After reading Jason Fried’s book, Rework, I guess Making Ideas Happen was pretty likely to come next. I read Rework with some scepticism, but it (and this is not an overstatement) dramatically improved my productivity and overview of my work, so I picked this book up with a degree more of enthusiasm.
Before reading Rework and Making Ideas Happen, I have to admit – my work / life balance was a mess, my prioritisation efforts were nuts, my to-do lists were expanding exponentially, and a lot of my day was spent fire-fighting rather than focusing fully on the things that matter.
I wasn’t a productivity geek before reading this stuff, but I did recognise many problems I faced, so I guess that was a start. Thankfully, these two books were a great grounding to change some really bad habits that I’d picked up whilst working at numerous businesses over the past years.
Action Steps are probably the best take-away from Making Ideas Happen. In fact they’re so simple, they were confusing to me at first. But it’s true – my todo lists of yesterday were just a big, confusing, knotted mess of impossibility. You know why I procrastinate? Nine times out of ten it’s because the next step forward toward a goal isn’t spelled out clearly enough to me. It’s really that simple. My todo items weren’t directly actionable, I hadn’t broken things down into simple, understood, steps that had ownership (even if I were the sole owner of the step, or even the whole project).
Breaking tasks down into actional steps also has an added benefit of changing the way I work from one of mounting pressure and demands, to one of rapid progress. I’m a big fan of Basecamp, and hey – it IS fun to check things off in there. When you’ve got a big stack of stuff that needs doing to get anywhere near achieving your big hairy objective – well, you can only get on with it if you know what (even tiny) steps to make, and you can only appreciate the progress you’re making if you can check those steps off as you go.
Anyway, there’s a whole stack of great tips from the legend that is Scott Belsky in this book, and you absolutely must read it in order to [become a more productive human being] – cut that last bit, in order to achieve the goals that you really want.
