Tag Archives: Simple

Goal, Layering, Principles, Simple

Six Reasons You Should Layer Your Projects

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Success on a project, in business or in life can’t be achieved until you start. Layering is an approach that increases your chance for success.

The concept is simple:

  1. Break the project into small parts
  2. Launch
  3. Repeat this process with more layers of complexity

The power of layering is easy to see below.

Show results– Layering allows you to see results from your actions quickly. This will help get more buy in and give you the confidence to succeed.

Benefit from the results– You can begin benefiting from work work quickly. You don’t need to wait for the whole project to be completed.

Learn from success and failures– You can learn from the feedback of your launch and it can help set the direction of further phases of your project.

Helps determine priories– After you launch a layer the next need will become more obvious.

Determines the project’s viability– Once you get your feet wet on the project you may find that the project is more complex that originally thought and it may not be worth it to continue. This helps you cut your losses.

Doesn’t get bogged down in details– The longer a project continues the more likely it will get held up for small details. Layering may allow you to launch without the details fully developed and then you address it in a future launch.

As you can see there are huge benefits to layering. Layering is one of the principles of building your success- you can read more about it, including examples how to use it, at the Layering Page .

GTD, Principles

Don’t Get Things Done!

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Go. Do. Act. Do More. Everywhere you turn there are more and more demands on you. The smart people turn to a productivity system like Getting Things Done and gain control of their lives- or do they?

These systems solve can certainly help gain control over tasks but they leave open many problems:

  • Too Complex– You need to read through a 200+ page book to get started. Who has the time and effort to go through it? When you get through the last page do you remember the points from page 10? Then the setup can take days, who has the patients?
  • Don’t focus on Planning– The systems focus almost exclusively on the doing: Get it done faster, better. But they are too quick to act. Many times a little thinking in advance can save much time on the execution or eliminate it completely.
  • Don’t Focus on Enjoyment– You can be perfectly efficient doing tasks you hate but if you don’t enjoy it what’s the point? Then before you know it you’re procrastinating and what good is the system doing for you?
  • Don’t Focus on Your Life– The systems may focus on work. Some even focus on the tasks you perform at home but what about integrating your health, spouse, kids and the rest of your goals into this.

Don’t get me wrong I love Getting Things Done and use many of its principles (You’ll see them in these pages) but it doesn’t address the above problems.

In this site I’m developing (yes developing lots more content to come) a system to take the best of all systems and address the above problems and more. Here are the advantages you’ll experience:

  • Simple It uses simplicity and simple technology to do a lot of the tasks for you. No need to recopy notes and keep 43 million folders for filing.
  • Life Management There’s more to life than work. There’s family, play, community- it’s about balance and doing what you need, when you need to.
  • Get started quickly– I’ve added a Get Started section where you can get started in just a few minutes. Actually if you take away that you should enjoy whatever you do, you’re already ahead of the game.

What are your frustrations with your current system?