Neat

Neatness is the absence of visual disarray. It’s the first standard people strive for when trying to avoid some anticipated consequence of conspicuous mess — like a reprimand from a boss, parent or spouse. Some workplaces mandate clean-desk policies, where employees aren’t allowed to leave the office with paperwork on their desks. So at 4:55 p.m., they scoop up everything on their desk and shove it into any available drawer space, only to resurface at 8:05 a.m. This doesn’t eliminate mess; it hides it.

Some neatness is neater than others. Many desks are free of piles, above or below the surface, but the placement of materials is arbitrary. It might be more aesthetic for someone to have a not-in-use document tucked out of view. But when it comes time to retrieve it, if it takes serious mental effort to remember where to find it, there’s definitely an improvement opportunity on the horizon.

Some people take neatness a step further and consider it synonymous with minimalism. Minimal isn’t always optimal. Frequently used items tucked away for sight’s sake can create unwarranted overhead. For instance, I used to keep all of my project folders in my filing cabinet, except the one for that supported the one task I happened to be working on in that moment. That’s generally a good practice, but there are usually a few projects whose support material needs to be retrieved several times throughout the day.

It’s far less hassle to keep those frequently retrieved project folders above the desk in a separate tray, rather than pulling them out of the file cabinet, then return them to the file cabinet when their frequent use has died down. So I added a project support tray stacked directly under my intray. To make project folders in trays neater (in a good way), apply the project labels to the bottom edge of the folders as well as the tabs; then store the folders with the labeled bottom edge facing outward.

Organized

An organized environment is neat by definition, but goes a step further. Paperwork is meaningfully ordered for efficient storage and retrieval, minimizing the need to waste brainpower on the clerical work of collating and remembering. Documents that are currently not in use are filed, not piled, out of view to minimize distractions from irrelevant content. Paperwork on the go kept in the appropriate folder or personal organizer.

Piles in themselves are innocent. When all of the paperwork on someone’s desk is related to the same project, it can still be scattered all over without being distracting. It may look like a mess visually, but if it’s all related thematically, it’s still coherent in purpose. If an interruption comes in that forces the person to switch to a different project, it’s easy to scoop up all of the papers belonging to the interrupted project and put them in either a project folder or, lacking a ready-made folder, back in his in-basket — then lay out that paperwork again once the interruption has been dealt with.

A frequent problem with managing paperwork, not addressed by most personal organization tips, is dealing with papers that fall into a mental gray area: they clearly aren’t trash, but it’s equally clear that they shouldn’t be permanently archived — they’re not “records.” They might need to be accessed in a few minutes, hours, days, or . . . never. The usual coping strategy for this short-term paperwork is to shove it to the side of the desk, where it blends with other paperwork that’s either actionable or reference, creating an amorphous sense of “so much work to do.”

As long a filing is reserved for permanent storage items, the surface of the desk will become the default holding area for randomly assorted paperwork. Usually, owners of these piles are using them as reminders of what projects need to be worked on. This is nowhere near as scalable as a well-updated calendar and task list. Only so many papers are visible at any one time.

The alternative is to create an A-to-Z general reference filing system, which becomes the temporary-to-permanent holding area for every piece of paper that’s either not trash or not supporting a project being worked being handled at the moment. When all paperwork is out of view, the user has to look at his or her task list and calendar in order to know what to do next. Avoid using randomly assorted paperwork as your To Do list, and you’ll find that prioritizing work becomes much less stressful.

Uncluttered

An uncluttered environment is neat and organized, but free of physical and emotional deadwood. There’re more to eliminating clutter than personal organizing. Clutter can be deceptively well organized: obsolete files, unnecessary routines on one’s calendar, unused gadgets, oversized furniture, time-filling habits like excessive beverage drinking. It’s not uncommon for people who review their actual usage patterns to find that they only regularly use a small fraction of what’s available to them.

I just got rid of a scanner that I’ve only used half a dozen times in as many months, but took up space and attention. In the future I’ll just go to a copy store when needed. Once the need to prop up the scanner was removed, I began thinking about how much I dislike my computer desk, and desks with shelves in general. So now I’m looking for a desk that’s less cumbersome. Pruning one unneeded possession usually increases sensitivity other more unneeded ones. Instead of creating a sterile environment, decluttering creates a more lively space by leaving only the things you genuinely use and care about.

Trash is obviously clutter, but clutter goes beyond trash. Most types of clutter are much harder to get rid of than trash, because they usually have an emotional connection to the owner. A book whose’s information was useful at one point in life but no longer is becomes hard to categorize as clutter, even if the owner knows deep down that she now has no conscious intention of reading it again — it has some intrinsic value, so it’s kept around “just in case,” neatly placed on a bookshelf where it remains harmlessly inert. The more “stuff” like this that’s kept around just in case, the more anchored to our past we become.

The first step to eliminating clutter is defining it in terms of what you want to accomplish at this point in your life, clarifying it as one or more goals or themes. Then survey your possessions to ask yourself if each one helps to support that new theme rather than an older one. If the answer is yes, keep it; otherwise it’s clutter. It may have value, but not relevance in light of your current life. Make it a habit to reduce the things in your life to the vital, and you’ll increase your vitality.

(Photo credit: mizocrazy)

Technorati Tags: Decluttering

Information: a need that feeds on itself

Until I cancelled my RSS feeds, I had no idea just how frequently and reflexively I was typing “gr,” my keyword bookmark for Google Reader, into the Firefox address bar. For the first couple of days on the Low Information Diet, stopping myself from check my feeds was unsettling. Typing “gr” was like an autonomic response to boredom and anxiety. If I hadn’t unsubscribed from the feeds, I probably would’ve found an excuse to read them anyway. Fortunately, since I did, only an empty GReader came up.

By the middle of the week, I was completely over RSS, and wondered how many hours I had spent either reading feeds, or surfing through sites based on information I had come across in those feeds. I’ve gone back to reading nonfiction, but now I visit my favorite blogs directly, at what will probably wind up being two or three times per week.

RSS has convinced me that information is a need that feeds on itself. The more information you find, the more information you seek, and the more you seek, the more you find. That circularity, being “in the loop,” is unscalable. Increased awareness of what information is “out there” to be learned or miss out on induces loss aversion. The hunger for information increases while the number of hours in the day remains the same.

Getting back to zero base

I think everyone should renounce his or her intake of information for at least one week. The Low Information Diet should be familiar to anyone who’s read The 4-Hour Workweek. It consists of:

• No web surfing
• No excessive email checking
• No RSS
• No news (really, the world will still turn)
• No non-entertainment television (ideally no television)
• No nonfiction books

What’s allowed: a one-hour indulgence each day of any of the above. Music and fiction are also fair game. I didn’t do the one-hour indulgence myself, since it was too easy for me to relapse.

You can always go back to devouring information for information’s sake, but if you stick to a full week, you’ll almost certainly drop some information sources from your permanent diet. Now that I’m going to blogs on an as-needed basis instead of reading them just because they’re in my RSS reader, I enjoy reading them more, since there’s less sense of obligation.

Some of the information we consume is important, some of it was important, and some of it might be important. The best way to objectively determine what’s relevant is stopping the flow of information entirely for a finite period. As long as you’re trying to keep up with incoming information, there’s no way to have sufficient perspective to distinguish between the content with high relevance and the content that’s consumed out of habit.

The less frequently you keep up with new developments in a given field of interest, the more perspective you’ll have on them. You can join every social network du jour, or wait a few months to see which few have traction, then join those. Value investors make as much or more money with less work than day traders. You can read the news analysis columns of newspapers every day, or get more in-depth analyses from weekly news magazines. Bloggers who check traffic and subscription stats daily overreact to minor fluctuations.  Some issues and events need time to play out before any meaningful patterns or relationships can be detected.

The point of diminishing returns

Just as there’s a point of diminishing returns with too much information, the same holds for too little information. The best way to find out how little is too little is to get back to zero base. By taking in no information, the sources you genuinely miss will make themselves known, but they’ll probably be far fewer than you expect. I noticed that it was harder to brainstorm topics for the blog last week, since some of what I write is a reaction to what others in the bloggosphere are saying. So I read those blogs weekly and will check others occasionally.

Just before starting a Low Information Diet, everything you’re currently reading or listening to seems essential rather that habitual. It’s hard to imagine giving up even half of your daily reading. After a week, you’ll probably go back to reading between 10-20 percent of your original. You start becoming aware of the opportunity costs of consuming more information than you can act on. Try it for a week and see what content you allow back into your life.

(Photo credit: Super Ninja)

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Decluttering

The books I’m discarding don’t serve my current life project, so there’s no point in keeping them “just in case.” The books aren’t clutter because they take up space. They’re clutter because their presence in my life represents an implicit obligation to read them. Yes, I could go the rest of my life keeping them around without reading them, but then they’re no longer books; they’re doorstops. They cease to have meaning and serve no purpose. They keep me anchored to aspects of the past that I no longer need to perpetuate.

Life themes

According to Morgenstern, each of us has a life theme. These themes are focal points around which we organize our behaviors, values and relationships. As we grow, themes evolve or change. The biggest impediments to change are the artifacts that we accumulated in pursuit of our original theme. We begin to identify with the “stuff” surrounding our themes.

I summarized my old theme as “learning,” and acquired a ton of books in pursuit of this theme. While I’m still passionate about learning, I no longer have my identity invested in it, so I don’t need to surround myself with books to symbolically demonstrate that I’m “learned.”

My new theme is “resonance,” a word that’s probably strange to outsiders, but the basic idea is that I only want to have and do things in my life that resonate as authentic and essential. Any vision of success that requires being a more voracious consumer or a lifestyle salesman is a nonstarter. Eliminating unreal things, relationships and obligations is my priority.

Clutter

Clutter is excess, not mess. According to Morgenstern:

Clutter . . . is defined as any obsolete object, space, commitment or behavior that weighs you down, distracts you or depletes your energy. [It] is symbolic of our attachment to something from the past that must be released in order to make room for change.

Decluttering, therefore, is making room for change, not just a means to have a prettier working or living space. In SHED, there are three types of clutter:

• Physical clutter: unused clothes (even if perfectly wearable), obsolete gadgets, etc. Even a large house kept after a divorce might be clutter, depending on the circumstance
• Schedule clutter: unproductive obligations — meetings, errands, etc. They might have served a purpose at one point, but are now obstructing more useful activity
• Habit clutter: excessive television watching and internet surfing, checking email, etc. They relieve stress in the moment but increase stress by creating time famine

While SHED is a comprehensive system for attacking clutter on each of these fronts, I want to focus on one insight I had that sped up my decluttering across the board.

Two questions, one art

In SHED, once you have your new theme, you look at each “point of entry” (physical, schedule, habit) and create “treasure guidelines” or determine which things to keep — the treasures — and which to trash. These guidelines are a detailed checklist for asking of each thing, “Does this support my new theme?” If not, it’s trash. The goal is to keep no more that 10-20 percent of one’s original load in each point of entry.

When doing this with physical clutter, I still found myself deliberating too much over each objects, and couldn’t figure our why I was resisting the process. Then it occurred to me: I was holding onto things because they had value. I needed to take the next step and ask myself if they had relevance.

Whenever you have trouble deciding whether or not to keep something, ask yourself two questions:

• Does this have value?
• Does this have relevance?

Once I applied those two questions to each and every object I considered getting rid of, the whole decluttering process started to flow. Our emotions are tied to the intrinsic value of something, not its relevance. Be sure to ask both questions. Asking if something has value allows us to acknowledge our reasons for wanting to hold onto it. Asking if it has relevance allows us to discern whether or not it enhances our own lives, rather then someone else’s.

My monographs of Tadao Ando and Renzo Piano were valuable, but I’m no longer as aspiring architect, so I sold them to someone who would find them relevant. Doing so brings enhances my commitment to writing, an activity has greater relevance and resonance for me. Multiply that process by hundreds of objects, and you can imagine the improvement opportunity available for letting go of obsolete engagements.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
– Elizabeth Bishop

Pick one thing in your environment that’s been sitting around that you’ve been meaning to get rid of, and apply the two questions to get the decluttering ball rolling. As Bishop would say, “Lose something every day.”

(Photo credit: Panayotis)

Technorati Tags: Decluttering

I’ve written several times in passing about inherent flaws in what’s usually called “time management,” particularly about the central assumption that controlling time is synonymous with increasing productivity. The time-and-motion model of productivity is an Industrial Age artifact that springs from the need for lockstep coordination of tasks on the assembly line. When cranking widgets requires a fixed-rate throughput, the need for doing most things at set times is absolute.

This model breaks down in knowledge work, where new inputs are typically experienced as interruptions. Without the ability to capture incoming work, or to suspend current work in a way that allows it to be resumed without woolgathering, only predefined work is deemed important. To reinforce the emotional investment in each predefined task, the time management adherent assigns arbitrary start and end times. This does two of three things:

• It defers the task, even if there’s no reason it couldn’t be done sooner
• If too little time is allocated, the person experiences resistance to the unrealistic demand and procrastinates
• If too much time is allocated, the person paces the task to fill the excess

None of these problems are fatal. On the contrary, there are times when the liabilities are outweighed by the benefits. For tasks requiring sustained periods of deep concentration, blocking out one or more hours makes more sense than chipping away at them in smaller increments.

The real problem with scheduling happens when a calendar is used as a to do list. I recently wrote about this in the post, Reclaim Time by Unscheduling Arbitrary Tasks. Unlike most home-based workers, office workers have to deal with frequent but irregular inputs. There are only so many calls someone can allow to go to voice mail, so many requests from bosses, customers and coworkers that can be tolerably dismissed.

Some workers who complain about the number of meetings that are cluttering their calendar are unaware of the further clutter they add to their calendar by scheduling tasks with no authentic time dependencies. When these scheduled tasks are interrupted, they either have to be resumed within the remainder of the originally committed slot, or rescheduled into a future assumed to be less free of interruptions.

The consequences of elevating When over What

In response to the post, Francis Wade of the 2Time Management System blog wrote a thoughtful examination of advanced time management practice. By implication, the rescheduling problem I pointed to was merely symptomatic of trying to maintain an inflexible schedule. When a more proficient user has her schedule interrupted, it’s understood that best laid plans will be disrupted from time to time. Rescheduling is a realistic part of the process.

The following excerpt illustrates the consequences of overscheduling better than I possibly could:

. . . those who decide to upgrade from Yellow to Orange Belts are often users who must deal a high volume of time demands.

They follow the Yellow Belt system of scheduling only the hard-edged appointments. In the typical 12 hour day, let’s imagine that they schedule an hour or two per day of activity.

The remaining 10 hours in the day are also scheduled… but only in the mind of the user.

The key difference between the Yellow and Orange Belts is that the Orange Belt takes the extra step and translates their mental schedule into one that is kept in writing, usually in Outlook or some other similar software.

Notice the “typical 12 hour day” cited. This norm in knowledge work results from piling the residue of yesterday’s scheduled work onto today’s, heightening the sense of urgency. Because the worker feels obligated to rivet each task to “today” in order to feel productive, he remains at work well past 5:00, until the backlog is completed or rescheduled, or the guilt from missing his family compels him to break the cycle of busyness.

Chronic overtime exemplifies what sociologists call eversion, where a behavior pushed to its extreme leads to the opposite of its intended outcome, like fasting leading to binging. The 12 hour day that results from socially approved cramming of Outlook calendars leads to counterproductivity. Attempting to control time through micromanagement creates a culture where time flies out of control.

Overtime acts as a safety valve for discursive busyness. As long as the evening is available to catch up on activities that were interrupted today and carried over from the day before, a shorter workday is unimaginable.

Of course, the 12 hour day wasn’t the point of the argument that was quoted. The alternative to transcribing a mental schedule into a written one is recognizing that an array of tasks with no external time dependencies is a list, not a schedule. The closer these tasks are stacked to each other on a calendar, the greater the domino effect when interrupted. The specific interruption won’t recur the next day, but general pattern of interruption throughout the day will.

Bookmarking

Without schedule clutter to deflect interruptions, the worker instead uses bookmarking. If he allows the interruption, he collects the material of his current work and puts it into his in-basket (if it’s email, he simply returns to the last message after handling the interruption).

The worker is writing up a purchase order. The boss walks up, asking if he has a minute. The worker throws the PO in his in-basket, then takes notes on whatever the big cheese has to say. When the boss leaves, the employee processes these notes, or delegates any embedded actions, then returns to the bookmark of where he left off on the interrupted work: the PO sitting in his in-basket. No time or focus is lost to regrouping.

Focus on managing tasks, not time

As mentioned, scheduling an action necessarily defers it. In contrast, an item on an action list should be done as soon as possible. “As soon as possible” doesn’t mean this very moment; it just means as soon as possible. If there’s a window of uncommitted time in your calendar, take advantage of it and work from your action lists.

Some actions will require more time and concentration, so schedule those if necessary. As with meetings, an excess of scheduled tasks will create time famine, so schedule things on an as-needed basis, without deliberately allocating too much or too little time. A little scheduling goes a long way.

(Photo credit: jpfinley)