The critique is well intended but misdirected. The problem lies with the end user, not the best practices or tips and tricks given, nor on the software and gadgets being fetishized. Without the right mindset, consuming advice is unproductive, but having a clear purpose for seeking out and implementing advice changes the ethos of life hacking fundamentally.

Personal Kaizen

Let’s shift the focus from life hacks to life hackers, or geeks, and contrast them to “regular people.” Normally a person experiencing a problem will solve that problem on a just-in-time basis without classifying it, therefore increasing the odds of repeating it. A geek takes a more architectonic approach by classifying the problem and looking for a systemic fix, asking two implicit but fundamental questions:

• What are the predictable roots of this problem?
• What are the best practices for solving, removing or reducing its occurrence?

Instead of leaving ice cream in the freezer when starting a diet, then trying to resist temptation, a life hacker throws the ice cream out, knowing that removing unproductive options is more reliable than appealing to discipline. A life hacker working on a spreadsheet understands that taking five minutes to find a function, macro or shortcut key in Excel will recovers hours of wasted time working on a repetitive task manually in the long run. A normal worker is too preoccupied with getting the assigned task done to stop and reexamine the strategy behind the task.

Yesterday, for the second day in a row, I forgot to bring the magnetic ID badge that allows me elevator access to the floor of my office — the badge was in a coat I left at home. The conventional reaction would have been resolving to remember to bring the badge next time. Instead, I took the badge out of the plastic lanyard holder and put it in my wallet. Now I just place my wallet next to the security sensor when I take the elevator, and I never have to worry about remembering to bring the badge. The focus wasn’t on overcoming the problem, but on removing it.

The individual example is trivial, but the same frame of mind can be applied to much more significant examples. Instead of haphazardly trying to control one’s spending each month, a life hacker will set up automatic payroll deductions with her bank for savings, investing and bill payment, knowing that whatever funds remain are discretionary.

Life hacks are instances of an ethos the Japanese call Kaizen: the focus on continuous, methodical improvement by viewing all resources and processes that contribute to a desired outcome as aspects that can be tweaked, measured or reconsidered — variables like tools, schedules, environment, relationships and methods. The same philosophy can and should be applied not only to production, but to life. Recipes by themselves won’t make a great chef, riffs by themselves won’t make a great musician, source code alone won’t make a great programmer. It’s the initiative and interest — the fascination — of the chef, the musician, the programmer, the life hacker, that integrates disparate information into a sum that exceeds its parts.

Better Problems

While we can’t be free of problems, we can always strive to have better problems. For years, I wondered why my coworkers received so much more email than I did. Part of this was due to their comfortable threshold for how many emails they would allow to sit in their inbox, but I recently realized that it had more to do with my threshold for many times I’m willing to delete the same type of email: twice.

As soon as I see the same type of email that I would delete again, I don’t hit the Delete key; I take an the extra minute to create a filter for it. So if I get a promotional offer from eBay, I set a filter to delete any subsequent messages of the same type with their unique identifier (e.g. “% off” in the Subject line). Having a two-minute rule to set filters as part of my daily email processing does two things: it prevents repetitive messages from irritating me into finally taking action on them, and it has the cumulative effect of reducing the size of my inbox over time. Having hundreds (yes, hundreds) of filters prevents me from getting hundreds of messages a day. Messages from whitelisted senders are similarly filtered to be automatically labeled and sorted above other messages in my inbox.

An hour of hard critical thinking can be worth more than a month of hard work. — Tim Ferriss

Network administrators have one of the few jobs where talent is demonstrated by working less. A good sysadmin automates as much of their work as possible by finding or writing shell scripts that keep things running with an absolute minimum of manual intervention. A Danny O’Brien pointed out in his presentation, Life Hacks — Tech Secrets of Over Prolific Alpha Geeks, a geek will spend 10 hours writing a script to accomplish an 11-hour task. They do this mainly because the process fascinates them more than the result, but that initial 10 hours is amortized each time the script needs to be run again — so the “Just Do It” reaction that’s typical of non-geeks is a false economy. The geek addresses the system rather than the symptom.

Many processes in other domains of work an life can be similarly automated with the right mindset. It requires disciplined self-examination, identifying repetitive decisions, documenting them, finding ways to streamline, automate, eliminate, or delegate them to others. Always set aside time from projects to focus on process.

(Photo credit: mwilkie)

At the time I wrote:

It’s on my Someday/Maybe list to try the likes of Guru or AskSunday. At the moment I don’t have any tasks that seem onerous enough to dump on a developing country. Maybe I’ll brainstorm a list of tasks and outsource them just to be fashionable and say I’ve done it.

This year, my new schedule is a problem looking for a solution, so I began reexamining my assumptions about the value of a virtual assistant (VA) and looking for use cases that weren’t silly. In my research, I came across a couple of posts by personal development and productivity blogger Sid Savara that gave some of the most detailed examples of using personal outsourcing effectively. He generously agreed to answer some follow up questions I shot him.

Andre: In your post, The Price of My Dreams – $60 a Week, you discussed your experiments with outsourcing your cooking and laundry. Are you still maintaining your domestic outsourcing, or have you expanded the scope of it?

Sid: Yes, I am still outsourcing my cooking and I love it.  At this point it’s truly changed my lifestyle – I no longer shop, I no longer cook and I no longer even think about what I need to eat.

I am also experimenting with a maid service (The Maids). Full disclosure, my parents own The Maids franchise in Honolulu.  One cleaning takes them about 1.5 hours, and saves me a total of about 6-8 hours.  They also do a far better job than I do, but if we’re just talking about time saved, it saves me about 6 hours every two weeks.

I’m interested in outsourcing my event planning (calling friends, organizing potlucks, etc) but so far my friends have done an admirable job picking up the slack, and I use Socializr to send out on email and then handle the RSVPs.  I had my TimeSvr aides send out the invitations for me, which saved me a few minutes of work each time as well.

Andre: You’re on record of having used Craig’s List and TimeSvr. Have you tried any other outsourcing resources, like Elance or Guru?

I have used Elance, but never Guru. My understanding of Guru is they are focused more towards heavily technical projects. As a software engineer myself, if I have something especially technical I want done, I tend to write it myself or collaborate with friends.

I have had a good experience with Elance.  I’ve hired a couple people to do minor, fairly mundane tasks (analyzing values in a spreadsheet for example) and it was always well worth the money.  My single virtual assistant that I used for much of my blog set up and research I also found from Elance. I asked Prabhu to find the best posts for me out of the mounds I read, cull my RSS feeds, look up names and contact info for various blogs and moderate comments. In addition, I had him do some minor proofreading etc of posts.

The most important thing is to find a good assistant.  I am sure there are bad ones out there, but I tend to be ruthless in my questions. If someone doesn’t show enough drive, or sounds to me like they’re trying to fool me into believing they are something they are not, I reject them.

Andre: What’s your judgment process for deciding to offload a task rather than doing it yourself?

Sid: I would love to offload more tasks.  I think the main issue is finding someone capable of doing it for a reasonable price, and looking at whether it is worth the effort to give the job to someone else. Any outsourcing requires a certain level of management or trust, and that’s the biggest issue I’ve had.

For example, I’d like to outsource more of my email responses as I get hundreds a day. I’ve discovered though that with judicious GMail filtering I can get it down to a manageable 30 or so “real” emails a day – and the responses tend to be customized.  If I was running a mail order business, perhaps I could outsource more, but as a software engineer and writer, most of my replies tend to be based on my experience and judgment calls.

Cooking, laundry, cleaning, car service, car washing etc are all activities that are solid candidates to outsource because I am sure I can get someone who can do it at least as well as me, and at a price that saves me enough time to make it worth my while.  Similarly, event planning (calling my friends) doesn’t require a lot of skill – but perhaps requires my personality,

Andre: What are the biggest mistakes to avoid when delegating tasks and projects?

Sid: I think there are two main mistakes people make (and by this I mean, these are the two main mistakes I made).

The first is assuming that the person who has been delegated the task knows as much as you do about it.  Knowledge that I take for granted and skills that I find basic may be foreign to my assistant.   Assume that your assistant has no skills, and that you’ll need to explain each step in plain english – the first time they do it.

The second is assuming that you know how to delegate. Most people are great at delegating tasks to one person: themselves. In order to effectively delegate, instructions need to be laid out very clearly with all the decision points explained. The type of results expected, the format of documents, etc should be specified in advance so that the assistant knows end to end what the process should entail.

Finally, one cautionary note – don’t assume silence is a good sign.  If you tell your assistant “I’ll expect it Monday, email me if you have questions”, and then don’t follow up by Monday, you may be in for a rude shock.  Oftentimes silence can indicate your assistant does not even know what questions to ask. Come Monday, you’ll either have a confused assistant asking for more time, or worse, the completely wrong task completed because they were too proud or too ashamed to ask for better direction.

Andre: What are some common assumptions made about outsourcing that you’ve found through experience to be exaggerated or false?

Sid: I think one large misconception is that foreign assistants are of inferior quality.  From my (admittedly narrow) experience, foreign assistants are skilled enough to handle data entry and analysis tasks given accurate instructions. Their command of the English language is strong enough, even though some may have accents.  So while they may not be suitable for speaking on your behalf at a keynote, they can certainly put together the excel spreadsheet and pie chart you present.

Another misconception that I had was that it would be difficult to get started.  I thought it would take weeks to find someone, to bring them up to speed, etc.  This is false – in all my experiences outsourcing, finding a provider was the easy part. My assistants were ready to help the same day – they are hungry for work.  The hard part is the delegation, and learning how to effectively get the most out of your assistant for mutual benefit.

Andre: In Can Virtual Assistants Make You More Productive?, you talked about your experiences with your individual VA, Prabhu, and with the team of VAs at TimeSvr. In the comments, you mentioned that you would be keeping Pradhu after your trial of TimeSvr lapsed. Was that out of loyalty, better rapport or better results? Which approach would you recommend to others: an individual VA or a team?

Sid: It certainly wasn’t out of loyalty – if I had a superior experience with TimeSvr that blew Prabhu away, I would likely have given him a couple weeks notice, perhaps tried to find someone else to take his services, and leave.  The main issue was that Prabhu was a well oiled machine by the time I found TimeSvr.  I had been with Prabhu and we had settled on a process to handle my tasks.  While TimeSvr benefits from economies of scale and can offer a large number of tasks (with specialized assistants for each tasks), Prabhu handled a few tasks that were especially time consuming and did it well – for minimum expense.  TimeSvr is a fantastic service for someone who wants a general purpose virtual assistant, or who wants solid reporting on individual, discrete tasks.

In my case, I had a few tasks that I needed done, that Prabhu did well.  The prices for both would be approximately the same to me (since I was likely paying Prabhu a rate similar to what TimeSvr assistants make).

I would recommend TimeSvr (or another VA team) to people who want a variety of tasks and a variety of different aides to do them, or if you are not sure what you are going to outsource just yet.  On the other hand, for a long term relationship with a few specific tasks an individual assistant and the teamwork that comes with that may be superior.  I believe that firms with VA Teams, such as TimeSvr, offer this dedicated assistant service as well. If I recall, the pricing was very comparable to what I was paying Prabhu – I just had no compelling reason to switch since he already performed efficiently.

Andre: Can you illustrate how outsourcing saved you time or effort with one or two of the most graphic examples?

Sid: I think cooking is still probably the best example.  Cooking is a process that requires so much more than simply frying up something in a pan – it involves looking up a recipe, driving to the store, purchasing ingredients, storing those ingredients until I have time to cook, cooking, and finally cleaning the pots and pans.  Compare that with just going outside and having food dropped off in tupperware, and it turns out to be a monstrous saving.

Having my apartment cleaned by the Maids is another great example.  They sent a team of 4 people, who are all trained to clean, with tools specifically made to clean.  My shower looks cleaner than it has in months, and my kitchen is spotless.  My friend remarked that to get his bathroom to look the way it did after they cleaned it would have taken him 3 hours of scrubbing.  I think part of this is because it’s their job, they work harder and faster than we would if we were unmotivated and cleaning it on our leisure time.  I will gladly trade some of my hours earning money developing software for a few of their hours spent cleaning and sanitizing my home.

Andre: In the latter post you mentioned “better parallelization of tasks” as one of the advantages of outsourcing. Will a VA team actually work of multiple tasks you assign simultaneously?

Sid: This depends on the VA firm, so it would be best to check with whoever you are going with to ensure your expectations are appropriate.  I gave TimeSvr so much work during my initial test that I don’t think they could do anything but parallelize if they wanted to give me good service.  I also emailed for status updates and heard back from different VAs on each task, which leads me to believe they had multiple people working on my account at the same time.

Andre: You documented how you dispatched a couple of research tasks: one for comparing e-commerce solutions, and another for comparing subnotebooks you were interested in purchasing. What would be your top tips for assigning tasks right the first time?

Sid: If it’s a research task, I absolutely recommend specifying exactly what format you want your research in. If you want a spreadsheet, tell them you want a spreadsheet. If you are interested in 5 specific features, ask for those columns to be listed.  This was a slight misstep I made with the e-commerce solution task, though the results still turned out fine. In the subnotebook task, I was much more specific with my request and ended up getting results that matched well with what I requested.

Bottom line, if you don’t ask for it – you won’t get it.

I would also caution against tasks that require some implicit cultural knowledge. For example, rather than saying get me the biographies of 10 popular US basketball stars, I would name the basketball stars by name – or risk having a few on that list that may not be popular anymore.  Another reader commented to me they assigned task similar to this asking for popular groups in a specific niche and their assistant ended up misunderstanding and providing them with useless information.

Andre: What’s the most fun experiment you’ve conducted with outsourcing?

Sid: I enjoyed having my assistants call friends and restaurants to make reservations “on behalf of Mr. Savara.”  I always felt like the restaurants treated me a little better because my assistant had called, though that could also just have been the enjoyment I got from having someone else call to make the reservation =).

(Photo credit: miss_rogue)

But I gradually added some back in anyway. Then, one day while reading yet another “Top N” post, that little voice amplified: “Is this really the best use of your time?”

I like information. And that’s the problem — I can consume it indefinitely. It’s not a case of information overload, but of information porn: gratuitous reading used to alleviate boredom or anxiety rather than enable positive change or solve a problem. In his recent Lifehack article on information overload, Dustin Wax astutely observes:

I’ve come to believe that when people talk about “information overload” they’re not really talking about identifying information they can act on, but something entirely different. They’re talking about recreational information – information as entertainment.

Instead of just categorically renouncing information. I decided a few weeks ago that I needed to modify my Low Info Diet.

Sunday reading

The new rule: No discretionary nonfiction reading during the week. Instead of reading a book for an hour or two each day during the week, I would read the entire book on Sunday, from start to finish, in one sitting. I would read and comment on blogs finishing the book. Instead of toggling to news sites between Monday and Saturday, trying to stay in the loop, I’d buy a copy of one weekly news magazine, The Economist, and read it in one fell swoop (minus the articles deemed unimportant), opting to catch up rather than keep up (I ordinarily would’ve spent dozens of hours following the Gaza incursion alone). If something occurred to me during the week that would be interesting to read up on, I’d look it up and bookmark it for Sunday.

That’s a lot of reading for one day, a least without some serious triage. Last Sunday I dumped more than half of the reading I accumulated during the week. Aside from the obvious benefit of eliminating task switching, having all of the reading visible in one block — rather than distributed throughout the week (10 minutes here, 15 minutes there) — makes your reading commitments extremely conscious.

Reading is no longer an involuntary response to casual stimulation. When you know how much reading you have to look forward to consuming, each item’s relevance gets evaluated much more deliberately. An interesting article you collect on Tuesday may not seem so interesting on Sunday, after it’s passed through a cooling period.

Exceptions:

• Fiction, which is consciously recreational
• Information needed to currently resolve an impasse on an active project (e.g. “What’s Error Code A73909?”)
• Two-minute reads
• Email and other messaging

Feel free to customize your own batching to suit your needs. For many people, email is their info porn. I’m an Inbox Zero kind of guy, so email isn’t a problem for me. But if you find yourself reflexively checking email, consider batching your email sessions. You don’t necessarily have to batch your entire week’s reading into one day — but I had to. After I made it a rule to stop myself every time I felt the urge to read to fill time, I became conscious of how much of my time was unconscious.

Notice that one of the exceptions is just-in-time information needed to unstick a current project. Just-in-case information doesn’t count — batch it. Compiling information to motivate action is a crap shoot at best, and is just as likely to provide new rabbit trails instead of closing current ones. Research, as Charlie Gilkey points out, is:

. . . a prop, folks. Yes, part of the creative process requires that we research whatever we’re thinking about, but if you find yourself nodding your head at what I’m saying, you know that there’s a point in which you have enough information to do something and there’s a point in which you’re using “research” as a way to get around creating. No amount of information or inspiration is going to solve the problem – for the problem has nothing to do with information.

I once attended an interview with screenwriter Mark Fergus (Children of Men, Iron Man) who claimed that he used to watch a dozen or so films as “research” before starting his screenplays. Suspecting that he was procrastinating, he decided to put off watching the reference films until after he completed a first draft. He pointed out that after getting first draft done, he usually had all of the information he needed in the draft to continue without the screenings.

From consuming to producing

Resisting the urge to consume information can be unsettling, especially when there’s no substitute activity to fill the void. In times like these, your task list is your friend. Don’t sit around wondering what you could be doing in the absence of a crutch activity. Either do something productive, do something genuinely recreational, or review what needs to get done. Trust me, there’s never a shortage of more worthwhile activities. The trick is to keep them conscious.

(Photo credit: jwyg)

Technorati Tags: Lifestyle Design, Productivity

Mind map your areas of focus

Instead of creating a list of behaviors, we’re going to create a mind map, digitally or by hand. This gives us the advantage of being able to link specific behaviors with the life themes they manifest. “Stop smoking” falls under the focus area of “Health,” or an equivalent in your own words. Linking the behavior with the focus area helps infuse the desired behavior with meaning. You don’t stop smoking to stop smoking, but for a larger purpose — in this case, health and vitality. Without explicitly mapping the relationship between what you don’t want and what you want, the restriction slowly becomes a demotivating “should” instead of a means to a positive end.

Ideally, you would start with all of your areas of focus first, then branch out to behaviors, projects and next actions, but any order is fine. The goal isn’t to fully replicate your project and action lists, but primarily to identify what drives them. Your map should go where your attention flows. The sample I’ve drafted here in a few minutes is a fraction of the size of my actual model, which would be unreadably dense for a screenshot.

One of the reasons for using a map instead of a list is that it gives you a chance to “refactor” what you write down — to rearrange your contents’ relationships for more accurate meaning. For instance, I put down “Scuba lessons” first, which triggered the focus area of “Fun and Adventure,” which reminded me of a hike coming up this weekend, and then some upcoming films.

A specific behavior or action might kick start the process, but ultimately, completing your inventory of focus areas is what seeds deeper thinking about how you want to act in the world. A focus area is just a category in your life that needs attention. If “Focus Areas” sound to clinical, put down “Roles” or something more user friendly. Examples focus areas would be:

• Family
• Finances
• Travel
• Spirituality
• Career
• Community
• Education

Avoid the temptation to list generic categories that you think you “should” have, unless they’re important to you. “Spirituality” or “Travel” might not be on your list, nor should they be if they don’t have your attention. If collecting stamps is a recurring behavior that has your attention, put “Stamp Collecting” down as a focus area.

What would that look like?

Areas of focus are necessarily abstract. A mind map gives you the chance to make them concrete. What does “Education” look like: taking an extension course, going for a degree, or reading a book? You can drill down each focus area into as much detail as you need. Or you can leave some level of detail unfinished if it’s something that’s inactionable under the current circumstances (like waiting for a raise to start prepaying your mortgage). Maps like these can mark placeholders for future thinking, either as additional branches or as separate mind maps.

A completed behavioral model allows you to look across all of your categories and their details in a single snapshot. You can see how focus areas interrelate, and see specifics of what do no next to facilitate each of those areas. Just as importantly, you can see which areas you’re ignoring as you view the whole map. You might decide that these need further attention, you might decide they’re being handled appropriately and don’t require addition action at the moment.

When to review the model

I like to look at mine daily, first thing in the morning, but experiment with different review frequencies for your ideal. One reason I pull it out daily is that I make local updates on it frequently, often twice a week. I originally thought it would be a weekly review item, but I found that this forest-and-trees view sensitizes me to my action lists, which makes working off of them less mechanical. But it’s less cumbersome than scanning a nested project list with next actions. A behavioral model is more personal than a project list, can be reviewed in seconds, and makes it convenient  to view at any level of detail you find relevant in the moment.

(Photo credit: kentbye)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Lifestyle Design

Po stands for provocative operation. Provocation is used to see where an idea or statement leads to with further exploration. Traditional logic, what de Bono calls rock logic, is concerned with “what is,” using the judgment system to determine whether or not a statement is true, or to classify something into a known category. The alternative to judgement is movement, or water logic, which is concerned with “what can be,” following a provocation is see what it leads to.

Since po is an operation rather than a noun, verb, preposition or adjective, the term doesn’t lend itself to a convenient dictionary definition. But the uses for po can be explained and described without much difficulty. The first step is to become familiar with the thinking operations represented by po, then it becomes easy to use the word in context. There are three primary uses.

Denoting a provocative statement

The first use of po is at the beginning of a phase or sentence to indicate that what follows is a provocation. Whether or not the statement is true is irrelevant; it’s only used for effect, as a novel point of departure for stimulating new trains of thought that hopefully result in new ideas.

Po urinals are installed in the ladies room has no basis in fact, but if we follow a new line of thinking that follows from this statement, something practical might emerge. Conventional urinals are shaped and positioned for use when standing. But what if we had a conventional toilet seat that functioned more or less like a conventional urinal? This leads to a new type of highly water-saving toilet (modified to accommodate toilet paper). One or two clearly marked stalls in a ladies room would have traditional toilets, as needed, while the other stalls would conserve many gallons of water.

Po cell phones have no screen or keyboard seems to have no intrinsic value, at least in the judgment system. When we treat the assertion as the provocation indicated, we look for what it might lead to. Perhaps there’s an aesthetic value. We can have a cell phone whose exterior is essentially a matte black slab, like the Tycho monolith in 2001, but with an internal screen and keyboard that slides out. For some, this design would be painfully boring; for others it would be the height of minimalist elegance.

Water flows into po wells. In this case, po is positioned within the sentence, but the function is the same: to signal a provocation. The statement uses traditional lateral thinking technique of reversal. Water flows out of wells, so we reverse the direction to see what happens. This could lead to the idea of a drip irrigation system used to reconstitute unusable soil. “Well” heads would be buried several feet into the ground, slowly saturating the earth with a mineral-enriched formula that would eventually change the soil composition. Over time, you could plant crops the soil was previously unable to support.

Note that these are all ideas I hatched in real time while writing this, not model examples. They might not work at all, or they might not work in their initial form. Validating ideas is a matter of judgment. Here, in the initial phase of the creative process, movement is a more useful catalyst. Ideas can always be developed or discarded later, but the first step is getting some raw material to work with.

Importing a random word

In Seeding Ideas with Random Stimulation, I discussed another long-standing lateral thinking technique: using a random word to reorient one’s perspective on an existing problem. We posit the random word and free associate it back to the problem. Once again, there’s no intrinsic relationship between the two objects. The artificial connection is used provoke a unique stream of thought.

We use po as a conjunction between the problem or design statement and the random word (or phrase). If the task is to design a new kind of coffee cup, and the random word is “traffic light,” then the provocation would be, “Designing a new coffee cup po traffic light,” or simply “coffee cup po traffic light.”

The common method for getting a random word it to open the dictionary and pick the fifth word (an arbitrary preselection) on whatever page is opened to, or the next word, until you reach a noun. Nouns are generally preferable for random words, due to the richer array of imagery and associations they stimulate. In a pinch, you can look quickly in one direction and use the first object you see in your environment as the random word, but this isn’t recommended. When words are selected instead of randomly generated, they tend to be selected for their relevance to the problem, diminishing the provocative effect. We deliberately look for an irrelevant word.

Here are some streams of consciousness that can come from the above provocation:

• Traffic lights . . . red, yellow and green . . . colors to indicate something . . . Put colored stickers on cups to indicate whether beverage is hot or cold
• Flow control . . . Put an adjustable iris toward the lip of the mug, which would limit splashing and spilling when twisted
• Lights have cylinders (cups) . . . multiple cups . . . modular design . . . cylinder that untwists into parts . . . Cylinder that breaks into two components: coffee cup and container for cream and sugar
• Mounted on pole . . . instead of a loop for a handle . . . Cup has a solid, small-diameter cylinder along its edge where you grip it instead of putting your fingers through it

Arresting a standard reaction

This isn’t really a “creative” application, but a practical one. Here we use po as a buffer to prevent the mind from coursing down it’s normal pathways when reacting to something. Whenever something says something inflammatory, implausible, ridiculous or simply wrong, you say to yourself “po” to suspend judgment — de Bono likens this to “instant mediation.”

Po acts as a neutral exclamation, a de-patterning cue to suppress reacting and promote futher exploration. If someone calls you an idiot for suggesting a certain idea, you think “po” to bypass the impulse to verbally retaliate. It’s an especially effective substitute response for expletives that do little more than stoke futher immature behavior. With practice, po can be used to snap out of many unproductive reactions and begin looking at a situation more objectively, as if you’re a third party looking at yourself and the other person.

(Photo credit: bounder)

Technorati Tags: Creativity, Thinking Operations, Lateral Thinking

• Reducing the amount of time needed to achieve a desired output
• Increasing the amount of output within the previously required length of time

Since the average employed American works a 46-hour workweek, with 38 percent claiming to work more than 50 hours per week — despite enormous advances in technology — it’s pretty obvious that reducing the amount of time we spend at work isn’t the socially approved option.

We could dismiss fixed or increasing workweeks as a business conspiracy, with employees producing more for the same pay. But the bias toward more output isn’t limited to employers. The average workweek for entrepreneurs — those without bosses — is 70 hours. Even outside of the workplace, the same impulse prevails. Here’s a passage from Digital History on the evolution of housework:

Yet despite the introduction of electricity, running water, and “labor-saving” household appliances, time spent on housework did not decline. Indeed, the typical full-time housewife today spends just as much time on housework as her grandmother or great-grandmother. In 1924, a typical housewife spent about 52 hours a week in housework. Half a century later, the average full-time housewife devoted 55 hours to housework.

What happened?

As washing machines and dishwashers were introduced, the socially accepted standards for cleanliness were raised. Instead of spending less time on a load of laundry, housewives simply ran more loads of laundry to fill the void. The same pattern can be seen with any enabling technology. The average American walks almost the same number of miles in his lifetime as he did a century ago, despite the proliferation of cars. Urban sprawl metastasized in response to faster transport.

Notice that for increased output to be warranted, it has to be wanted. The more-is-better mindset actually increases the desire for the increased output, creating a mutually reinforcing escalation in production and consumption.

Valuing discretionary time like discretionary income

Most of us have specific income goals, either a target number or a general increase. The same aspiration can and should apply to time.

In a special for Danish television (embedded in this post), Tim Ferriss consulted with a pair of entrepreneurs and an employee to reduce their workweek. Most of the advice he gave were the usual hacks — batch email, shorten meetings, conduct an 80/20 time audit — but one of the most noteworthy points was a simple question he asked them: “So, how many hours, ideally, would you like to work each week?” It’s a question that most employees wouldn’t consider asking, either out of social taboo or a singular focus on income.

When discretionary time isn’t valued (or culturally devalued), employees compete on other playing fields, putting in more hours to impress employers (conspicuous production) or pursuing promotions that ultimately result in more hours at the office and a drop in income-per-hour. No employee feels safe arriving last or leaving first.

Diminishing returns vs. diminishing hours

Forbes, Lifehacker, and Signals vs. Noise have all recently discussed the most popular alternative to the standard five-day workweek of eight-hour days: the four-day workweek of 10-hour days. Signals vs. Noise took issue with Forbes’ critique of the four-and-ten workweek, insisting that Forbes “misses the point” of a real four-day workweek.

The point of the 4-day work week is about doing less work. It’s not about 4 10-hour days for the magical 40-hour work week. It’s about 4 normalish 8-hour days for the new and improved 32-hour work week. The numbers are just used to illustrate a point. Results, not hours, are what matter, but working longer hours doesn’t translate to better results. The law of diminishing returns kicks in quick when you’re overworked.

Which leads to one of the more progressive alternatives on the horizon: the results-only work environment (ROWE). Under ROWE, employees are free to work anywhere, not excluding the office, as long as they hit their assigned performance goals. Since results are the only standard of performance, the number of hours required to achieve them is entirely up to the employee. At Best Buy and Netflix, the first case studies of ROWE in action, employees typically find that 32 hours is the sweet spot for getting their assigned tasks done.

It’s possible that a standard like ROWE could come to replace the eight-hour workday fought for and won by trade unions, but the desire to spend less time for the same output has to come first. There’s no hack to bring about a different mindset, only continuous self-examination.

In the meantime, consider this: the next time you come across a great tool or tip to save time, ask yourself, “What will I do with the time I save?”

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Lifestyle Design

• The reduction was gradual. Though the goal is less than an hour online per day, I didn’t want to trigger a relapse by overcommitting. That said, I only spent 25 minutes online Sunday — it’s getting easier.
• It isn’t meant to repudiate technology. I wanted to see if I could learn to use the internet for effectively by thinking more and reacting less.

I mentioned recently that when I switched from using a PDA and the Palm Desktop to using a Filofax, it felt like waking up from a trance. Leaving my laptop behind has had an exponentially greater wakeup effect.

“The screen is no comfort. I can’t speak my sentence.”

That line from a Midnight Oil song never felt truer than it did this week. To reduce the possibility of binge surfing, I left the laptop at home and wrote elsewhere, alternating between a legal pad folio and an Alphasmart Neo. It’s amazing how much more easily words come when I’m not staring into a screen, and how much more enjoyably. I feel more present with my surroundings in general. Previously, even when I was nowhere near a computer, I always felt as though I had one hemisphere in my laptop.

But there have been problems, especially in trying to reconcile social networking with remaining offline. I haven’t maintained my social bookmarks lately. I’m slower to respond to email and comments. I still want to stay in the loop with other bloggers.

Right now I’m using part of the hour online to isolate the few feeds with posts I want to comment on, printing them and taking them with me. Whenever I have some discretionary time, I draft my responses directly on their respective printouts, then enter these the next time I’m back online. While that doesn’t give me the presumed benefit of posting my comments early in a thread, the quality of the comments is much more contemplative.

Reading things offline is a much more focused experience than reading the very same things online. When I read a blog post online and come across a link within the text, I can choose to click on the link or ignore it — but in either case, I have to make a choice. Reading offline creates less mental overhead. Choosing not to follow a link is more distracting than not having a choice. With or without links, having fewer reading options allows me to concentrate on the reading in front of my without the impulse to move on the moment I come across a boring or difficult passage.

“Take a load off, Fanny”

While I started this experiment by writing on the Neo, I’m more inclined to use the legal pad folio. I find that since I have to put the Neo in a carrying case, my impulse is to put more things in the case: a book, a legal pad, a couple of folders, and at least one or two other things. It became the volumetric equivalent of Parkinson’s Law, where I was filling any available space. This is one of the reasons why Frank Lloyd Wright hated adding closets to his bedroom designs.

The folio restricts me to carrying only the legal pad and the printouts I want to comment on. There are no time fillers to fall back on if I get bored. As a recovering compulsive reader who used to read 3 to 4 books a week, I have to be careful about carrying around a book at all times. Now I’m more deliberate about when and how I read.

It’s a nice feeling to be able to walk around without all the baggage I would tote when I used a laptop. I can start writing immediately, without worrying about electrical outlets or wireless access. Because 100% of my attention is on what I want to say, finishing an article or post takes a lot less time than it used to.

How much work is unpluggable?

Being a writer is different from being, say, a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company. For many people who rely on spreadsheets or email, working with just pen and paper is not an option. I still think that limiting connectivity is a worthwhile experiment for most people. Like most things in life, unplugging is not an either-or choice, but a matter of trying something new to see how far it can be taken, just as a learning experience.

The key is to think of it as an experiment instead of a commitment. Figure out the absolute minimum amount of time you actually need to be online, and redesign your day in accordance with that. Ask yourself how you would get your work done if being online was not an option. How long can you really go without checking email? How much social networking are you emotionally willing to let lapse? Is catching up an acceptable alternative to keeping up? Is being in the loop an actual need or just an assumption?

Try it for a day or a week, just for the sport of it. You just might surprise yourself.

The most insidious problem with time management is that it views every moment in terms of its opportunity cost. Coulds become shoulds. Two hours spent reading a book could be better spent prospecting for clients. The time I spend writing this post could be better spent toward my freelance writing. Since there are infinitely more things that we could do than what we can do, looking for lost opportunities behind every choice we make is gratuitous. Making a decision work is more important than making the right decision.

Technology has transformed work from a place that we go to into an activity that’s constantly available. But the ability to work anytime does not confer the ability to work all the time. There’s a limit to how long we can work with sustained, meaningful focus. Beyond that critical threshold, productivity diffuses into busyness.

It’s only recently that we’ve come to understand that ending work takes as much discipline as beginning it. There’s no elixir for attaining that discipline, only an act of will.

Decide before starting a high-focus task how long you’re going to spend on it. Until recently, writing was consuming all of my discretionary time. Since writing generally comes easy to me, I realized that beyond a certain point, it was a crutch activity that was keeping me from new experiences, not to mention other projects that didn’t involve typing.

So I set a rule for myself: spend no more than eight hours a day writing — four hours freelance writing, and four hours blogging. It’s still tempting to spend more time on a writing project, especially when I’m very close to finishing. But simply having momentum on a task is not enough reason to continue it if it means letting other needs and interests atrophy.

Clearly envision and define the successful outcome. Without an explicit image of what a completed project looks like, or at least a quantitative benchmark, the quality of the outcome we pursue will always be relative to our existing results. Since our aspirations exceed our efforts, chasing a shifting goalpost is a fool’s errand. What constitutes “done”? What is the practical standard that allows you to let the project go and move on to new challenges?

Take more breaks. Taking breaks means disengaging, not task switching. Breaks mean not checking email, watching TV, catching up on RSS feeds. The object is to liberate attention, not reroute it. A break can entail sitting back in a chair for two minutes, meditating for 10 minutes or taking a nap for 20 minutes.

Just as we fool bosses into looking busy by being in visible motion, we fool ourselves into feeling idle by not being in visible motion; so TV and the internet allow us to simulate idleness while idling. We need to rest mentally and emotionally, not just physically, and it bears repeating that this is a discipline — something we have to train ourselves to do after years spent working under supervision.

Get feedback from end users. Managers have a vested interest in keeping employees working for work’s sake, if only to appear appropriately managerial. But clients, audiences and consumers tend to know when enough is enough. They signal their satisfaction by either silence (good work taken for granted) or praise (great work). As a group they’re more objective than our (real or internalized) bosses.

If you expect a certain volume of output from yourself, but no one else is asking for it, try producing less quantity and channel your efforts into higher quality. Decreased activity often translates to the increased perspective you need to judge your efforts more objectively.

Recently I unearthed the Buddha Machine I purchased a couple of years ago, which buffets the sound of silence and acts as my muse. Released from the Chinese electronic music duo FM3, the Buddha Machine is basically a box the size of a first-gen iPod whose design is more reminiscent of portable transistor radios from the Seventies. There’s a speaker on the front, and the top contains a switch/volume control, a headphone jack and a DC adapter.

On the side of the box is a two-position switch that toggles to advance to the next of nine sound loops — simple electronic drones that stop short of rhythm and melody.

That’s it. Nine loops on a memory chip in a box with poor sound quality. It’s the lo-fi counterpoint to the iPod. Instead of a device you fill with more content every time you get bored with your last download, what you hear the first time you sample the Buddha Machine’s threadbare track selection is what you’ll get henceforth. The whole ethos of the device is that it’s complete in its minimalism.

There’s nothing to stop someone from creating similar loops as downloads for any digital audio player. In fact, if you want to hear the loops used in the Buddha Machine to get an idea of what it sounds like, you can download the WAV file and compress the tracks into your favorite format. Maybe there’s already of cottage industry of ambient loops for download with the same purpose in mind. But the Buddha Machine experience is as much the artifact as the disembodied content. It looks as cool as it sounds.

The device’s sound palate is fairly monochromatic, making it a practical alternative to music as a backdrop to working. It’s aural incense, a constant tint of sound designed to mute the silence that induces self-consciousness. If you find your inner monologue getting in your way more than assisting you in getting work done, or just unwinding, the Buddha Machine can function as a strategic way to interrupt your mental chatter. With the proper headphones, it’s also great for drowning out distractingly uptempo music in public venues.

The device is available in the US through Forced Exposure.

One small but non-trivial way to cultivate a clear mind when working at a computer is to cultivate a clear desktop. Deleting a program icon from the desktop doesn’t delete the program itself, with rare exceptions. A Windows dialog prompting you to proceed with icon deletion will confirm this prior to execution. If you’ve installed the actual program itself directly on the desktop, moving it to Program Files or some other folder that’s out of your face will create one less distraction.

The screenshot above is my working desktop. The only folder I’ll place on it is the one for the current project in progress. For instance, for this blog post, I have a folder with the post title. Within the folder I have the text file and the image file for the post. The desktop frames the sole object of my focus. When I’m fininshed with it, I’ll hit Windows-E and drag the project folder into Documents.

When I first boot the computer, I either mentally identify the very next action I’m going to take once the boot cycle is finished, or decide to open the Palm Desktop to view my calendar and @Computer list if the next action doesn’t immediately come to mind. I have my main tools, the Palm Desktop, Paint.net and Q10, assigned to hotkeys: Ctrl-Alt-D for the Palm Desktop, Ctrl-Alt-P for Paint.net and Ctrl-Alt-Q for Q10.

To assign hotkeys for applications on the Start Menu, right-click the app in the menu, select Properties, tab to the Shortcut Key field, enter the letter you want to use to launch the app, then click OK. From then on, you can launch with app without navigating to the it on the Start menu; just hit the designated letter in conjunction with Ctrl-Alt. Unfortunately, Firefox needs its icon to be on the desktop to accept a shortcut assignmnent. Since I wanted nothing on the desktop except the Recycle Bin, I select it from its top position on the Start menu using Windows | <Down Arrow> | Enter.

Have a protocol for filing your downloads in designated places to keep yourself from repeatedly deliberating about where things should go — or worse, letting files fester on the desktop indefinitely. Put music files in the Music folder, documents in Documents (I keep a subfolder here for PDFs), pictures in Pictures, and so on. In short, place them where the operating system has created the appropriate buckets for them, unless you have a scheme you find more logical; if so, create it and use it. For instance, I keep an Installers subfolder in my user account folder (i.e. my profile user name). Once I download a program, I drag the install file into Installers and run the install from that folder.

Select a wallpaper that sets the mood you want to create for yourself when working, or some touchstone image that manifests the ideal lifestyle you’re working to create for yourself. You might want to rotate a selection of wallpapers over time in order to experiment with each one’s emotional impact, or just to keep things fresh.