It all started a couple of years ago when my pastor asked me to teach a class on productivity. Then, gradually, people began to ask me to help them get more productive. Recently, I led a couple of seminars on how to win both at work and at home. It feels strange, teaching people the tactics I used to keep myself organized. One, because I rarely feel organized, and two, because I do this stuff just to deal with the volume of inputs I get in an average day.

But even though it feels a little like I’m an play acting, I also have discovered that I really do love talking about productivity and sharing the things I do (such as they are).

So, if these are topics that interest you as well, I hope you enjoy this post and the ones following. I’d like to write out my journey through productivity, the systems I use, and the why behind them.

To begin with, I want to tell you a little about my history. In high school and college, planning didn’t really enter into my thought process very much. I tried to get things done at the last minute, procrastinate as long as possible, and cram everything into the last second.

Then when I graduated from college and begin to work full time a funny thing happened. I realized that I was good at sales. People had always joked about it, and I knew that I enjoyed talking to people, but I discovered that selling was something that I not only liked to do, but that people would also buy things from me.

I got to be good at it. Like dialed in, rockstar good. I had a great territory, and was blowing my numbers out of the water. I could basically set my own hours and income, and my job was to talk to cool people and help their businesses grow.

Then one day, my boss unexpectedly quit. He was burned out and ready for a new challenge. And before I knew it, his boss had tapped me to move into a manager role.

So I went from being responsible for me, to being responsible for 15 sales folks, all of whom had more experience and longer tenure in their roles than I did. Goodbye 40 hour work week, hello 60 hour hell.

Looking back, I’m unsure how I survived the first few years as I was not a very good leader back then. I am really grateful to those folks who “managed up” to help me cope, and my boss who patiently mentored me.

I’d love to spend some more time in a later post talking about leadership, and things that I’ve learned about managing people, and managers in my career, but for now I want to focus on the most important lesson I learned during that time.

I still remember the seemingly endless stream of phone calls, emails, and meetings that continued to bleed over into every area of my life. It would have been difficult to keep up with if I knew how, but given that I didn’t have any sort of system with which to record what needed to be done, I was completely overwhelmed.

At that stage in the game, email was where the largest portion of my life was spent. I tried so hard to tame the flood of incoming messages, mostly with little to no success. I’d gain some traction, and then get another assignment and lose everything I’d learned. What I mess!

One day I was discussing this with a colleague at another company and he suggested downloading some sort of third party extension for outlook. If I did that, he said, I’d be able to completely change my workflow and be organized!

The problem is, that I’d met this guy in passing at a conference and completely forgot what extension he told me to download!

So, I did what every other procrastinator does, and searched the internet for hours looking for a solution. Finally I found an extension based on “Getting Things Done” a book by David Allen.

I never used the extension… never even downloaded it… Because I figured I should first listen to the book. So one Saturday, after putting the book on my IPod, I plugged in my headphones and started mowing the lawn.

As I’ve reflected on my life, there are moments that I can remember where you can see significant sea changes that forever alter you. Meeting your future spouse, staring into the eyes of your newborn child, finding your calling etc.

As sappy as it sounds this was one of those moments for me. And I’ve never approached work the same way again.

I’m excited to get into the meat of this book in the next post. Until then, I’m honored you read this far and hope you will check back in.