I read Dermot's book - here are my thoughts.
Transcript:
Hi there! So, for this review of Smart Work by a Dermot Crowley, I thought I'd match the book cover, and where are in. Some takeaway messages for me from this book:
1.) Get everything located in one electronic spot. I know that we like to work across multiple documents, and multiple systems. But if you can get your tasks your email in your calendar all in one spot. That is super helpful for organising your day. I transitioned from being heavily in the Google space, in the Outlook space or the MS space to make this happen. That means that I can easily turn things like emails, and other actions into tasks. That really helped me transition towards inbox zero by turning emails into tasks. That was super helpful for me.
2.) The other thing that I really got from this book was to share your tasks with both due dates and start dates. Start dates are really important about you know reminding you, and letting you know that you need to start this task in order finish it on time. That's something that I hadn't done a lot of in the past. That you know in order to remember to start something, you had to remember how in advance in the future it was rather than electronically set those start dates, and due dates.
3.) The final thing that I learned from this book that I hadn't previously done was to allocate time to get tasks done rather than just trying to leave big blocks of the diary free in order to do work. Whatever that might be, I know have started to allocate within my diaries specific time where I work on a specific task. That could be writing a blog, could be responding to emails or it could be very specific in terms of getting a task done that someone else has asked me to do on a project or another piece of work. Or it might even be calling up some clients and having a chat to them about the work that they're doing.
Those are 3 things that I got from this book Smart work by Dermot Crawley. As a PhD student or an early career researcher, I can highly recommend it to you. It'll help make you far more productive if you willing to take on and implement this advice.
Have a read.