As a former cubicle corporate worker, I didn’t realize how much a boss helps/motivates you to be organized. But now that I’m running a freelance business (aka being my own boss), I’ve had to setup my own systems and procedures to make my business run smoothly.

I’m more organized. Following the methods of GTD allowed me to organize my whole life - from my goals of creating multiple passive income streams to the minor details of remembering to get an oil change. In GTD, Allen talks about the extremely useful habit of capturing your thoughts - whether on a notebook, computer, or PDA. As you capture your thoughts, you can then take those thoughts and organize them. Without this habit, you will continually have a disorganized mind because your mind was not made to be a virtual file cabinet.

Once I captured my thoughts, I followed GTD’s principles for organizing those thoughts. GTD gives great tips and principles for using calendars, to do lists, and filing cabinets. As I organized my thoughts, I was able to see an accurate landscape of my life. This information has helped me make better decisions on how to spend my time.

Having an organized life is like working in a clean, non-cluttered environment. I do more effective work when all the “loose ends” in my psyche is organized.

I’m coming up with more good ideas. Productivity is not just about working harder. It also includes working smarter. And to work smarter, I needed better ideas than my previous ones. GTD has helped me come up with quality, creative ideas for my projects.

Much of the inspiration for my new ideas came from Allen’s encouragement to brainstorm. I never really brainstormed before, but GTD showed me that brainstorming was part of the brain’s natural method to come up with good ideas. On page 73, Allen has 3 great principles for having an effective brainstorming session:

1. Don’t judge, challenge, evaluate, or criticize.
2. Go for quantity, not quality.
3. Put analysis and organization in the background.

Yes, after your brainstorming session, I have to filter out the good ideas from the bad ones. However, by filtering the ideas after the brainstorming session instead of during the session, I come up with good ideas I would’ve never thought of had I been in filtering mode. Prematurely filtering ideas stifles creativity.

I’m more focused. One of my biggest time management mistakes was multitasking. Contrary to what many people believe, multitasking actually lowers productivity. Studies (New York Times and CNN) have shown that doing one activity at a time is more efficient than multitasking.

Much of my multitasking was worrying about other things while working. By capturing all my thoughts on a notebook and organizing those thoughts, I was better able to focus on one activity at a time.

GTD has an excellent tactic called Next Action. This means figuring out the actual concrete activity you need to do next for each project you have. For example, instead of just writing down a general project like “Start a new blog”, I would also write down the Next Action. This could be “Install Wordpress” or “Think of 10 possible domain names”.

The simple Next Action tactic has allowed me to focus on doing instead of constantly rethinking about my projects. I now spend more time actually making progress on my projects instead of succumbing to analysis paralysis.

I use my time more wisely. GTD bases its to do lists on context. This means I’ve put all the phone calls I need to make on the same list. So, when I’m around the phone, I can check the list and knock out a couple phone calls in the same time period.I’ve made to do lists for each of my clients. So, whenever I work with those clients, I pull out their to do list to make sure I’m covering everything I need to cover.

My Errands to do list is filled with Next Actions that I do in one car trip.

Conclusion

I would recommend Getting Things Done to anyone regardless of their career. Allen’s methods will take some discipline but they work. If you apply them to your work and life, you’ll experience greater productivity.

The title tag test is one of the main things I do to to make sure I’m building effective links.

Here’s how the test works. I pick an internal page that’s at least a week old, because sometimes Google takes awhile to index pages. I make sure the page has a unique title tag.

So, I wouldn’t test this page: Find Top Paying Keywords for Google AdSense. This title is filled with common keywords.

Instead, I’ll look at a pages like: Many Big SEO Firms Make Chicken Scratch or The Spamification of Trusted Words, Ideas, & Organizations.

What you’re looking for are words that you don’t usually see in the same sentence and/or unique words. In the two examples above, you don’t usually see the phrase chicken scratch paired with big SEO firms. And spamification is a unique word.

The next step is taking the unique titles and searching them on Google. If the pages with the unique titles are in the top 20 of Google, then more than likely the website is passing link juice.

The reasoning behind this test is that unique titles should rank in Google because the title tag is one of the most important SEO factors. If a page with a unique title does not have a top 20 ranking for its title tag, then that’s evidence that website is penalized by Google.

This test can help you avoid trusting PageRank (PR) too much. I’ve found many PR5 sites that don’t rank in the top 20 for their unique title tags.