Three months later

At the end of the previous post mentioned above, I added a qualifier:

There’s always a placebo effect that accompanies any change of gear, so once the novelty wears off, I’ll be in a better position to reflect on just how substantial the progress has actually been.

And that’s exactly been the case. I was working through my lists faster for a while largely because the medium was new to me. The fact is that the essence of my system has always been most effective when I collect on paper, and process what I collect into a digital organizer.

I assumed that if I could capture incoming information on paper faster than I could on a laptop or PDA, then the same speed increase would apply to processing, organizing and review phases of task management. Over time, I noticed that I was increasingly irritated with having to leaf through the pages of my Filofax to find items or make new entries. Hunting for the right page added just enough sand in the gears to bring things to a halt. It would only take a few seconds, but it was long enough to unconsciously resist the impulse to review and enter information. I was less inclined to pull out the planner to write down small tasks.

For users of traditional time management systems, that’s not much of a problem. Small tasks are probably not worth writing down in the first place — that’s good priority management, right? But in GTD, anything consuming attention that goes untracked is an open loop, regardless of whether it’s big or small; it’s still an incomplete thought.

That might seem academic, but for anyone who’s experienced having nothing on his or her mind, despite having a heavy workload, any system that makes it inconvenient to track everything is unacceptable. I want to spend most of my time doing things, not thinking about them.

Rewriting lists

Whether this is a bug or a feature depends on your temperament, but I really got tired of having to rewrite my lists from scratch, instead of making local edits, during weekly reviews. Proponents of paper systems maintain that having to write new lists forces them to look at their lists more carefully, enabling them to see items that have been sitting around too long. Writing down the same task three weeks in a row gives them pause, prompting them to either redefine the task, get rid of it or move it to the Someday/Maybe list. On a digital system, it’s easier to gloss over undone items, since they stay on your list until you deliberately delete them.

Oddly enough, I found it easier to ignore undone items when I was using paper lists. Rewriting lists from scratch was just irritating enough to make me want to get the exercise over with a soon a possible, mechanically copying the items from the previous list that weren’t crossed out, and in my haste I would gloss over some that really needed further examination.

Copy and paste

Like the iPhone, the Filofax is crippled by the inability to copy and paste information into a notes field. Most of the information I’m exposed to comes to me over the computer, and being able to copy and paste relevant sections of content as action support was an enormous advantage I realized I wasn’t willing to give up. I liked being able to paste addresses into entries on my Errands like, or urls into certain entries on my @Computer list (it was actually more convenient than using bookmarks).

A hard edge between collecting and organizing

I don’t equate technology with complexity. Sometimes it’s simpler to commute to certain places with a car instead of a bicycle. One of the ways using a digital organizer simplified things for me was in distinguishing between the collection and organizing processes. I knew that if anything I wrote down was still on paper, it needed to be processed. If I had nothing on paper, there was nothing further to process. When I did everything on paper, it always seemed like whatever I collected passed through a fuzzier continuum.

I’m perfectly aware that all you really have to do is get specific about defining projects, next actions, etc., then cross out what you’ll collected; but while that make intellectual sense to me, it didn’t make experiential sense. Even after processing an item, it still felt like “stuff.”

What about digital distraction?

I’ve been using a smartphone and notetaker wallet ever since I adopted GTD. The notetaker wallet just replaced my standard wallet without significantly taking additional space, and since I would carry a cell phone anyway, adding PDA functionality to it saved me from having to bring another device.

The biggest drawback to smartphones, for me at least, was having too many options available: games, document editors, outliners, and other tools and toys. As soon as I pulled out my phone to look up or enter something in my calendar, I’d start thinking about what else I could be doing on the phone.

Since going back, those potential distractions really haven’t been a problem, even though I haven’t specifically done anything to prevent those distractions. I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, since I did have those distractions before. I think I’m undergoing a shift in my attitude toward distractions, especially since I’ve eliminated so much of the emotional backlog I was keeping (see Disembedding Your Identity from Your Stuff). The more focused I’ve become on what I want, the less need I feel to block out what I don’t want. Knowing more precisely where I’m headed obviates the need to wear blinders to prevent me from going off course.

A few months ago, I was doing most of my freelance writing on an Alphasmart Neo — a decidated word processor with no internet access, no media player, and none of the distractions you expect in a laptop. Now I do virtually all my writing directly on the laptop or a junior legal pad (when I’m out, a junior legal pad is more portable than the Neo). Distractions happen from time to time, but I’m self-assured enough now to know that I’ll get back on track.

Stick with your system

I’m not advocating that anyone abandon a functional paper system. If you’re not having these problems, don’t adopt them just because they’re rhetorically persuasive. As always, do what works for you. But if you find yourself reading this thinking, “I thought it was just me!”, then you’re the one I’m writing this for. I’d actually prefer using a paper planner for a number of reasons that I outlined in the original post, but at the end of the day, the costs outweighed the benefits — for me.

(Photo credit: chaz_dixon)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity, Technology

Every now and then I feel the urge to reflect on the ones I resist as a reality check. I resisted cell phones for years, until I got one from my mother as a birthday present (it had a whopping 20 minutes-per-month service plan, which was more than I expected to use). I resisted using a RSS reader, expecting to suffer from information overload, addiction and distraction — pretty accurate so far.

Maybe I’m truly missing some technology out there that would actually benefit my life if I were more open-minded. Maybe I’m digging my heels in too strongly. If so, feel free to chime in and let me know. Here are some of the “solutions” that I resist, either partially or categorically.

1. Social networking. I’m on a few of the networks, but I can’t seem to motivate myself to use them more. They strike me as solutions looking for problems. Delicious and Twitter seem the most useful to me, since they involve the least overhead. You don’t have to create an elaborate profile; you can just use them. But the value of Facebook is lost on me. It just seems like yet another inbox to keep track of. What is the killer app here that I’m missing? Why not just email?

2. Television. I grew up with TV in the household and gradually found myself watching it less and less, preferring to spend my time reading (way, way too much time). After I moved out, neither of my first two roommates had a television, and I couldn’t believe how much more relaxed life was without one. Now I get agitated whenever I’m even around a television. I don’t even have one to watch DVDs, though I keep telling myself I “should” get one for that purpose sooner or later.

3. Game consoles. All electronics games, really, including those on PCs and portables. I played enough video games (not to mention non-electronic RPGs, like Dungeons and Dragons) in the Eighties for a lifetime. I have to maintain a “one day at a time” policy to avoid getting addicted again. I had a minor relapse with Tomb Raider 10 years ago, and have learned my lesson since: if you don’t want to slip, don’t go where it’s slippery.

4. Virtual outsourcing. 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.

5. Office 2.0. I’ve tried. Lord knows I’ve tried. While I’ve managed to switch to writing directly in WordPress for blogging, I can’t bring myself to trust the cloud for my article writing and spreadsheets. I once lost four hours of writing in GDocs due to a router hiccup, and I have a long memory. More importantly, the state of the art on both Google and Zoho office suites is still severely lacking in features that are critical to me, like Outline View. Naturally, they’ll improve over time, and probably become more robust than their offline counterparts. But I don’t live in the future.

6. Online finance trackers. I’m way too paranoid to even consider putting my banking information on sites like Mint and Wesabe. Besides, this is another cloud service whose added value totally eludes me. I don’t even used specialized personal finance software. Excel does the job just fine for my purposes.

7. Vitamin enriched water. Bottled water is silly enough as it is. Now we’ve turned water into a supplement whose dubious health advantages (most American aren’t deficient in vitamins, except E) are negated by the crystalline fructose sweetening. It’s better to simply drink less sugar water than to drink “better” sugar water. The same applies to any “diet” junk food.

8. The iPhone. Granted, not a very radical or original rebellion, but until the iPhone has a native list manager with desktop synchronization, I’m happy to let this cultural phenomenon pass me by. The internet does look might nice on it, though.

9. Mobile email. I have a perfectly capable email-enabled phone, complete with a front-facing qwerty keyboard and IMAP support. I found that whenever I’d check email on the phone, at least some of them would involve replies that required resources I had at work, like physical files or other personnel; or they would require verbose answers that would be much more comfortable touch typing; or they had links to sites that were better viewed on a real monitor. I don’t like fragmenting my email processing, so I stopped doing email on the phone. I never had to deal with “Blackberry addiction,” because it was too unpleasant to be habit forming in the first place.

10. IM. Aside from chatting with a few international friends, where it makes logistical sense, I despise instant messaging. Every time I would see the notification go off, my blood pressure would go up. Yes, you can turn off notifications or make yourself appear offline, but if I used those features as often as I wanted to, it would be essentially the same as not using IM — which is pretty much the way things stand now. I recognize that this one’s a little irrational, and I’m going to force myself to start using IM again eventually.

What technologies to you resist?

(Photo credit: GeneC55)

Technorati Tags: Technology

The word “productivity” has been overused and misused for years, especially in an age of “life hacks” that span from extended travel and income automation to novel applications of binder clips. More specifically, productivity has become synonymous with self-actualization, which troubles some writers with faux-humanist or New Age proclivities. But the frequent misuse of a word doesn’t necessarily cancel its usefulness. What called for is greater precision with language.

Work and production

The real root of people’s frustration with the word “productivity” lies in the English language’s absence of a word that addresses the full spectrum of work. There are fundamentally two types of work:

• Work that has personal or social value
• Work that has economic or exchange value

Notice that when people use terms like “work-related” or “work life,” they invariably mean work in the latter category. But work is simply the energy expended to realize an outcome — any outcome, whether it’s throwing a party, starting a company, doing a cross-country road trip, completing a client presentation, or reaching one’s ideal weight.

The two poles encapsulate a spectrum of fulfillment, rather than mutually exclusive modes of existence. We get an education (what the Greeks categorized as a leisure activity) to increase our job prospects. We often get personal satisfaction from projects completed at work. Many of us hold the ideal of monetizing our hobbies or passions in order to spend our days doing what we love.

Why killing your job won’t kill your dissatisfaction

From Twitter, last May:

Me: Article writing. Sigh. Wishing I could blog full time. Gawker or GigaOM, please buy me out!

Gina Trapani, four hours later: Some days I dream of quitting my job and becoming a full-time blogger. Oh, wait.

It’s tempting to imagine that other people or external situations are the source of our discontent. When people do manage to extricate themselves from their day jobs, they often wind up transferring their discontent to other agents: not enough clients, too many clients, bad clients, a bad economy and so on. But the enemy lies within.

Life is multidimensional. A job is only one aspect of our work, and one aspect of our lives. There’s no such thing as a “dream job” if it’s meant to be the lynchpin for a fulfilled existence. Work on your job, work on your health, work on your marriage, but stop trying to get everything out of any one of them. Even the best things in life are unhealthy in excess.

The lazy workaholic

The workaholic is the classic “one-dimensional man,” bereft of identity beyond a single area of focus. Workaholics avoid confronting many life issues by throwing themselves exclusively into one. Since they’re continually in motion, they can never be accused of being lazy by those who use activity as their metric for productivity.

True productivity involves realizing and recognizing all values that contribute to a meaningful existence. Meaning doesn’t bestow itself on a person; it has to be actively discerned and defined through a continuous, cyclical process of thinking and doing.

Areas of focus

Setting goals without meditating on values is a reliable way to concentrate one’s life too narrowly. One way to counteract the tendency to overidentify with one aspect of life is to create a list of all aspects that have meaning, which in this case we’ll call areas of focus. An example would be:

• Professional
• Health
• Marriage
• Family
• Friendships
• Learning
• Community
• Financial Independence

This is just one possible array of values among many. Some people might subsume “Marriage” into the larger category of “Family.” Others will see romance as a significant enough component to keep marriage separate from general family issues. Some people don’t value civic participation, so “Community” wouldn’t appear on their list. For some people, “Learning” will be too broad of a category for a specific field of interest, like painting; so “Art” might be a more accurate focus area. Some people don’t need “Financial independence,” but would be content with a balanced checkbook and zero debt, so “Finance” would be a more accurate label.

Areas of Focus should be an authentic, personal list that reflects what you’re willing to spend time and energy on. Don’t put down “Community” if you’re not active in the community, or don’t plan to be.

The litmus test, other than your intuition, is your project list. Look at each of your focus areas and ask yourself, “Do I have any projects about this?” If the answer is no, you have two options: work out what projects you need to fulfill the area of focus, or ask yourself if it really matters to you. The Areas of Focus list is a great tool for identifying blind spots in your project list. Review your focus areas whenever you feel like your actions are out of alignment with your values.

(Photo credit: jordan.meeter)

Hearing the above remark by Clay Collins in a talk with Duff McDuffee about the limits of the word “productivity,” a frustration I’ve harbored for weeks suddenly uncoiled.

I’m over productivity. It’s outlived its usefulness as a focal point and framework for meaningful discussion.

Through overuse and misuse, productivity has become an amoeba word, a term whose meaning can morph to any usage the speaker or writer chooses by changing its frame of expectation. Productivity joins the ranks of words like “success,” “spirituality,” and “growth” to mean whatever the person using them decides they mean in the moment.

Once people start using the word “productivity” to describe experiences, actions and accomplishments in the same breath, it means everything and nothing. It narrows and contours how we discuss and perceive experiences, and how we assign values to them. If someone argues that having an enjoyable dinner with friends is “productive,” all I can say now is “Oh, grow up!”

Linguistic overload

“I still remember a shock I had in Chicago in 1964,” Ivan Illich recounted 25 years later. “We were sitting around a seminar table; opposite me sat a young anthropologist. At the critical point of what I thought was a conversation, he said to me, ‘Illich, you can’t turn me on, you do not communicate with me.’ For the first time in my like I became aware that I was being addressed not as a person but as a transmitter. After a moment of disarray, I began to feel outrage.”

In the Sixties and Seventies, “communication” was the pet amoeba word of sociologist and pop psychologists. The exploration of dreams and reflections gave way to transactional analysis. Through a similar clinical reductionism, productivity is the knowledge worker’s socially acceptable proxy for self-development.

Personal development gurus have transplanted the term “productivity” from the corporate rubric of operations management and from human resources (the technical term for “people”). Productivity as researched by operations management is an external measure of a firm’s return on investment in its workforce.

Knowledge workers have appropriated this standard and internalized it into an ethic. Values are reified into measurable objectives, and any objective that doesn’t easily lend itself to measurement risks being overlooked.

Limiting the scope of productivity to the practical

It’s not necessary to scrap the word “productivity” altogether, but it is important to ensure that what you mean by it isn’t easily open to question. In my case, I realized that I understand productivity as maintaining clarity of mind by capturing a managing anything that consumes attention. That’s not how 99.9% of the population defines productivity.

If a word requires an explanation to distinguish its particular usage in a sentence from its common understanding, it’s probably an amoeba word. Words with no accountability have no utility.

Back in the early Nineties, when a desktop was my only computer, I always drafted in longhand. When I finally got the laptop I coveted for so long, it took me a few months to notice how much my writing output had declined. But I ignored this, attributing the slowdown to other factors. Now that I’ve more or less ditched the laptop again, the productivity boost is too striking to ignore. I think this is the case for multiple reasons, but for now I want to focus on one: batched output.

Output Focused Tools

The first day I abandoned the laptop for a legal pad, I wrote an entire product review in just over two hours — about a third of the time it normally takes. The first step involved removing a mental block that always kept me coming back to the laptop: contingencies. Hovering in peripheral consciousness was always the nagging question, “But what if I need to look up something?”

Looking things up midstream is the ultimate crutch activity. Before the age of persistent connection, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words without it ever occurring to me that I couldn’t continue without slotting in a missing piece of information.

I usually restructured the writing to do without the information, which was often gratuitous anyway, especially if it didn’t come to mind before I started writing. Otherwise I would simply make a note to look it up after I finished my draft, adding it retroactively. A draft that’s structurally coherent can withstand a few holes in the edifice that need to be filled in afterward. I realized that I had lost my ability to act on incomplete information.

Batched Output

A legal pad, typewriter or dedicated word processor immediately dispenses with input. There’s no option to look things up, check email, click on a link, or indulge in anything that can bring information in to alleviate anxiety or act as surrogate intellectual activity. When looking things up is not possible, or at least not convenient, it’s obvious when there’s thinking that still needs to be done. Reflexive searching is like nibbling at a candy bar to stave off genuine hunger with a sugar rush.

Using tools that facilitate output exclusively prevents what Moshe Feldenkrais called cross-motivation. He used this in the context of body movement education, noticing that people whose movements lack fluidity typically actuate the flexors and extensors of the same limb simultaneously rather than inhibit the opposing muscle group. I believe that to maximize output we need to simultaneously minimize input. The best way to do this is to handle multiple output tasks as a batched process, temporarily cutting off input channels.

@Writing

Some GTD practitioners use a context list called @Writing for their outlines and drafts. I’ve resisted this, preferring to restrict contexts to specific physical locations. Now it’s apparent that @Computer is not a workable context for my writing, and since I divide my writing between the legal pad and the Neo, I added the @Writing context to cover both media.

This works remarkably well, since nothing can go on that list until any dependencies are out of the way. I have to get my ducks in a row before making “writing” a next action. If I need to reference information to support my writing, I have to look it up, print it and add it to my Action Support folder so that I can write offline; then I have everything I need to define an @Writing next action.

An ongoing experiment

My current goal is to get to the point of batching input, in this case being online, to one hour per day. I still have to email articles, drop blog posts into WordPress, and look up source material to print, but I’m trying to streamline the process to keep my connectivity to an optimal minimum. It’s been an awkward but interesting process so far, and I’m anxious to see how this experiment in progressive unplugging progresses.

The failure had to do with my work-school situation. I was working 50 hours a week and taking 12 units of classes. At work, what came in through email largely dictated what I had to do. At school, I had to capture assignments given verbally or through handouts. Just as before I switched to the Moleskine, I found it much faster to process email-based work directly on the computer than to alternate between media.

While I managed things on paper in the classroom, I found myself slowly reverting to Eudora and the Palm Desktop at work. Running dual systems made weekly reviews painful. I always felt like I was missing some project or action, even if intellectually there were no apparent leaks. Projects and actions weren’t funneled into a single place that would provide a panoramic view of the week ahead. Three-hours reviews were not uncommon.

So I went back to my old way of doing things. That meant the Palm Desktop when deskbound, the Treo and my notetaker wallet when mobile.

Returning to paper

Now that I’m a full-time freelance writer, my work is no longer dictated by a rapid influx of email, which gives me more latitude to experiment. This time I started by inventorying the problems I’ve had with paper systems:

1. No desktop synchronization
2. Increased bulk, especially when compared to the Palm Centro
3. Being left-handed, looseleaf organizers are usually awkward
4. Potentially redundant with phones containing calendars and list managers

Without email as the driving force of my work, I had to question why I was still clinging to the idea that I need to sync my data. I simply needed to reframe problem #1 as an advantage.

Problem #2 was a little more serious, at least for me. My key requirement for any organizer is that I can fit it in my pocket. If I have to carry it in my hand, I’d have to motivate myself to do so, and I don’t believe in motivation. A system that gets used most of the time is not a system at all.

Fortunately I found the expensive but terrific Filofax Mini Guilford Extra Slim. This 3″ x 4.5″ organizer looks like a regular wallet when closed, so it easily fits in my back pocket. At $60, you could almost buy a Palm Zire Z22, but I couldn’t find a cheaper organizer of similar size that was anywhere near as compelling.

The flat bound Moleskine prevented me from inserting pages between context lists. So if I ran out of space for @Home because it ran up against @Errands, I’d have to continue the @Home list in a new location, which is suboptimal. Looseleaf notebooks solve this problem for most of the population, but the rings get in the way of the left hand when it’s at the left margin, making them an issue for southpaws. The Filofax Mini’s rings are small enough to make them a nonissue.

Since the Centro is so small, and has a good calendar and list manager, I hesitated to add another “device” to duplicate this functionality. I decided to short circuit this logical argument with “So what?”, and go paper anyway. If I found it too onerous after a few days (why gurus advocate 30-day tests is something I’ll never understand), I’d drop the paper system and go back to what I had before.

Seeing progress

So far, switching to the Filofax has been an enormous distraction filter, more than I would have anticipated. When I would do my weekly reviews on my laptop, I’d often get lured into doing ostensibly under-two-minute tasks that would break my concentration. Attention matters more than time during a weekly review, so doing even short tasks should be avoided, in my opinion. Now I keep my laptop closed if it’s there at all, so there’s no internal crosstalk between what I could be doing and what I should be doing.

The Filofax’s To Do pages have checkboxes, and since I prefer to cross off completed tasks, I use the checkboxes in a novel way. If I create a next action that either takes less than two minutes during the weekly review, or would take less than two minutes in some context other than the one I’m in, I check the box.

So if I’m at a train station and come up with two-minute next actions that need to be done at home, I jot them down with a check, so that as soon as I get home, I can get those out of the way immediately. Similarly, I can write down two-minute actions during the weekly review without feeling the need to act on them at that moment, but start knocking them off the moment I finish the review.

I also underestimated how much distraction was happening by using my cell phone as a list manager. Every time I’d pull the phone out of my pocket to review an action list, I’d feel the urge to play Sudoku or Advanced Brain Trainer, validate myself on Twitter, or listen to music on Pocket Tunes. I believe than every action leads to a predictable next action, and that one of the keys to eliminating distractions is to identify whether or not what a certain habitual action leads to is productive.

I still use my David Allen Company Notetaker Wallet for spontaneous capture, since the pen is siloed right in the wallet, next to the notepad. I used to let these notes accumulate until I got to a computer to process them into the Palm Desktop. Now it’s rare that 10 minutes goes by before they’re processed into the Filofax. Incidentally, I replaced the wallet’s Rotring retractable with the Fisher Bullet Space Pen with Stylus, which is much better for freehand mind mapping and flowscaping on the Centro (using Pennovate Notes) than the Centro’s overly pliant stylus.

Perhaps the most important advantage of using separate organizer is perspective. Keeping my task management system outside of my production tools — my laptop and cell phone — provides an Archimedean vantage point that allows me to think about my workflow instead of within it.

Of course, I’ll have to keep monitoring how my productivity develops over time. There’s always a placebo effect that accompanies any change of gear, so once the novelty wears off, I’ll be in a better position to reflect on just how substantial the progress has actually been. But right now, it’s hard to imagine going back to an electronic system.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, GTD