jkgrossi said:
This one's another great post... where have you been hiding out all of this time :wink: ?
It seems like you've really got a handle on your "system", and you've made it work effectively for you. I took a look at your website, and I really like the way that you set up the "Core Company Values" for your organization. Do you go about setting up your personal values in the same way (looks like it's by functional area)? Do you think that you could give some examples of how you've set this up for yourself? I think that it would be really helpful for those of us who are still struggling with this area.
I just found these forums a few days ago after reading David Allen's Ready for Anything. I jumped on that book when I first saw it (and then the salesperson made me buy it, since that particular bookstore frowns upon book-jumping). I also read GTD when it first came out.
I use the mission statement approach for running my business in the same manner I use it personally. The business derives new goals and projects from its mission, just as I derive new personal goals and projects from my mission. I think most businesses that have a mission statement just post it on a wall to look at but never actually live it by setting goals to fulfill it, and that's a shame, since it takes a lot of work to make a good one. Whenever I have to make a tough business decision, I always go back to the mission statement for guidance.
My business is developing and publishing PC games, most being nonviolent logic puzzle games. I've been doing this since 1994. I also run a popular forum on the web site, which includes a subforum called Indie Life, which is about self-help topics for people who run businesses similar to mine. Plus I've written lots of free articles at
www.dexterity.com/articles. A few years ago I served as Vice President and then President of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP), a nonprofit organization for software developers. Most independent game developers will have crossed paths with me at some point.
As for the core values in the business mission statement, I also do the same thing for my personal mission, except that I put it with my goals instead of my mission, so I see it more frequently. Here are the core values for the business:
Products: fun, creativity, elegance
People: honor, growth, commitment
Systems: intelligence, effectiveness, flexibility
Customers: cheerfulness, empathy, gratitude
Developers: respect, encouragement, synergy
Management: focus, passion, leadership
Finances: abundance, growth, contribution
This covers the major areas of the business. So when I'm considering a new project, I can think about how well it fulfills these values across the different areas of the business.
You can do the same thing for personal values, except that you use different areas of focus. For instance, Career/Business as a personal area of focus for me has these values: efficiency, profitability, happiness, relaxation, creativity. The values are already encapsulated in the mission statement to some degree, but pulling them out and putting them on the goals page makes it easier for me to see how closely my goals match up with my core values. It also helps me get ideas for new goals, and it lets me take a pulse to see how I'm doing at fulfilling different values. For instance, I might ask myself, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how well is my business doing in terms of generating financial abundance?" When I do this for every value, I can quickly identify the weakest areas and then add new projects to improve them.
One book I'd like to recommend that really complements the GTD system nicely is Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern. I read it just before GTD. Julie Morgenstern is to organizing your space as David Allen is to organizing your projects, actions, and ideas. Thanks to Julie my office has been impeccably neat and organized for years now, and I never have a problem with clutter. There's some overlap between these two authors, but not very much. The process you go through with organizing your space is very similar to the way you organize your tasks. It takes a 1-2 day period of concentrated focus where you sort and purge everything. Then you apply the system and fit everything into it. And finally, you maintain it. I used these two systems together synergistically; they complement each other beautifully. Julie also wrote a book about Time Management, which is pretty good, but it's mostly a rehashing of previous time management ideas. Her organizing book is superb, however.
Hope this helps....