieving “Inbox Zero” 5 minutes 5 minutes 10 minutes 25 minutes
- 6. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Getting Things Done Methodology that teaches you to: • Have more energy • Be more relaxed • Have more clarity and presence in the moment with whatever you’re doing • Get a lot more accomplished with much less effort The art of stress-free productivity By David Allen
- 8. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM The “wrong” way to manage tasks Daily to-do lists are very bad! • Hard to nail down to-do items ahead of time due to constant new input and shifting priorities • If it doesn’t absolutely have to get done that day, it dilutes the emphasis on the things that truly do
- 12. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow Step Description Capture Collect and gather placeholders for ALL the things you consider incomplete (open loops) in your world Clarify Answer questions like “What is it?”, “Is it actionable?” and “What’s the next action?” Organize Place in proper bucket so that action can be taken, it is filed away for reference, or to be reminded of it in the future Reflect Regularly review your system, gather and process your stuff, update your lists, and get current Engage Make good choices about what to work on right now at any point in time
- 13. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Workflow Diagram Capture Clarify Organize Processing tips: • Process the top item first • Process one item at a time • NEVER put anything back into “In”
- 14. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Reflect - The weekly review All your Projects, Project Plans, Next Actions, Waiting For, Someday, and Tickler lists should be reviewed weekly • Gather and process your stuff • Review your system • Update your lists • Get clean, clear, current, and complete
- 15. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Engage – The power of the Next Action • Context • Time Available • Energy Available • Priority Criteria for choosing what to work on next:
- 16. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Model for identifying daily work • Doing predefined work (next actions and calendar) • Doing work as it shows up • Defining your work
- 17. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Components of the GTD Dashboard
- 19. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Lists List Type Description Actions Task List Collect, actions, someday, tickler, and waiting for items (can be related to a project) Projects Custom List Any multistep outcome that can be completed within one year Project Categories Custom List (lookup list) Used to categorize the project documents Events Calendar List Events (can be related to a project) Area of Focus Custom List (lookup list) The different areas of your life (personal, work, church, volunteer, etc.) Context Custom List (lookup list) The physical or psychological environment in which you will process actions (home, errand, email, phone, online, etc.)
- 20. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Libraries Library Description Project Data Documents and links related to a project. Utilizes the “Link to a Document” content type Site Assets Images, CSS, and JavaScript files that are used throughout the site Site Pages Wiki pages used throughout the site
- 21. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Apps and other stuff Item Type Description Email Services* App Free app (for now) that enables emailing directly to a SharePoint list Hillbilly Tabs jQuery A jQuery script written by Mark Rackley that turns several web parts stacked on top of each other into a tabbed view JSLink JavaScript Available in many SharePoint 2013 web parts - allows you to alter the formatting, data, and functionality of a web part using CSR (client-side rendering) solutions *The only part of the GTD Dashboard that is NOT built with out-of-the-box components
- 22. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Views List/Library Default View Other Views Actions All Actions Action, Actions by Project, Calendar, Collect, Completed, Later, Next 7 Days, Next Actions, Overdue, Project Actions, Someday, Tickler, Today, Tomorrow, Waiting For, Writing Calendar Projects Active Projects All Items Project Data All Documents Documents, Links Events Calendar All Events, Current Events
- 23. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Workflow “RepeatAction” workflow • SharePoint Designer workflow • Fires when an Action is modified • Creates repeating action based on chosen criteria (only when action is completed)
- 26. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM You can download the site template! Download at wendy-neal.com • Includes everything you saw here, EXCEPT: – E-Mail Services App – Custom theme and logo – The data
- 28. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Tips for Achieving “Inbox Zero”
- 35. WWW.SPBIZCONF.COM Please fill in my session feedback form available from the ‘Session Resources’ tab on my session window. Thanks for watching!
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Welcome to the SPBiz Conference! I’m super excited to be here today, presenting a session called “Create a GTD Dashboard in Office 365 to Get Things Done”
- My name is Wendy Neal, and I’m a Senior SharePoint Consultant for McGladrey, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I’ve been working with SharePoint for about 8 years now, starting with the 2007 version. My passions are in the area of OOTB configuration, branding, and custom development. My non-SharePoint technical interests include user interface design and usability, which I enjoy writing about on my blog, and I’m also a contributing author for a few other sites listed there.
- This quote really rings true for me. In today’s world it seems like we’re busier than ever. Nearly everyone feels like they have too much to handle and not enough time to get it all done. I personally have a lot of stuff going on in my life: I work full time, contribute to the SharePoint community by speaking at conferences/SharePoint Saturdays and writing articles on my blog, I write articles for web sites, I do freelance web design, and like to have time for my family and personal life as well. I felt like I wasn’t able to put as much time into each of these things as I wanted without negatively impacting other areas of my life. I decided to implement a set of principles called Getting Things Done, GTD for short, which I’ll discuss in much more detail throughout the presentation. I’ve tried to use several software apps that were designed to handle GTD, but each of them fell a little short in functionality. So I decided to build my own GTD Dashboard in Office 365/SharePoint Online, and I’m going to share how I built it with you as well as how I use it to help me get things done.
- Before we look at the dashboard though, let’s look at the agenda for today. First, we’ll cover the basic principles of GTD and how to incorporate those principles into your life. Then we’ll take a look at the components that were used to build the GTD Dashboard, such as the lists, libraries, views, workflows, even some JavaScript. Next, I’ll demo the dashboard using some real-world use cases to demonstrate how the Dashboard can increase your productivity. And finally, I’ll throw in some tips for achieving that elusive “Inbox Zero” so you can get in control of your email inboxes. Then we should have plenty of time for questions at the end.
- So let’s jump right in to the basic principles of GTD.
- Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a methodology or a set of principles created by David Allen, which he describes in his book of the same name. I was trying to come up with a couple sentences or bullet points to sum up GTD in one slide, and I ended up taking this directly from the first paragraph of the welcome section of the book: It teaches you how to have more energy, be more relaxed, have more clarity and presence in the moment no matter what you’re doing, and get a lot more accomplished with much less effort. Well that sounds awesome, right?! If you follow the principles outlined in the book, I think you definitely can achieve these things. The next few slides will attempt to explain the basic high level concepts of GTD, which I’ll really only be scratching the surface, so I highly recommend reading the entire book if you really want to get the full picture.
- Not only is it a waste of your time and energy to keep thinking about something that you’re making no progress on, it also adds to your anxiety about what you should be doing but aren’t. Before I started practicing the principles of GTD, I always seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about what I should be doing that I’m not, or thinking about how I would go about accomplishing something, or defining details in my head about a task or project that I need to complete sometime in the future. This is very counter-productive and accomplishes absolutely nothing! A good GTD system will help you to capture, define, and organize all your ideas, projects, and tasks, in a single location. Once you’ve gotten all this information out of your head, then your mind becomes clear and you become more focused on actually performing the tasks in your to-do lists and “getting things done.”
- Before I start to explain the basic concepts of GTD, I first want to point out the WRONG way to manage your tasks. Have you ever tried creating daily to-do lists on your calendar, where you’re forecasting out a few days or even weeks with what you’d like to get accomplished each day? I used to do this and it did NOT work for me. I couldn’t even figure out why I wasn’t getting everything done that I wanted to. I blamed it on not having enough time in the day to get everything done. But David Allen sums it up perfectly in his book: First of all, it’s hard to nail down your to-do items ahead of time because you have new things creeping in and priorities are constantly shifting Secondly, it something doesn’t absolutely HAVE to get done that day, it dilutes the emphasis on those things that truly do. If you’re having to sort through your action list for today and figure out which items MUST be done and which are optional, you’re constantly having to make this decision every time you look at your list and it’s cluttering your mind. You should treat it as sacred and only put on your calendar or daily to-do those actions that MUST get done that day in order for the methodology to work as intended.
- Before we continue, I want to define a few key terms. Allen defines an Open Loop as anything considered unfinished, and if not managed correctly, will consistently engage your mind inefficiently. In other words, anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an open loop that will be pulling on your attention (and quite possibly driving you crazy). The key to Getting Things Done is putting all of your Open Loops into some kind of organizational system that will allow you to properly manage and process them, thereby reducing the amount of time you spend thinking about them when you’re not actively doing them, as well as reducing your stress levels.
- According to Allen, a project is any desired result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step. So it’s not necessarily the typical “project” you think of at work where you have tons of tasks and a detailed project plan (although that’s still a project according to this definition). But think on a much smaller scale. Even something that takes only two actions to complete is considered a project and should be defined as such. So for a simple example, say you and a group of friends want to go see a movie. “Go to a movie” would be a project, and you would have actions such as “Research what is currently playing”, “Discuss/decide which movie to see”, and “Buy tickets online”. The “Next Action” is the next physical activity that progresses your project toward completion. The “next action” in our movie example would be to research what is currently playing, because we can’t buy our tickets yet, or even have a discussion/decide which movie to see until we know what’s playing. By filtering your action lists by Next Actions, you will see only the things that you can take action on right now to move your projects forward, and aren’t distracted by all the other actions that must occur later.
- Think of a context as a way to sort or categorize your actions list by the tool, location, or situation in which you can accomplish the work. Some examples of contexts would be: Phone call, email, computer, work, home, errand, etc. By organizing your next action lists in this way, it will be easy to filter out all the emails, for example, that you need to send and do those all at once; or all the phone calls you need to make. Or for the actions that you can only do at home, you don’t want to see those when you’re at work because you can’t make any progress on those right now, so you can filter those out. We’ll see some examples of this during the demo.
- There are 5 basic steps to the GTD system: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.
- This workflow diagram illustrates the Capture, Clarify, and Organize steps. Keep in mind that you’ll likely have more than one “In-basket” – you can have a physical in-tray for paper-based items, a virtual inbox in a GTD app, and your email inbox also counts as an In-basket. You’ll want to CAPTURE all your open loops, thoughts, ideas, promises, commitments, tasks, etc. in the appropriate in-basket (email inboxes already do the capturing for you). The next step is to clarify each item in your in-basket, by asking questions such as “What is it?”, “Is it actionable”, “What’s the next action?”, “Will this take less than 2 minutes”, and “Should this be delegated to someone else?” Finally, in the ORGANIZE step, you’ll actually put your stuff somewhere to be dealt with later, whether it be in the trash, on a someday/maybe list, file it away as reference material, create a project, or place it on your calendar, next actions, or a waiting list.
- Now when you first start utilizing the GTD principles, it may take you several hours to get everything out of your head and various other systems you might be using and into a central in-basket, and then to process and organize everything. Once you’ve gotten past that point however, you need a way to have your stuff move through the workflow smoothly on a continual basis. A good way to do this is to incorporate a weekly review into your schedule. The weekly review meeting is where you sit down and process all the stuff that has accumulated in your in-basket since last week, and update and organize all your lists. It’s important not to blow off this meeting – schedule it on your calendar for every week and treat it as sacred. As far as which day and time, simply do what makes the most sense for you. I find that Friday at noon for about an hour is the best time for me. The week is nearly over so I can reflect back on what I’ve accomplished, look forward to next week, and by doing it in the middle of the day, if I uncover anything that I missed that still needs to get done before the weekend, I can do it on Friday afternoon. The key is to just find what works best for you and stick to it.
- The main purpose of this entire process is to facilitate good choices about what you’re doing at any point in time. If you’ve captured and organized all your stuff properly, then you don’t need to worry or spend time thinking about all the things you’re not doing at the moment. After your “must do” items for the day are done, you should then be armed with the tools you need to choose what is the next best thing to work on at any given point in time. Notice the screenshot on the right. Imagine that this list was very long (in actuality there are dozens of items in my Next Actions list). Now imagine that I have about 15 minutes free before my next meeting, and I wonder what I can get done in that timeframe. Here I’ve filtered my list by Context, Time Needed, and Energy to reveal only 3 items that I could possibly work on right now. Now it’s just a judgment call (since they are all the same priority) of which 1 or 2 items I can get done before my meeting.
- The last thing I want to talk about before we move on to the solution is ways of identifying your daily work. We’ve already mentioned the Calendar, these are things you MUST get done that day. Then you are at liberty to choose what to work on from your Next Actions list. This is your predefined work. What about things that just show up throughout the day that suddenly become urgent and must be done right away? This is the reality of the world we live in, and so you must do those. That is precisely why you shouldn’t put too much on your calendar or daily to-do list, because the things that you’d like to get done that day, but aren’t imperative, are going to get bumped and that’s going to cause undue stress. The 3rd way is to to constantly define your work – clearing out your in-tray and digital messages, and breaking your projects down into actionable steps. You can do this as time permits and don’t need to wait for the weekly review to do all your processing. In fact, some actions may be more urgent and can’t wait for the weekly review.
- Now that we’ve gotten some basic high level GTD concepts out of the way, let’s take a look at the different components that make up the system.
- The GTD Dashboard that I built is a SharePoint sub site, created using the Team Site template. I deleted the lists and libraries that weren’t needed, and added a few more. This slide shows all the lists, libraries, and apps that make up the solution. We’ll take a deeper look at each of these in the next few slides. You’ll notice that there’s one list that isn’t highlighted – the Tasks list (in the lower right corner). This is a list that was created automatically when I created a workflow. Even though my workflow doesn’t use a tasks list, it must remain here, and you can see that there’s 0 items in it.
- Mention if you have on premises, that you don’t need Email Services, that you can set up incoming email to a list
- Actions list has 17 total views All the rest of the lists/libraries just have the one standard All Items or All Documents view
- The site uses one workflow at the moment. I have a field called Repeat in my Actions list. This allows you to create repeating tasks, and you can see that you have a choice of the repeat frequency. Then I’ve built a SharePoint Designer workflow that fires anytime an action is modified. It checks to see if the action has been completed, and whether or not a repeat selection was made. If both of those are true, then it creates a duplicate task with the due date set to a calculated date based on the criteria chosen in the Repeat field. We’ll take a peek at the actual workflow during the demo.
- Here’s a quick peek at the actual Dashboard home page. It’s what brings access to all my lists and views together in one central place. There are several distinct areas. The top portion of the quick launch has links to my projects, calendar, and actions lists. The bottom portion of the quick launch is more of an admin area, where I can maintain my contexts, areas of focus, site assets, etc. I’ve added some quick buttons at the top so we can easily add a new project, collect item, action, and so on. The middle section is where I’m using a tabbed web part view to display all my actions that are due today, tomorrow, in the next 7 days, and later. And on the far right I’m showing the most recent 5 items in my “in basket” or my Collect list. This is simply to server as a visual reminder that I have unprocessed “stuff” to take care of, and I can see it without having to click on anything.
- Now I want to show you the GTD Dashboard. Before we hop over to the demo, a couple things I’d like to point out: There’s quite a lot to it so we aren’t going to actually “build” the dashboard, that would take hours. But I will walk through many of the components to show how I built it. At the end of the demo, you’ll be able to download the site template. You can then install it in your Office 365 or SharePoint on premises environment and use it as is, or build upon it to meet your unique needs.
- Some weirdness was noticed: Column order/hidden column settings didn’t come through Some Actions views show the Timeline JSLink on Actions add form copies over in incorrect format.
- Before we move on to email tips, I want to close with this thought: You can make your GTD system as simple or as complex as you want. You can create tasks and subtasks for every little detail of your project, or you can create more general tasks if that works better for you. Bottom line is, don’t make your system so overly complex that it causes a tremendous amount of work just to capture and process a simple task. Your system should make you more productive, not less.
- The bad thing about email is that your inbox can tend to grow extremely large very quickly if you don’t keep on top of it. Here’s a few tips that I use to keep all my inboxes at Inbox Zero at the end of each day.
- Emails should be treated just like any other “stuff” or open loops that you have in your life. Use the Getting Things Done principles that I’ve explained here today to process your incoming email just like you would with any other action or project.
- Keeping that in mind, don’t forget the 2-minute rule. If you can answer an email in 2 minutes or less, just do it now! Don’t leave anything “unread” in your Inbox. I’m guilty of this still, but I’m working on it. I’ll take a peek at the email and then mark it unread to handle later. DON’T DO THIS! If you can’t answer the email in 2 minutes or don’t have the information in front of you that you need in order to answer it now, forward it to your GTD system and then archive it to refer to later. DON’T leave it in your inbox.
- Also make sure that your GTD system is set up to accommodate processing of emails from any device. As you saw in the demo, I set up my Actions list to receive email messages directly into the list as a “Collect” item. Just make sure to add your list’s email address as a contact in all your devices so you can easily forward an email to it to be processed later.
- When first trying to get your Inbox under control, it can seem overwhelming, especially if you have thousands of items in your inbox. One trick to get up to speed quickly is to move all the items in your inbox (those things that you don’t need to reply to in the short term) into another folder that you can process later. Just getting them out of there and starting with a fresh, clean inbox can do wonders and also keep you motivated to keep your inbox clean. Just don’t forget your old messages are there. Create a task or a project in your GTD system to clean those up.
- If you receive things regularly that don’t require action from you other than to archive or place in a folder for later viewing, utilize your email system’s inbox rules to automate that for you. For example, every week I get a backup file of my WordPress blog site emailed to me. I don’t need to reply or take any other action except to file it away in case I need it later. So I set up a rule to file it to my Backup folder, so it never even hits my Inbox.
- Constantly checking your email as messages come in can really crush your productivity. Unless your job requires you to monitor your email inbox constantly (like a Help Desk support person, for example) you should not be reading every email as it comes in. Designate 2 or 3 times out of your day as email processing time, and stick to that schedule. You can let people know about your schedule if you need to, so they don’t think you’re ignoring them. You may even have to turn your email off during the rest of the day so you can concentrate on Getting Things Done!
- I hope you learned how to apply GTD principles to your life to increase your productivity and help you get things done, and how you can leverage Office 365 or even SharePoint on premises to help you organize all the stuff that’s going on in your life. Thank you so much for watching, I know there are a lot of great sessions in this time slot, and I really appreciate you choosing this one. And don’t forget to fill out the session feedback!