Project Phases Long Term Project Planning

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19.4 The Art of Productivity without Stress

Now you can take a slight detour away from pure enterprise management by looking at some tools offered by Open ERP to improve your own personal time management. It is not much of a detour because good organization is the key to better productivity in your daily work. Open ERP’s project_gtd module was inspired by the work of two books focusing on efficient time management: • Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen 2001, most often referred to by its initials GTD trademark registered since 2005. This book is built around the principle that people should clearly write down all their outstanding tasks and store the details about these tasks in a trustworthy system. They then do not have to worry about holding all of this stuff in their head. Since they can be quite sure that it is recorded safely, they can allow themselves to relax and so have the energy and time to concentrate on handling the tasks themselves systematically. • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey 1989 : the author advises organizations on the use of these practices, and reports on the productivity improvements in the organization that result. Note: Managing time efficiently David Allen, Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, New York, 2001, 267 pages. ISBN : 978-0142000281. Also see the site: http:davidco.com Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Free Press, 1989, 15th Anniversary Edition : 2004, 384 pages. ISBN : 978-0743269513. Tip: De-stress yourself Clear the tasks that clutter your thoughts by registering them in an organized system. This immediately helps you to de-stress yourself and organize your work in the best possible way. If you feel stressed by too much work, do the following exercise to convince yourself about the benefits. Take some sheets of blank paper and write down everything that passes through your head about the things you need to do. For each task, note the next action to do on an adjacent line, and rank it by the date that you will commit yourself to doing it. At the end of the exercise you will feel better organized, considerably de-stressed and remarkably free of worries The objective in this detour is not to detail the whole methodology but to describe the supporting tools provided by Open ERP’s project_gtd module.

19.4.1 Not everything that is urgent is necessarily important

The first modification brought by the module to the basic Open ERP system is a separation of the concepts of urgency and importance. Tasks are no longer classified by a single criterion but by the product of the two criteria, enabling you to prioritize matters that are both urgent and important in a single list Many managers with a heavy workload use urgency as their sole method of prioritization. The difficulty is then in working out how to plan for substantive tasks like medium term objectives. These are not urgent but are nevertheless very important. Note: Example Distinction between urgency and importance If you are very well organized, urgent tasks can and should often be given lower precedence than important tasks. Take an example from daily life as an illustration: the case of having some time with your children. For most people this task is important. But if you have a busy professional life, the days and weeks flow on with endless urgent tasks to be resolved. Even if you manage your time well, you could let several months pass without spending time with your children because the task of seeing them is never as urgent as your other work, despite its importance. In Open ERP urgency is given by the Deadline of the task and importance by the Priority. The classification of the tasks then results from the product of the two factors. The most important tasks and the most urgent both