How do you allocate time? Do you find yourself regularly seeking out large blocks of time to complete a task, only to find out afterward that it took a fraction of the expected time? Or do you often find yourself underestimating the time to completion, splitting up a task across multiple interruptions?
Some time management system gurus would argue that every task, however big or small, needs to be scheduled. But even critics of time management generally agree that activities requiring higher focus need long blocks of time set aside. But how long is long?
Parkinson’s Law
Even before Cyril Northcote Parkinson first postulated his “law” in an essay for The Economist in 1955, the notion that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion” has long been a popular assumption. It’s accepted as a given that if you give people eight hours to complete a six-hour task, they’ll take eight hours. Over time, Parkinson’s Law has been reformulated in quasi-scientific locutions that sound even more authoritative: “A task will swell in perceived importance and complexity in direct correlation to the time allotted to it.”
Like Murphy’s Law, Parkinson’s Law was coined by a humorist. Parkinson wasn’t in the business of offering time management tips. While all responsible project managers will plan for contingencies, they wouldn’t seriously do so on the basis of Murphy’s Law. Everyone recognizes that Murphy’s Law is observational humor, an exaggeration for comic purposes.
Parkinson’s Law, on the other hand, is often taken quite seriously, sometimes with disastrous effects when managers attempt to increase productivity by shortening deadlines. With supervised manual labor, where wage earners are expected to look busy throughout their shifts, it’s no surprise that workers will pace their work as needed to remain conspicuously active. In those cases, shorter deadlines can actually expedite things if supervisors can tolerate the idleness that follows, which is unlikely. Shortening deadlines usually does little more than increase the display of activity, and often increases errors — which then have to be fixed, pushing completion back beyond the original deadlines.
Knowledge work is fundamentally different from manual work, but not because it carries more perceived importance or complexity. It’s different because people can move faster on demand but cannot think faster. Think rate is fixed, or at least controlled by factors other than willpower or coercion. I recently realized why I enjoy writing longhand over typing. I type much faster than my mental rate of composition, since I frequently deliberate over word choices, but longhand is a perfect match.
Like Murphy’s Law, Parkinson’s Law isn’t a falsehood so much as an exaggeration. We’ve all seen it work from time to time, sometimes on the basis of luck; but there’s a actually a deep principle behind its occasional success: it forces people to think about their process as a whole instead of figuring it out as they’re going along.
You don’t need a boss breathing down your neck to apply the principle. You can simply take any task, pick a shorter time to completion and work backward. If you had to complete your most pressing project in half the time you now have available for it, and you didn’t have the option of taking longer, how would you do it? What would you do differently?
Concentration Threshold
Concentration Threshold is a theory of time allocation expressed by Julie Morgenstern, who states it as an observation rather than a law. If you give yourself too little time to complete a task, you won’t start because you implicitly know the time frame is unrealistic. If you give yourself too much time to complete a task, you won’t start because you implicitly know that your attention won’t last for the allotted block of time.
Concentration Threshold is specific to each individual and each task. We don’t procrastinate in general; we procrastinate on certain things more than others, depending on the level of focus required. Morgenstern describes a couple of examples in her commercial podcast, SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life: The 4-Step Plan for Getting Unstuck:
Most writers that I know can only write for up to four hours a day, and if they give themselves eight hours, they’re going to spend four hours procrastinating until they’re inside that window of “I only have four hours left,” and all of a sudden they buckle down and get it done. And when it comes to paying bills it’s very similar. People procrastinate on that because what I call their concentration threshold for managing their finances is about 20 minutes. So they sit down for an hour and they procrastinate for 40 minutes until they’re up to their concentration threshold, and then they finally engage, because 20 minutes is their maximum time frame for finances.
Leveraging your concentration threshold is a three-step process:
- Determine what specific activity is evoking procrastination. Resist the temptation to identify yourself as “a procrastinator.” Most people who think they procrastinate all of the time, on further analysis, come to realize that they only procrastinate on a very small, but important, number of things.
- Determine how long it takes to complete a task including procrastination time. In other words, count the time to completion from the moment your scheduled yourself to start to the time you actually started, then from the time you actually started to the time you finished for the day.
- The next time you schedule the task, only allot the amount to time that elapsed when you actually engaged from start to finish, which is very likely your concentration threshold.
Parkinson’s Law and Concentration Threshold look similar, since both call for shortening time allocations. But Parkinson’s Law always advocates time reduction, acting as a pressure valve, whereas Concentration Threshold requires sometimes reducing time, sometimes increasing it.
If you work in an environment where you’re required to put in a fixed number of hours, another way to apply the principle is to determine when your attention starts to wane (well, not yours or mine, but our friends and coworkers), then schedule your break periods right before those times. Learn to look for the natural ebbs and flows of your attention and work with them rather than against them.
(Photo credit: sfllaw)
In migrating virtually all of my computing into the cloud, I decided to try my hand at using a netbook. Depending on your semantics, I was using a netbook before they were netbooks, as a beta tester for the ill-fated Palm Foleo that arguably pioneered the genre. Of the models I surveyed, the HP Mini 1000 Mi came closest to the Foleo’s form factor, which I absolutely loved.
Last week, Engadget asked its readers "How would you change HP’s Mini 1000 Mi?" After the reply I started to post ran into a few paragraphs, I decided to cut and paste my thoughts here instead.
Why a Netbook?
My time logs show that it takes from 8 to 11 minutes for me to start working on the my regular laptop — time spent looking for an electrical outlet and waiting for the boot sequence to complete. Granted, my old laptop only has 1 GB of RAM and the battery is too exhausted to last more than 30 minutes before throwing XP into Hibernate mode. The HP netbook gave me something more agile than a full laptop: small, fast-booting, and with sufficient power to leave the charger at home. But is a netbook computer useful for serious work?
When I first started using the Foleo, I was primarily attracted by how I naturally carried it around: one handed in a neoprene sleeve, instead of a bag that would inevitably get filled things I didn’t need. Frank Lloyd Wright used to design homes with as few cupboards and closets as he could get away with, recognizing that if owners had additional space to fill, they would stockpile possessions rather than use them. I never missed having a laptop bag. Alas, I had to RMA the Foleo back to Palm when the product was canceled. Most of the netbooks released in the interim have either been too small, unergonomic, or otherwise compromised for me to take them seriously — until now.
The HP Mini 1000 Mi
Fast forward 18 months. From the moment I unboxed the Mini 1000, I had most of my Foleo experience back. Of all the netbooks currently on the market, except for a couple of sibling HP products, the Mini 1000 has the best keyboard I’ve tested, with keys that are flush-mounted and untapered. The Mini has a "92 percent," almost full-size keyboard, which is becoming increasingly common on netbooks. I only wish HP would have used a trackpoint (the eraser-like nub) for navigation instead of a trackpad, which would have created enough space to incorporate a full-size keyboard like the Foleo. As with a few other netbooks, like the Acer Aspire One, the trackpad’s buttons flank the sides of the pad rather than the bottom, which my thumbs have yet to get used to.
Software
The "Mi" version of the HP Mini 1000 features Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows XP. I wanted a less commercial operating system that would compel me to use web-based applications rather than native ones. The Mi was clearly designed with the non-geek in mind — there’s no command line console like the Bash shell, for instance. I miss the shell, since I much prefer to write with the classic text editor, vi, than the included text editor, gEdit. Most writers want a full word processor, and would probably be satisfied with OpenOffice, which is also bundled with the Mini. I’ve never been able to get into OpenOffice Writer, since it lacks the Outline View that makes Microsoft Word indispensable.
HP’s Mobile Internet Experience (MIE) user interface is a bit more attractive than a default Ubuntu distribution. The home screen is comprised of three panes. The left pane is for email, using Thunderbird. The center pane is for the web, featuring a search/address bar and bookmarks for launching a customized version of Firefox. The right pane is for music and photo, using HP’s own MediaStyle player and manager.
I set up the Thunderbird panel for my Gmail IMAP account, but after a couple of days I found myself more comfortable with accessing Gmail through the browser again. The Thunderbird interface is superficially attractive, since it displays the headers of your latest messages is soon as the computer is booted. But clicking on one of these headers doesn’t open the message directly. It opens the Thunderbird client in full screen mode, so you have to click on the header again to open the individual email. So the header column on the home screen is essentially a launcher icon for Thunderbird.
The same is true for MediaStyle. When you click on a thumbnail of a photo on the home screen, instead of displaying that photo full-sized, you’re taken to MediaStyle’s photo manager, from which you have to select the thumbnail again. Clicking on the thumbnail cover art for a music file works similarly: the selection launches MediaStyle’s file manager, and the file must be re-selected.
The web pane is better designed. The dropdown bookmarks menu and four Favorite thumbnails launch the browser and go to the selected website directly. The entry bar at the top of the allows you to put in a URL or search term, and the icons for Go and Search are intuitive.
The Linux version of Firefox, though customized, doesn’t seemed optimized for the Mini’s 1024 x 576 screen. The browser frame consumes too much real estate, but I’m still searching for a lightweight Linux Firefox theme — the two that I found wouldn’t install. Most of the extensions I use on the Windows version, on the other hand, did install (I have more compatibility issues with the latest Windows Firefox betas than with the MIE version). Fullscreen Mode (F11) is the best way to use the browser in most cases, especially when using Google Docs and Gmail.
In Daily Use
Switching between several computers nudged me into using the cloud exclusively on the netbook. After a couple of instances of leaving a natively written draft on the Mini, then needing that file later at a different computer, I decided to rule out local computing on the netbook. I use MindManager Web (the web-based version of MindManager, using the Mindjet Connect service) as my digital inbox. If there’s a thought I want to grab while working on something else I toggle over to MMW and drop it there; then process what I’ve collected on that collection map at the end of the day, opening the file from the MindManager 8 desktop version. I also use the "inbox" map on MMW for any collecting any sites, articles or documents I come across when using the Mini. 90 percent of what I need to be productive on the Mini is Gmail, Google Docs, and MindManager Web.
Like the old days of the Foleo, it’s been a relief to carry nothing but the netbook and it’s sleeve instead of additional paraphernalia. Unlike the Foleo, the Mini’s battery life is 2.5 to 3 hours, while the 2-year-old Foleo’s battery lasted nearly 6 hours with WiFi and Bluetooth active. HP sells a separate 6-cell alternative to the included 3-cell battery, but it protrudes from the base of the device at the center, which is neither visually attractive nor lap-friendly.
I’m tempted to replace MIE with Windows 7. Part of the reason for choosing the Linux version was the chance to learn something new. I don’t feel lost in the new environment, but the overall responsiveness is sluggish compared to Windows 7 installations I’ve seen on other netbook computers. I also find MIE’s slate-colored interface a rather cold ("Because modern science was looking for a color more somber than black," Mort Sahl once quipped about charcoal gray suits).
Overall, I like the practicality of the Mini Mi, but I’m still at a point where I feel more comfortable and productive when I’m sitting at a full-size laptop. But the netbook is perfect for taking advantage of smaller windows of time.
In compliance with Pantech’s guidelines, I had to wait until today, April 19, to unveil the winner of the challenge I issued in my last post. For those of you have better things to do than follow links, the challenge was thus:
I want you or anyone to post in the comments or email me the coolest cloud-based work setup they use on a daily basis, with a least one example of how it allowed you to do something you couldn’t do previously.
I got a bunch of great answers that were informative and inspiring. It’s a platitude to say that I had trouble choosing only one, but that was definitely the case here. But let’s skip the handwringing and get down to brass tacks. Who won?
Congratulations . . .
Kevin A, whose implementation of cloud services struck me the most extensive and integrated setup (if you’re not Kevin but still want second crack at the Matrix, keep reading):
I’ve used various MS technologies to acheive “cloud-like” computing over the past few years. Anything from Live Mesh, Live Mail (to a hotmail-hosted domain), WHS, and various other stuff.
I rarely sync my WM devices to the phone, because Windows Live for Windows Mobile syncs both my e-mail and contacts OTA. In turn, Windows Live Mail syncs contacts back from the hotmail acct back to my desktop, thereby un-neccessitating the requirement that I use Outlook to “back up” my contacts and mail.
On the WHS side, I can not worry about “backing up” computers because WHS does it for both my desktop and laptop. I can tell Vista to redirect Documents, Music, etc. to the WHS side. And once Mesh for WHS plugin is complete, I can tell WHS to handle meshing important documents to MS’s cloud network. So I don’t have to deal with offline files, or synctoy, or other solutions where I need to be necessarily connected to “my” network to get a sync on my files.
I may be a bit MS-centric here, but I’ve beta-tested various MS products over the years, and WHS, Mesh, and WLWM/WLM are three products that stood out because it cuts out the unnecessary middle-men. Why should I be required to be in my network or establish a VPN into my network to make sure my file is up-to-date? WWAN technology are only going to get better, I just have to ensure that I have short bursts of ‘net connectivity (3G or higher) to get up-to-date contents. Same thing with “sync your mail” into Outlook. With apologies to MS, I don’t particularly use Outlook, since it is bloated and tends to get confused occasionally. WLM is all I need, and MS has made it very easy to sync to a hotmail-hosted account, which in turn does the same for the WM5+ devices. I need not to be “at” my computer to get the same effect as an actual sync.
With SSD becoming standard, I may resort backing up my files via Mesh so that I don’t end up losing it. Which in turn would be backed-up via Home Server server backup syncing to the mesh, and folder redirection on the desktop, and Mesh is smart enough (supposedly) to not use the WAN connection. Which in turn would result in less end-user confusion about which “file” residing where is the most up-to-date
As Kevin admits, his solutions are rather MS-centric, using Windows Live services to sync Windows Mobile and Windows Home Server over-the-air (OTA) — but he’s managed to completely bypass Outlook and Exchange ActiveSync in the process. If I were willing to migrate from Gmail to Live Mail, I’d probably install WHS and follow Kevin’s lead. Like the other examples posted by contributors, this isn’t a 100% “Cloud” solution (WHS is doing the heavy lifting until the Mesh plugin is available), but the level of integration demonstrated is closest to the “single distributed computer” ideal I’ve been trying to model for my own setup.
Other Noteworthy Contributions
The most moving post for me was by Brent Johnson, who’s using Twitter to chronicle his mother’s upcoming lung replacement surgery among friends and family, and to organize teams to raise funds for it:
As it stands right now, I’m posting updates through Twitter, and I have them appear on a private WordPress page for family and friends to read.
As the surgery approaches, we’re also putting together a fundraising team to help raise money to cover the estimated $525,000 surgery. The fund raising teams will likely have computer access for many of their tasks, but we plan on implementing Twitter into that as well. During the events themselves, we will be able to coordinate the event (and the site volunteers) through the use of Smartphones and Twitter. That means all we will need are our cell phones, and we will be able to dispatch important announcements to team leaders spread over a large event or venue. It will enable to us communicate walkie-talkie style without having to purchase (or rent) expensive walkie-talkies. Since these are fundraising events, it’s important to us to conserve as much money as possible so it goes towards the fund (and not expenses).
Once the surgery starts, we will be able to post short Twitter updates about my mom’s condition for everyone to read. During the critical surgery, the last thing I will want to do is lug around a computer in order to update a website. Furthermore, I don’t want to have to call dozens and dozens of people to let them know her condition. Utilizing Twitter, I can easily post short updates LIVE, and everyone can either use their favorite Twitter client, the Twitter webpage, or our WordPress blog (with Twitter plugin) to see how well she’s doing. It will simplify everything during a very trying time for us and allow us to keep everyone updates minute by minute.
Girlxoxo had a very extensive setup, and virtually tied with Kevin A’s solution (but Kevin’s seemed more streamlined by a hair):
Google Calendar – all entries are scheduled there for my food reviews website. It’s a private calendar, but all the reviewers have the address so they can see when their review will be published. Also like that they can search by their name and at a glance see the dates for all their reviews.
Google Docs. All food reviews are written & stored there (about 850 and counting) .
Google Spreadsheet. Used to keep track of all income for months and all payments to reviewers.
Leaving Google …
Pixlr.com – Use it to edit images. Works just like Photoshop which I have on my computer, and I love that I can import pictures from a URL. Unfortunately, I still save the edited images to the laptop.
Delicious.com stores links I come across during the day.
Keepm.com. Stores all contacts – phone, gmail, facebook etc. I don’t want all contacts on my phone – some I probably will never use.
Mobile Phone. Use it for blogging also to my mobile phone features related website – using SharpMT, xnViewer and PocketScreen for screenshots (guess that’s not really cloud but I like the all in one – FAST aspect of it).
Dashwire.com – all contacts, texts sync from mobile to Dashwire.
Speaking of sync – Google mobile (and calendar) sync (I know I said I was finished with Google).
Business phone line (for blogging contacts): Google Voice (formerly Grandcentral.com) – rings my cellphone.
Rather than paste the entire comment thread here, check out the great contributions in the last post.
Still Want to Win a Matrix Pro?
Tools for Thought is the first of over two dozen sites that are running contest for the Matrix Pro, courtesy of Pantech. The details of each contest will probably be quite different, but the prize is the same: the Pantech Matrix Pro. Head on over to one of the remaining sites:
Good luck, and thanks for all of your contributions!
This isn’t the usual T4T post, for a couple of reasons.
First, instead of giving advice in my usual presumptuous fashion, I’m asking for it. I’m radically redesigning my workflow and need a few intrepid readers to share some successful or dramatic examples of how they’re using the cloud. Second, I’m “selling out” by aligning myself with a commercial promotion — cell phone geeks take note. I’ll get to the details in a few paragraphs, but first, an explanation . . .
Cloudsourcing
Just as it’s often said that true writing is rewriting, I believe that true thinking is rethinking — the ability to step back from deeply entrenched assumptions, opinions and perspectives, and actively look for further alternatives. As a mental exercise, I often find it useful to periodically reexamine the assumptions I take for granted and invert them to see what happens.
A recent starting point for that self-examination was 10 Technologies I Resist. I went down the list and see if there were a few of those technologies I could test drive to broaden or reverse my perspective. There more more that a few that I found worth experimenting with: virtual outsourcing, IM, online finance trackers, mobile email and Office 2.0. That last one is the kickoff point of this post. For the next 30 days I’m going to migrate all of my information into the cloud, and chronicle the progress of the project is a series of posts called “Cloud Studies.”
In switching from full self-employment to office work, I’ve had to distribute my personal and professional work across several platforms: a home desktop, a work desktop, a laptop, a netbook and a cell phone. Trying to reconcile my data by copying locally-stored files, or sharing them by email, was getting ridiculously convoluted. So my goal is to design a virtual architecture that integrates my data in the absolute minimum number of buckets.
I recently, painfully migrated from the Palm OS Treo/Palm Desktop combo — that’s been the bedrock of my GTD system since I first implemented it — to the Windows Mobile equivalent: a Treo Pro and Microsoft Outlook. My goal is to sync my phone and various Outlook desktop/OWA clients over the air with a hosted Exchange account, then gradually layer on additional services: Skydrive for mass storage, Live Mesh for file synchronization, Mindjet Connect for mind maps, and possibly My Phone for PIM data. If none of this sounds less convoluted that my previous scheme, I have a pretty good idea that once the infrastructure is set up, my workflow will be dramatically streamlined — essentially accessing one “computer” from any device.
This Is Where You Come In
Here’s what I want. I want you or anyone to post in the comments or email me the coolest cloud-based work setup they use on a daily basis, with a least one example of how it allowed you to do something you couldn’t do previously. “Coolest” here can mean a few things:
- The most efficient: e.g. how you run your life through a personal wiki or WebDAV
- The most dramatic: how you use Backpack and Twitter to dispatch work to a team virtual assistants in St. Croix (real-world examples please, not creative writing)
- The most elegant: how you eliminated your additional computers and run them as virtual images on Amazon EC2 from your netbook
- The most democratic: how you’ve replaced all of the files and applications on your hard drive with free and open source web apps
You have 48 hours from “now,” 12:00 a.m. Thursday, April 16, 2009, until midnight Saturday, April 18.
What’s In It for You
As you’ve no doubt gathered from the post title, the winner scores a brand new Pantech Matrix Pro. The Matrix is a dual-slider Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard (non-touchscreen) smartphone in the form factor of a feature phone. In simpler terms, it’s a phone that slides up vertically for a numeric keypad, and horizontally for a QWERTY keypad. I’ll be posting a review of the phone shortly, but the bottom line is that I would probably make it my default phone if I hadn’t just renewed my Sprint contract (long story). Included with the phone is a $100 gift card that can be applied to any products and services sold through an AT&T store, online or offline.
If you have everything you need in the mobile space, then don’t play to win. Play to share your favorite cloud hacks.
How do you allocate time? Do you find yourself regularly seeking out large blocks of time to complete a task, only to find out afterward that it took a fraction of the expected time? Or do you often find yourself underestimating the time to completion, splitting up a task across multiple interruptions?
