Why isn’t stainless steel called stain-proof steel? Because it does corrode, it just does less. When I set out to document my paperless life it felt misleading using the term “paperless”, which implies I’ve conquered the paper monster altogether. Rather this article is here to outline how I achieved a significantly paper-less existence and learnt to accept that there are situations where paper is still king.

It’s been two years since I read David Allen’s relentless bestseller Getting Things Done. Judging by the painfully outdated items in my Outlook task list (“research this ‘Face Book’ thing everyone’s talking about”) I haven’t stuck with everything Allen prescribes in his book, but I am definitely a changed man having read it. So here now are the things I took away from GTD, good and bad.

I once held a job with a midsized company that provided delicious bagels every morning. The only problem was that when I came into work they expected me to, you know, work. By break time the bagels were gone. Something had to be done. Thankfully, nobody ever realized how inefficient my role was. Using a brilliant and free software package called AutoIt I created a script that did the bulk of my job for me. When those bagels came I was poised and ready whilst my computer was doing my job for me on another floor. With a bit of tweaking about 60% of my ongoing daily workload was completed without any effort or attention.

With the popularity of email management philosophies like Getting Things Done (GTD) and Inbox Zero, more people find themselves dragging and dropping hundreds of emails into subfolders. This is a tedious process and one Outlook is not well designed to accommodate, especially when dealing with a high flow of correspondence. The perfect solution would be one where a quick, single keystroke gets the selected email(s) to their destination. No fuss, no muss, move on to the next. Fortunately there’s an easy way to do this up using Outlook’s macros and a little know-how. This article will show non-programmers how to painlessly set this up in less than five minutes.

Many years ago I read a book called Unleash the Warrior Within by Richard J. Machowicz. The cover supports a self-empowering title and a picture of the tough-as-nails author. Despite these deterring factors I stuck it out and read the book cover to cover, and it was worth it. Mr. Macho-witz, a former Navy SEAL and practicing Zen Buddhist has provided a viewpoint seldom seen in the self-help genre; the disciplined military perspective.

There has been a recent infatuation in productivity circles with the idea of having an assistant. It’s an easy thing to get excited about; having someone available to do all your menial and frustrating tasks while you sit around and drink margaritas. Mix in the idea of getting a Virtual Assistant (VA) from the developing world for pennies on the dollar and a lot of people buy in. It turns out that in many situation where you would pay for a VA’s helps, there is a much better way.