Yesterday at our second workshop for the good people over at McCann Erickson, in brainstorming how the people in the room could influence how to turn their company into a very digitally-fit organisation we hit upon a good old piece of wisdom from David Allen's Getting Things Done (or GTD - alternative description here) that I thought was worth reminding and sharing.

There are 3 types of work:

1. Doing pre-defined work
2. Doing work as it shows up
3. Defining your work

We all know the first two, but the third is so easy to neglect or forget.  Defining your work is tidying up your in basket, email, voicemail and working out the next steps on your projects.  Once you've defined your work and are feeling pretty good about it, then we work on how we work. 

What are my good habits?  What are my bad?  What's the nature of my work and what are my goals and standards?  Is that new piece of software actually helping?  Is it over complicating things without returning enough benefit?  Or would 20 mins investment of time one evening really make it start to work brilliantly? If I spent some time figuring out how to share calendars on Google Calendar - would that make a significant difference to the productivity of my team?

Useful reminders like the above can really help us make time for a little perspective and help us get in control of our work, how we work and the digital tools we use to do it.