I wanted to share with you my actual template that I’ll be using for my annual review this year. I’ve been tweaking my annual review for the past five years, and here is what has stuck, plus a few new gems.

Annual Review Template 2011
by Lisa Peake

1. Completing and Remembering The Year
Adapted From David Allen’s Productive Living Newsletter, here: http://www.davidco.com/newsletters/archive/1209b.html

You might think about your answers in relation to various areas of your life:

• Physical
• Emotional
• Mental
• Spiritual
• Financial
• Family
• Community Service
• Fun / creativity / recreation

• Review your list of all completed Projects. If you don’t have a list like this, make one up.
• Review larger outcomes – Areas of Focus, Affirmations, Goals, Visions, Missions, Purpose and Principles.
• What was your biggest triumph this year?
• What was the smartest decision you made this year?
• What one word best sums up and describes your experience this year?
• What was the greatest lesson you learned this year?
• What was the most loving service you performed this year?
• What is your biggest piece of unfinished business this year?
• What are you most happy about completing this year?
• Who were the three people that had the greatest impact on your life this year?
• What was the biggest risk you took this year?
• What was the biggest surprise this year?
• What important relationship improved the most this year?
• What compliment would you liked to have received this year?
• What compliment would you liked to have given this year?
• What else do you need to do or say to be complete with this year?

2. Releasing The Year
Adapted from an exercise as told by Alexandra DeFurio, photographer: http://defuriophotography.com/

• Gather small pieces of blank paper, and a pen. Unlined junior legal pads work well for this, or post-it notes, or simply cut up pieces of printer paper.
• Write one thing you would like to release or complete from the past year on a single piece of paper. Start a new paper for each new topic. Write as much as you wish to, and if you need multiple pages for one topic, go right ahead.
• When you’re complete with the writing, gather and carefully dispose of all of the papers by burning them in the fireplace, or by shredding. This is similar to free-form writing, but with a special focus on releasing the past year.
• Congratulations, you just took out the trash for a whole year.

3. Asking For Feedback
Borrowed from Les McKeown’s Predicatable Success blog, here:
http://predictablesuccess.com/blog/the-leadership-lesson-you-missed-in-2010/

• Send the following email to a few of your colleagues, friends, mentors, coach, boss, and family members:

“Hello

I’ve just finished a review of what I did well, and what I didn’t do well in the last year. I learned a lot of valuable lessons which I’m looking forward to applying next year. However, I’m pretty sure I haven’t caught everything, and as you know me well, I’d love for you to help: would you please hit ‘reply’ and in one ruthlessly constructive sentence answer this question honestly?:

What’s the one big lesson that above all else you think I should learn from the past year?

Thanks!”

4. Creating The New Year
Adapted From David Allen’s Productive Living Newsletter, here: http://www.davidco.com/newsletters/archive/1209b.html

• What would you like to be your biggest triumph of next year?
• What advice would you like to give yourself next year?
• What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results next year?
• What would you be most happy about completing next year?
• What major indulgence are you willing to experience next year?
• What would you most like to change about yourself next year?
• What are you looking forward to learning next year?
• What do you think your biggest risk will be next year?
• What about your work, are you most committed to changing next year?
• What is one as yet undeveloped talent you are willing to explore next year?
• What brings you the most joy and how are you going to do or have more of that next year?
• Who or what, other than yourself, are you most committed to loving and serving next year?
• Who in your world can you ask for help and support next year?
• What one word would you like to have as your theme next year?
• What quality will support you in creating your ideal year? (e.g. Trust, Honesty, Loving Discipline, Abundance, Focus, Creativity, etc.)
• Schedule some time to create any Ideal Scenes, Vision Boards, or Affirmations that will support you in the coming year. Put it on your calendar. Make sure you will have any relevant supplies by then (markers, magazines, paper, poster board, etc.) Enjoy this special time of preparation and visioning with yourself.

As always, be sure to take the parts that serve you and leave out the rest.

Wishing you a year’s end full of graceful completions, loving connections and radiant joy. Talk to you next year!

-Lisa

Here are 15 ideas to get you started on your next productive break:

1. Drink a full glass of water. You might be surprised to find out that much of your hunger is actually thirst.
2. Close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Your eyes need a break if you work at a computer for much of the day. Relax. Breathe deeply.
3. Keep a folder full of inspiring emails and randomly pick one to read. Include favorite quotes and personal emails that “made your day”.
4. Keep another folder with humorous emails, video clips, cartoons that come your way. Visit this folder anytime you’ve lost touch with your sense of humor.
5. Listen to a song or piece of music that you love. Any one song. Sing along if you like.
6. Read one paragraph of that book you’ve been putting off.
7. Get up and have a dance party in your office. Or in the bathroom, if you must hide your incredible talents from your co-workers.
8. Go outside and throw a ball for your dog. Cuddle with your cat. Do something non-intellectual that opens your heart.
9. Take a walk around the block. Notice what you see.
10. Send a quick text of love and appreciation to a friend or family member. Enjoy what you get back.
11. Stand up and stretch. Get creative and find different muscle groups that haven’t been stretched in a while.
12. Find a small physical task to do. Repair something. Re-fill something. Be productive while you’re disengaging, if you must.
13. Take a nap. Corporate offices are adding nap rooms. If you own your own business or work from home, there’s no excuse for being sleepy on the job. Give yourself a “power nap” when you need it.
14. Browse photos of the people and places you love. Keep them handy on your desktop or screensaver.
15. Remember what you’re grateful for. Especially in moments of grumpiness or weariness, remembering gratitude can provide a great burst of energy.

Please don’t squander all of your break time on reading the news or checking Facebook. These things have the potential to distract and drain you. Instead, devote your break time to to one of these mini-meditations.

What else do you like to do to replenish yourself during work time? Please leave a comment to share with others.

Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself. Ask yourself this question with a sincere and open heart, then listen for the answer:

What is my most important task right now?

_____________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________

This works best when you have a complete inventory of all your outstanding agreements with yourself and others, that you’re reviewing and updating regularly. Even without a pristine inventory, have the courage to awaken to what matters most, right now. Today. This minute.

Email me and let me know how this went for you. I’ll reply to you personally with feedback and support. Really!

The average office worker is interrupted seventy-three times every day. And the average manager is interrupted every eight minutes.

- CubeSmart, Inc.

Clients regularly ask me how to deal with seemingly constant interruptions in the workplace. Here are the three strategies I recommend, in order of appearance:

1. Minimize Unnecessary Interruptions

• Establish clear boundaries around the time you need for focused work. Close the door, turn off the phone, let your team know you’re offline.
• Get better at leading meetings and make sure they actually accomplish “the real work” of deciding what will be done, by whom and by when.
• Create times that you are fully accessible – office hours, if you will. Let people know when you want to see them.
• Establish regular meetings with key team members to facilitate enough communication that they won’t need to pop their heads in so often.

2. Accept and Attend

Give the interruption your full attention. This may sound counter-intuitive, but interruptions by their very definition have “got you”. Surrender. Giving someone your partial attention will not make you more productive, nor will it make them go away.

• Look, listen, focus, and attend to your interruption.
• Stop looking at your computer screen.
• If it’s an incoming phone call, try closing your eyes. They’ll thank you for it.

3. Embrace Divine Interruptions

Become fully present and available to the person interruption you. Every interaction is an opportunity to build a supportive relationship with another valuable human being. 

• Take a deep breath.
• Make eye contact. Allow this person’s eyes to remind you of your own innate goodness.
• Look only for the good in this person. Listen carefully for the good in what he or she is saying.
• Count your blessings. You may be interrupted, but this means you are also: connected, valued, collaborating, communicating, and not least on this list, actively employed!

Why are they called divine interruptions? Because they are perfect, because they are beyond your control, and because you can make them magic if you Minimize, Accept, and Embrace them.

Here’s an interview with two of the people who have most influenced my approach to working smarter and happier. You’ll need to subscribe to Harvard Business Review or pay if you want the full length PDF. What they offer you for free, though, is not half bad.

Being More Productive

An Interview with David Allen and Tony Schwartz by Daniel McGinn (May 2011)

Here’s the absolute bottom line:

Tony Schwartz: Organizations need to recognize that human beings are basically organisms containing energy. And that energy is either being renewed or being dissipated over time. An organization has to realize that part of its responsibility, whether it wants it or not, is to ensure that people have full tanks of energy. This is one of the big variables that will determine which organizations thrive in the next 10 or 20 years.
David Allen: Think about it this way: While we’ve been sitting here talking, stuff has been piling up in our in-boxes and our voicemails. Some of it has the potential to meaningfully shift our priorities. When we turn to this accumulated stuff, we’ll need to eliminate old business that is pulling on us, that’s taking our attention, and reallocate our resources to these new priorities. You can only do one thing at a time, and you only have so many resources. You either feel OK about sitting here talking to us, or you feel bad about the 9,000 other things you’re not doing. Everybody needs a system to make those choices wisely.

Read the rest here: Being More Productive

Books by Tony Schwartz

Books by David Allen

Three Tips to Unleash Your Competitive Edge

If productivity is a priority for you, consider this advice for tackling your to-do list — and more.

If there were just a handful of secrets to being more purposeful, productive and profitable this year, when would you want to know them? Tomorrow? Next month?

What about right now?

Continue reading at Entrepreneur.com.

I’m no financial expert, but I’ve been refining this process for about a year, and I feel like it’s finally becoming “productive”, meaning that I’ve found ways to reduce the time it takes and maximize the value I receive from it.

Click the link below to see my actual checklist:

Lisa’s Bi-Weekly Financial Review

It’s a Google Document “Form” which means I can check off all the boxes I complete, click Submit, and have a record of what I did. That way, if I need to skip some steps, I can see what I didn’t complete and come back to it later. Bear in mind that I’m a freelancer, so some of my steps apply to how I receive income and pay taxes. Nonetheless, this should be pretty easy for you to borrow (copy-paste) and tweak into your own template.

Now if you’ve looked that over and are wondering how to make it your own, I recommend you look over David Allen’s Personal and Professional Incompletion Trigger Lists (pp. 114-117 in Getting Things Done; pp. 288-289 in Making It All Work). If you don’t have the lists, go buy the GTD Setup Guides, also known as templates or laminated cards. Use the sections labeled Financial (why not look at all of them while you’re there) to trigger other ideas about what to review. (Full disclosure: That’s not an affiliate link, but David Allen is a thought-leader of our time, so I kinda think he deserves your $16 bucks.)

So now that you’ve read my Financial Review, I’d love to get your input, feedback and encouragement. Here are my questions for you:

• Is there anything else you do that I’m missing?

• How often do you review the nitty-gritty of your finances?

• What other steps do you take to plan long-term?

• Do you do your review with your spouse? Business partner? Accountability partner?

• Has a regular review like this one helped you? How?

Please leave a comment below, or Tweet your ideas to me @peakeproductive.

I hope your summer is flowing along beautifully. I know mine has been packed between family trips, birthday celebrations and getting outdoors to enjoy (even more) sunshine.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, please consider joining this new Meetup Group for Getting Things Done (GTD) in L.A. I’ve just joined and am eagerly awaiting our first event. Perhaps you’ll be the one to suggest a time and place?

This group will provide an opportunity to meet and network with other GTD enthusiasts in our local area. Talking to other people about how you keep yourself engaged at a higher level is one of the best ways I know to create a strong focus and do more great work.

And hey, if you’re not in LA, what about starting a Meetup group or informal gathering in your own area? Grab a few colleagues, friends, your kids, or your book club. All it takes is a few people who know they could be working smarter, and a commitment to keep coming together to support each other. It’s simple, it’s powerful, and it’s what the pros do to stay accountable to their goals.

Click here to join me at GTD in L.A.

I’ll be back again soon with some summer tips for refreshing your own version of peak productivity.

Flash forward and here we are in the digital age. We’ve often feared that advances in technology would rip our humanity apart, but it’s starting to look like we were wrong about that. As Arianna Huffington put it recently, “Remember all those scary movies about how humans were going to become machines in the future? Well, as it turned out, the machines ended up enabling us to be more human instead.”

I think she’s right. The internet is finally centered around the most basic human need: belonging. I also think we’re probably spending a little too much time self-promoting on Twitter at the expense of dedicating our time to causes greater than any one of us. But, I digress…

I wanted to tell you about a fun new site dedicated to my favorite thing, making your life easier. TaskRabbit just launched their services here in Los Angeles, founded on the idea of “neighbors helping neighbors”. They’re already up and running in Boston and San Francisco.

So if you don’t have time to assemble your Ikea furniture, walk your dog, redeem a Groupon offer, or wait on hold to talk to your utility company, someone out there wants to do it for you, at a fair price. The best part is that you might meet a nice, enthusiastic (probably over-qualified) person within a 30-mile radius of you.

What do you do when you know you don’t have time for a little task? Who do you ask for help? Who can lend you a cup of sugar, metaphorically speaking?

How To Write A Successful Outcome

1. Write it in the past tense as if to say “I already…” did what?
2. Use a Strong Project Verb. Here are some good examples from 43folders.com
3. Include what you expect to have happen as a result of this completion. Be realistically optimistic with yourself.
4. Review and revise this outcome at least once a week based on a complete inventory of everything else in your life. This reality check is called a Weekly Review.
5. Get the involvement and alignment of each person involved with the project. Make sure you’re in agreement about why you’re doing this, and how it relates to larger intended outcomes. For a review of larger outcome levels, see David Allen’s Horizons of Focus.
6. Think big, and start small. Break it down into subprojects if needed.
7. Make sure every project has at least one Next Action – the very next physical thing you will do to drive it forward. Start them with good next action verbs, which are not the same as project verbs.
8. Do mind sculpture at least once a week envisioning your success – see it, feel it, taste it, touch it.

What else do you do to set up your projects for success? Any tips on how to capture or name a project effectively? I would love to hear from you, so please leave a comment below and share your tips with us.