GRIP Book — Part 1, Grip & Your WEEK

Here’s my key learning from the book — GRIP by Rick Pastoor

After reading a couple of books on self-help, I had stopped looking at that corner in the book shop of the airports and more time spent in the sections of autobiography, philosophy, mindfulness, and poetry. Recently while traveling back home and a glance thru the book store I came across this title — GRIP by Rick Pastoor, a few pages read and I took it home.

We may have come across many versions of self-help books, productivity tips, and methods but GRIP not only offers but also shows us all practical and actionable steps to improve our everyday productivity;

That too simply by focusing on 4 key elements of our everyday essentials

Calendar

To-do

Email

Friday Recap

It is only in early of this year, January 2022 when I had shared best of 4 books from my 2021 reading list; here is the link:

I have no plan to share or post any update until I read — GRIP, before we jump in to my understanding, key learning and takeaway from this book.

This will be 3 blog post as the book itself is divided in 3 parts:

1. GRIP & your week
2. GRIP & your year
3. GRIP & your life

GRIP & your WEEK

Calendar

Your calendar is your ROCK

Something solid you can look to when things get chaotic. Make that thing your calendar.

just do what your calendar says. Period.

what a simple yet powerful statements from the book.

Make your calendar the most important part of your productivity system and it will give a clear direction with benefits of being finite while tracking your most precious money — called Time.

So what goes on Calendar? — All meetings with end time, Travel, Prep and Post meeting time and your most important day to day activities.

Apart from this, you can use 30 minutes rule; items or tasks that is going to take more than 30 Minutes or else that is so urgent and should not be overlooked, should go to Calendar.

Quote from the book — which I absolutely love:

Plan your week as it’s the week before the vacation

We all have list of key projects, must-win projects or priorities but still end of the day or week, we feel nothing significant has happened in this direction and yet we were so busy doing other things.

Translate your priorities into specific tasks is the key🔑

How to choose your tasks?

Filter 1: what are your priorities?

Critically chose your priorities, not everything under your responsibility is a priority and needs your time and action.

Filter 2: Balance between urgent and important — use Eisenhower matrix

Plan first for what is urgent and important

Filter 3: Am I focused enough?

Priorities means cutting down to what matters most, shorten your list.

If you are having too many priorities, you really haven’t prioritized at all.

To-do

my favorite part of the book

This is part which I read first after picking it up at the airport and to be honest, I read this section couple of times.

Stop storing things in your head

a concept from Getting things done by David Allen as he puts it;

your brain is a thinking machine, not a storage device

Any task — large or small — that your brain keeps reminding you about can be seen as an open loop and that is a loop which needs to be closed. How?

By putting all your open loop into actionable task in to-do list, our brain is 100% sure that someone or something will remind you of a task. It turns down the volume on those persistent internal reminders.

A kind of backup brain — Task manager. Jot down everything and act on few — priority.

Six Steps of build your to-do list:

1. Pick your ideal system

• digital, should sync with your phone and computer, clear and fast.

2. Make a single to-do list

• list out all your open loops, keep it simple, use Inbox.

3. Turn tasks into actions

• use action words, formulate tasks into concrete actions.

4. Group actions into projects

• group tasks into projects — 1 can be 3 task project & other can include 10.

5. Put labels on actions

• Use label for energy, location and people.

6. Outline work areas

• Group projects in relevant Area of responsibility — Product or Team

After reading this book, I clearly understand how to handle my endless list of to-do. Kudos and many thanks to Rick Pastoor.

Email

taking charge of your mailbox

the more messages you send, the more you receive. and this means we are spending our days responding to and taking care of the priorities of the other people.

What an eye opening line.

Use Time Blocking for email processing; I have recently started this experience of blocking 2 slots of 30 Minutes everyday only for email processing.

This will give you an idea of time you actually need to stay on top of your mailbox and you can close your mailbox rest of the time since you know that you’ll catch up during the next slot.

Most important folder — Archive: do not waste your time in organizing your emails, use only one folder. A Hard Truth.

How to handle the Email: The Guide

For every email you receive; you can do following 5 things:

1. Turn down the request — say no
2. No action required — Archive
3. An action required — less than 2 Min, Do it
4. An action required — take more time, with a fixed deadline — add to calendar
5. An action required — take more time, with no fixed deadline — add task to your to-do list

What a simple and effective strategy!

Friday Recap

your calendar is all set, prioritizes are well defined in to-do list, and time blocked for email processing. System is set.

but upkeeping requires one simple routine, each week take 30 minutes of your time to update your calendar and clean up your to-do list — A Friday Recap.

This is a weekly review — concept from Getting things done by David Allen.

Weekly review allows you to look back at all the chaos of the week gone and take charge of the week coming and for this find the best moment of your Friday, Weekend or Monday morning, what suits you the best.

For the week gone: Run through your inboxes, notes, ongoing projects and tasks.

Plan for your coming week with what is aligned to your prioritizes and goals.

Reflect on your week with accomplishments and key learnings; big hits or misses and learn from it.

Thanks a million Rick Pastoor for simple, powerful and actionable ideas.

Thanks for reading.

Keep reading, keep sharing.

Astu.