Having the same thought twice

Ubiquitous capture is nice in theory, but realistically, writing everything down is unrealistic. The real goal isn’t it write down every thought or every piece of information that enters your head, but to capture anything that captures your attention. Ideally, if you’re doing A, your mind should be on A, but if B enters your mind — either from an external interruption or an internal thought — the effort spent trying to ignore it will just amplify it. By writing it down, you can turn your attention back to your primary task.

But suppose A is “obviously” more important than B. It’s tempting to avoid writing B down, since the act of writing it down seems like giving it undue attention in light of your priority task. That’s a problem, since anything you’re not consciously investing effort in at the moment will comparatively seem insignificant. The attention you give to whatever you’re currently doing will always overshadow what you’re not doing. So trying to rely on a subjective standard of what’s significant “enough” to write down will probably lead to inconsistent results. Few things are more annoying to worrying about something you forgot to write down when you had the chance, but now can’t remember.

So don’t use subjectivity as a standard. Whenever you find yourself thinking about something more than once, write it down. Having the same thought twice might seem like a problem, but it’s also a cue. Don’t deliberate over whether or not it’s worth writing down, just write it down with extreme prejudice. If you’re wrong, and what you’ve captured turns out to be interesting but not worth taking action on, you’ve wasted five seconds of your life by writing it down.

Deferred evaluation

Just as doing A while thinking about B dilutes focus on the task being done, the converse is also true: doing A steals focus on thoughts about B. Neither object of attention is being given full attention. By collecting the secondary thought, you’re making the conscious decision to defer thinking about it until you’re in a context where you can give it your full attention: when you process your in-basket. Your “doer” role is mailing stuff to your “thinker” role.

Don’t sweat the small stuff

Capturing minutiae isn’t really a problem if thinking about minutiae takes attention away from whatever you’re currently doing. Some of those items might actually turn out to be more important than you initially realized, once you look at them without the distraction of doing something else.

Not everything needs to be acted on. Some things capture your attention because they’re interesting, not necessarily because they’re consequential. Many more books are interesting than the ones you’re willing to commit time and energy to reading. Processing what you’ve captured gives you the opportunity to distinguish between the two attractions, and to prioritize them.

(Photo credit: dailyinvention)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

Time for some backpedaling. For years I’ve been a proponent of studying in long, uninterrupted blocks — ideally a couple of hours at a time. Since I’ve been experimenting with segmented reading, I’m starting to doubt that longer is better — not the amount of overall time per se, but the length of uninterrupted time.

The television model of reading

For as long as I’ve been an adult, I’ve always viscerally disliked the experience of watching television, but it wasn’t until I read Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television that I understood why. Mander contrasted the difference between absorbing information through reading and through television.

When you read a paragraph, it’s easy to stop and start at will. You can pick up where you left off without missing anything. You can pause to reflect on your agreement or disagreement with the author’s statement. You can take notes or verbally relay what you’ve just read to someone else in the room.

When you watch something on television, you can still do any of the above, but the nature of the medium makes in inherently more difficult, assuming you don’t have the remote control of your DVR in hand. Any time you pause to reflect on what you’re watching, new information is streaming by. You have to choose between watching and thinking. If your attending is directed toward thinking, it’s not directed toward watching. Video is a succession of events that make the brain predisposed to pay attention to what happens next rather than reflect.

Long reading sessions of firewalled attention have a roughly equivalent effect. By continuously reading new material for longer periods that working memory can hold, there isn’t much left at the end of the session for the brain to process. I’ve noticed that when I sit down to write a book review, it’s almost as if I have to read the book all over again to recover the details.

Lean thinking with the low information diet

Just as eating more calories than we burn through work or exercise leads to obesity, consuming more information than we can use creates analysis paralysis. Just-in-time information is more agile that just-in-case information.

It’s easy to assume that anything requiring mental activity is “thinking,” but information and thinking are not synonymous. Information that’s relevant to a current or imminent project is raw material for thinking, but without an action-oriented focus, it has no value. There’s a point of diminishing returns where more input interferes with more output.

But how to we figure out what information is relevant unless we first take it in? There’s no way I know of to avoid this conundrum entirely, but spending a week on the low information diet can help reset your standards for what content is and isn’t relevant. At the end of the week of avoiding news, RSS feeds, nonfiction and websites, you’ll probably find that once you give yourself permission to add those sources back to your daily intake, only a fraction of them will remain compelling. To use a term that was fashionable in the Seventies, the low information diet is a form of “deprogramming.”

Segmented reading

As mentioned in a recent post, the concept behind segmented reading is to split reading sessions up into 10-minute fragments, then take a break to review what you’ve just read if necessary (I chose a break of around two minutes, which may or may not be optimal), then repeat the cycle. The break gives your brain time and space to think before your short-term memory loses the material it just covered.

Even if you do hours of segmented reading, it will feel as though you’ve only been reading a few minutes, in contrast to single spans of long reading, where the brain is trying to hold on to old information while taking in new information. The effect is similar to GTD, where one’s entire inventory of work is offloaded to an external system of lists, files and calendar entries.

It’ll be interesting to test the concept on writing and other forms of work to see if pattern interrupts are as effective with output as input. Time to find out . . .

(Photo credit: christopherblizzard)

Technorati Tags: Thinking Operations, Productivity

In John Medina’s awesome book, Brain Rules, the chapter on attention caught my attention. Medina, a professor, would ask new students each semester the following: Given a lecture that’s not too dull or too interesting, how long would it take for them to stop paying attention to the instructor and start looking at the clock? The near-universal answer: 10 minutes. That answer comports with many studies that find that attention drops out in the first quarter hour.

So the good professor started redesigning his lectures by breaking them up with anecdotes that illustrated the previous 10 minutes’ worth of content. In other words, every 10 minutes would have a story interlude. The effect on student retention was so profound that Mendina won a Teacher of the Year award out of it.

While reading the chapter I felt like testing the hypothesis. So I set my alarm for 10 minutes, during which I would continue reading the book uninterrupted, then take a break for roughly two minutes (untimed) to review the previous 10 minutes of reading or do something else — drink a beverage, stretch, whatever. The I would repeat this cycle for as long as desired.

Even before the first 30 minutes of this segmented reading, the effect it had on my ability to concentrate and retain information was obvious. Reading like this was slower, but effortless in a way that I’ve never experienced.

Taking a load off

I’m used to reading in long stretches, usually a couple of hours at a time. Up until now I’ve always assumed that long intervals of uninterrupted reading was the most efficient way to process text. Well, it is the most efficient way, but not necessarily the most effective.

The longer I read, the more material I had to retain in working memory (mental RAM). As the cognitive load from previous reading increases, the ability to focus on current reading decreases. Put simply, the more you try to remember, the less you’re able to concentrate. This might explain why instructional videos on YouTube, with its 10-minute maximum, are so effective.

I’ve never been good at taking notes while reading, since I tend to go “in the zone.” Writing breaks the flow of my reading. Normally what I do — for instance, when working on a book review — is spend a few days reading the book from start to finish, then go through it again taking notes. This was a pretty painful way to work. Now I take notes during the break periods. 10 minutes of reading feels like just the right amount of material to summarize without feeling overwhelmed, at least for me.

By switching to ten minute segments, I knew while I was reading that I would have a chance to review any difficult material I came across, so I know longer felt the need to stare a certain passages before moving on. It’s a very liberating feeling. Three hours of segmented reading doesn’t feel like three hours. It only feels like the last 10 minutes.

Slowing down to human scale learning

The biggest “disadvantage” of segmented reading is that getting through a book takes much longer — four or five times as long, it seems. Having just gone through a low information diet, I’m not sure that this is a bad thing. Both segmented reading and the low information diet seem to be teaching the same lesson: don’t consume information at a rate faster than you can digest or use it. Knowing how much longer it’s going to take to get through a book now, I have to be much more selective about my reading.

I’ve notice that I’ve intuitively applied the concept to my blog writing for some time. I format my posts in ways that I would never think of doing if I were writing a book. I split up long paragraphs, even when they’re technically one thought; I use bulleted lists, bold sentences and subheadings liberally. I would normally consider these elements “bad” copywriting. But readers seem to zone out on long blocks of onscreen text (usually read two or three feet away, suggesting that a blog post is closer in format to a poster than to a page in a book).

Breaking up feed reading

After completing the low-information diet, I’ve been reluctant to add feeds back into my RSS reader. Most of the feeds I subscribed to no longer seem to offer enough value for the time I invested in them. But now I realize that it wasn’t the time they consumed, but the attention. I want to try adding some feeds back into the reader and apply segmented reading to see how it changes the experience.

Trying it out

Again, the concept and technique are simple. Set a timer for ten minutes and read without interruption. Then take a break, reviewing the material just read as needed. Technical and nonfiction reading benefit most from this. Rinse and repeat.

(Photo credit: dabdiputs)

Technorati Tags: Thinking Operations

One way to cope with the brain’s lack of discipline is to keep your life compartmentalized. If a personal issue occurs to you at work, just ignore it, and if it’s important, you’ll think about it when it’s relevant. That’s a big risk to take (forgetting the odd anniversary) in the name of simplifying your life. And it’s totally unnecessary.

All you really need is a good collection and transfer protocol. If you’ve been reading Tools for Thought for a while, you probably know the drill by now: write it down, throw it in your in-basket and process it into your calendar or lists.

By what if the source material from work needs to go home, or vice versa? What about the articles you printed out for your Read/Review stack that you could chip away at in between errands? What if you’re a road warrior whose primary office is a laptop?

Using plastic travel folders

The simple solution is to create a set of semipermanent folders for collecting things on the run, schlepping things between work and home, or keeping things on you for supporting certain tasks. You can buy them preprinted from the David Allen Company, but they’re much cheaper to make if you have the labeler that no serious GTD user would be caught dead without.

Since these folders will get a lot more handling the general reference files you keep in your file cabinet, it’s better to use plastic folders rather than generic manila ones. The standard set consists of the following labels:

• In: This folder acts as your portable in-basket when you’re not deskbound, keeping any new documents, notes and receipts you collect from randomly spreading throughout your go bag. If you make your own set, it’s a good idea to make this one a different color than the rest (traditionally, red), since it will probably be the most frequently accessed
• To Home: If you’d rather not process personal items at work, or if they simply need to be stored at home, this is their temporary holding area
• To Office: Same concept, opposite direction
• Action Support: It’s usually more practical to have a single folder for any paperwork that you need to reference on all your errands than carrying separate project support folders, unless you have a lot of them
• Waiting For Support: Not one I’ve ever used personally. I just use Action Support for any actions I’m taking myself or expecting from others
• Read/Review: Technically not a travel folder, but you’ll probably make at least as much use of it in transit as you would in the office. Standing in lines is a great time to get through some of your reading material

Naturally, you can customize folders to your preference. You might want a separate “Receipts” folder instead of throwing your receipts in your In folder.

Storing and labeling

Before I started working at home, I used a three-tray setup at work: one for In, one for read/review material, and one for action support. The Read/Review folder would go, of course, in the read/review tray; the Action Support and To Home travel folders would go in my action support tray; the other folders would stay in my bag.

It’s a good idea to not only label each folder at the tab, but also toward the bottom edge in the center. Insert the folders so that the bottom edge face towards you. That allows you to see the labels clearly without getting obscured by the papers inside — you don’t have to lift the papers to see the labels. Apply some clear tape over each label to keep them from peeling away from the surface. If you really want to make the folders more aesthetic, use clear label tape with white lettering, but for me that’s overkill.

If you have any travel folder categories that you’ve found to come in handy, please mention them in the comments.

(Photo credit: The David Allen Company)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

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

The moment we have to compare, sort or relate more than three or four factors, it becomes more efficient to track them externally, using media like paper, a whiteboard or a computer. This type of externalized thinking is called distributed cognition.

Distributed cognition is a fancy term for a simple concept.

• First, we collect our thoughts about the project or situation at hand
• Then, organize these thoughts into one of three schemes to clarify their meaning and relevance

Once we have all of our thoughts in front of us simultaneously, it becomes easier to see or define their relationships.

We can think relationally when we have persistent mental representations in the physical world to work with. When we try to manage multiple thoughts without physical aides, we’re limited by short-term memory to comparing two thoughts at any given moment. Managing three thoughts requires two comparison operations. This can happen quickly, but has operations multiply, the overhead soon becomes unscalable.

I use the word “thought” in a peculiar way — as a general term to stand for any object of our attention: an idea, a fact, a memory, a concern, a concept, or a detail. Thoughts can be broad or specific — we can think about a “bird” or a “beak.” Like a hologram, we can take a fragment of a thought (beak) and reconstruct a whole from it (bird).

In ascending order of complexity, lists, trees and maps are the scaffolds used to hold our thoughts in place while we examine them objectively. Lists are for simple overviews, trees are for hierarchical relationships, and maps are for nonlinear relationships.

Lists

These are fairly self-evident. If you want to make it easy to pick up everything you need at the grocery store, you make a list. If you want to ensure that all relevant topics are discussed during a meeting, you create an agenda — a list.

Lists come in two types: ordered and unordered. Ordered lists can be organized chronologically or by priority of importance. Lists may be unordered because they represent an initial brain dump — collecting before organizing — or because sequence and priority are irrelevant. The Beatles are John, Paul, George and Ringo, regardless of order.

The advantage of lists is simplicity. They’re intuitive to make without specialized tools or further instruction, and they’re compact enough to fit onto any collection medium — the back of an envelope, a PDA, a notebook. The disadvantage of lists is that the person making them will sometimes unconsciously populate a list using a narrower set of criteria than originally intended. A list about “rock and roll” might begin with a diverse array of thoughts around the topic (electric guitars, groupies, lyrics), then slip into a narrow array without the list maker realizing it (a list of rock stars). With trees and maps, we explicitly group thoughts under headings to prevent getting sidetracked from the big picture.

Trees

Trees organize thoughts into hierarchies, allowing us to see their linear relationships. Trees can be graphical, with boxes and lines, or they can be simply written outlines. If the hierarchy is self-evident, making a tree is still helpful for more objective examination. Writing outlines and org charts are typical examples of trees. If the hierarchy is as-yet undefined (drafting a book proposal, or an org chart for a new business), it often helps to collect thoughts in list form first, then organize them into a tree to clarify or establish their relationships.

Trees can be top-down or botton-up. If you’re planning to write a book about dogs, you can start top-down, brainstorming chapter ideas: breeds, training, feeding, and so on; then repeating the process for sections within each chapter. Bottom-up trees are for working inductively. You want to write a book about dogs, but sense that you would like it to target a more unique niche. You start brainstorming prospective chapter ideas: accessories, grooming, pedigrees, etc. — suddenly, you see a pattern, and realize that writing a book on competing in dog shows might be the way to go.

The advantage of trees is that the categories and subcategories are explicit. It’s obvious during the brainstorming process when there’s too much emphasis on one category. The disadvantage of trees is that the relationships between categories, subcategories and elements must be understood up front. It can be difficult to drop a new idea onto a tree when there’s only an intuitive grasp of how the idea relates to any of the existing categories. This is less of a problem with bottom-up trees, but maps offer more freedom to accommodate looser relationships.

Maps

Maps — a generic term for diagramming structures like flowcharts, mind maps, flowscapes and concept maps — can be used to illustrate a process, determine relationships between different elements, or capture thoughts before the relationships between them are evident. Maps can incorporate trees and lists as part of a larger whole. Some maps are strictly procedural, like flowcharts, while others are relational, like concept maps.

Mind maps, the most widely used mapping scheme for personal use, can be done on paper or computer. Many people find that mindmapping on paper is more fluid and spontaneous than doing so in programs like MindManager or Freemind. On the other hand, computer mind maps can be distributed easily, and it’s possible to attach support material to nodes if desired. A mind map for a project can double as a digital file cabinet for all relevant support materials, like documents, presentations, images and web links.

The advantage of maps is that they can include all types of elements or relationships within a project or situation. In a mind map, for instance, list items can orbit a central theme, and each of them can branch into its own tree of related details. The disadvantage of maps (some types, at least) is that it’s possible to continue free associating indefinitely and lose sight of the critical elements in the map. Sometimes it helps, after making a map, to pick out the critical nodes and consolidate them into a list, or a shorter map.

The ratio can vary. 10% of a collector’s paintings might account for 90% of the collection’s value. 50% of a meal might alleviate 100% of a person’s hunger. The ratio may or may not add up to 100%, falling short or exceeding it.

The 80% figure also implies that looking for the critical 20% leads to adequate but suboptimal results. 80% may not be sufficient, and assuming that only 20% of the contributing resource matters can foster an overly narrow perspective.

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to the 80/20 principle is the term itself, which is cumbersome for informal use. Industrial engineers have Pareto charts to analyze operations, but we need a more informal way to apply the principle that makes intuitive sense.

Asking the 80/20 questions

Thinking is mainly a process of asking and answering questions. By asking better questions, we can get better answers. The first step in making a general principle actionable is to turn it into a question. If we frame the 80/20 principle as a question, and drop the specific numbers out of it, we might end up with a tool for thought that’s easier to use. Let’s generate some variations on the question to fit different situations.

• What’s the least amount of this that makes the most difference?
• How much of the time I spend doing this activity is creating the bulk of the outcome?
• Which few of all the thoughts I have are on my mind most of the time?
• How much of the food on this plate would satisfy my hunger?
• Which of these activities would have the most leverage?

You may notice a pattern here. In each case, instead of taking the input for granted (a plate of food), we’re making our attention within the input more granular (which food on the plate). Instead of looking at the house, we’re looking for the load bearing walls. We’re consciously searching for the critical elements instead of assuming that they’ll become obvious over time. They probably will, but it’s more efficient to think about the critical elements on the front end.

We start to recognize that much of the time, effort or material needed to achieve an outcome may not be necessary. The first two hours of research may accomplish most of what would be accomplished in five. It’s a matter of applying the right question to your own situation, seeing to what extent it applies.

The questions make no assumption that 20% is the right percentage. The only assumption that’s being made is that some of the inputs account for most of the outputs, which is usually true but not always.

When asking 80/20 questions, it’s important to remember that their main role is to pay closer attention to what resources within a given set are necessary, not to ignore the possibility that all resources are necessary, or even sufficient.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Thinking Operations

I ordered my usual French Dip, a bowl of clam chowder and a slice of chocolate cream pie. As soon as I set the tray down on the table, I found myself looking at the volume of food I was about to eat with different eyes. My intuition was raising a red flag against the act of hyperconsumption I was about to commit.

Staring at the food for a moment longer, a question suddenly came to mind.

What 20% of this would give me 80% of the satisfaction?

I wound up eating perhaps more than 20%, but well below half. I ate the full (small) bowl of clam chowder, less than half of the sandwich, and four forkfulls of the pie. I put the rest in a box, and repeated the process at home. It took me four days to finish a meal that I would have ordinarily pounded away in one sitting.

I’ve started doing this with everything I eat and drink now, and I not only have more energy when I’m finished, but the act of eating is more enjoyable. It’s not the mathematical proportion that matters. 80/20 is an arbitrary ratio in this context, and could just as easily be 50/50 or 90/10. What matter is the fact that I’m forced to pay attention to what I’m eating in relation to a standard of fulfillment, not consumption.

Like most Americans, I was raised to finish everything on my plate. This ethic carries a number of unexamined assumptions:

• Everything on a plate is worth eating
• The size of the plate is appropriate to the amount of food we actually need
• The plate needs to be loaded
• Food left on the plate is “wasted,” as opposed to turning to excess fat if eaten
• “Full” meals are served on plates, as opposed to bowls, skewers or napkins

The 20% Not-to-Eat list

While I’ve only been applying the Pareto (80/20) principle to individual meals for less than a week, I’ve had more experience with a different application. Last December, I decided to lose some weight. Being too lazy to maintain a real diet, I asked myself, “What are the 20% of foods that are causing 80% of my excess weight?”

It took about three minutes to realize that they fell into two categories: candy and pastries. I was surprised by how simple it was to drop these from my eating routine (Phillipe being the one and only exception), since I usually ate them to alleviate boredom anyway. Sometimes resisting the urge took a little emotional effort, but the alternative of counting calories or carbs would have taken much more. I always prefer making things easier before applying more effort.

Within two days, I noticed that my stomach no longer exerted pressure against my belt, and within two weeks, I noticed that I had to keep pulling my pants up. In six weeks I lost 11 pounds, with nothing to analyze or track.

The great thing about 80/20 analyses is that they apply at any level. If you’ve already eliminated candy and pastries, your 20% might be dairy products and meat. Whatever it is, it’s usually something that’s obvious once you focus on it as an issue.

Technorati Tags: Thinking Operations, Diet

Escaping the busy trap

In busy environments, it’s easy to confuse acting with reacting. Notice that when people respond to a request with something along the lines of, “I’ve got some many things to do!”, it’s often with a deer-in-headlights expression. Purposeful action requires cycles of repose and reflection.

Action is conspicuous, purpose is not. In the age of conspicuous production, actions give instant gratification. Purpose, when it’s not framed as a “mission statement,” is an ongoing, developing conversation with the self. No statement can automate an authentic life. Purpose has to be revisited and reassessed as we acquire experience.

When reassessing direction, it’s essential to get out of any busy environment, whether that involves leaving the office or leaving your laptop. The fewer things in the external environment you have competing for your attention, the easier it becomes to discern what really has your attention. One question you can use to distinguish between distractions and authentic touchstones is:

What am I ignoring?

Examining the negative space of the life and goals you’ve defined for yourself is one of the fastest ways to achieve perspective. It’s also one of the most emotionally difficult. This catalytic question puts issues that might otherwise be glossed over in the front and center of your attention. Instead of mentioning “I don’t spend enough time with friends” in passing, as a casualty of some ostensibly worthier goal, the observation gets framed as an issue in its own right.

When I started Tools for Thought, I had no intention of writing primarily about productivity. At some point during the Pattern Language for Productivity series, the productivity theme became a mental loop that I’m only beginning to escape by looking at what topics I’m ignoring. I had to pull myself out of the blogosphere and start writing offline in order to listen to my inner voice.

“What am I ignoring?” is a process of creative questioning that provides a reality check against the widget-cranking mentality that militates against reflection and change in direction. It’s a good question to ask any time, in the middle of any consideration.

Consuming advice from an RSS reader doesn’t scale well. Even good advice in excess is indigestible. Sometimes it’s better to step back and question your assumptions rather than fill the void with answers from others — including mine.

Technorati Tags: Thinking Operations

Consider All Factors (CAF) is an attention directing tool designed to do this. During a defined interval of time, you mentally list every consideration about a topic you can think of, as opposed to just the first few that come to mind.

An example

A shy person is invited to a party. His default reaction is to think, “I’m just not an extrovert.” For this exercise he decides to enrich his perspective by considering other factors in that social situation:

• Body language
• Greetings
• Response to questions
• Questions to ask others
• Dressing for impact
• First impressions
• Smiling
• Who’s there that I already know?
• Purpose of attending
• Anxiety created by unfamiliarity

Some considerations arguably overlap: first impressions, dressing for impact, smiling. It doesn’t matter, and would be counterproductive to censor new angles on what might be thought of as the same theme, since the only way to really know is in hindsight. In this case, the person might not have previously paid any attention to the role of personal appearance in creating good first impression, despite that factor being obvious to others.

By consciously distributing cognition around a topic, he gives himself new things to think about. The consideration “purpose of attending” might contrast with going to the party simply because he was asked, instead of having a deliberate focus to guide to his behavior. The consideration, “anxiety created by unfamiliarity” is interesting. One strategy for overcoming his social apprehension is to familiarize himself with everyone in the room, making as many introductions as possible to avoid being confronted with a crowd of strangers.

Other examples

We can “do a CAF” for a couple of minutes on just about any topic, either for better planning or simply for its own sake as a mental exercise. Doing a CAF on apartment hunting might yield:

• Commute to and from work
• Length of lease
• Rent
• Total move-in cost
• Impression of landlord
• Square footage
• Aesthetics
• Noise level of surrounding area
• Walking distance to amenities (e.g. stores, parks)
• Parking
• Consensus with other decision makers
• Furniture
• Pets
• Terms of rental agreement

Again, some overlap. Pets and lease length would be covered in the rental agreement, but isolating “terms of rental agreement” as a separate item might prompt the apartment hunter to look more carefully for unreasonable clauses instead of taking the contract for granted. Notice that the apartment hunter has also factored in “impression of landlord” as a conscious consideration rather than leaving it as an afterthought or subliminal intuition.

Starting a exercise program:

• Type of exercise
• Clothing
• Equipment
• Schedule
• Home, gym, personal trainer?
• Fitness goals (e.g. weight, running distance)
• Handling eventual decline in discipline or enthusiasm
• Nutrition
• Documenting progress

This person has identified a decline in discipline and enthusiasm as something to deal with before its onset. It’s much easier to plan for setbacks in advance than trying to address them while they’re happening.

Exercises

The more you practice the CAF operation, the easier it gets, and less inclined you are to be satisfied with accepting the first considerations that immediately come to mind. When you think about a new topic, you’ll begin to instinctively ask yourself, “What am I missing?”

But it takes deliberate practice to make this questioning engagement a conscious habit. Spend two minutes doing a CAF on each of the following topics, using a timer and continuing to think of more factors until the time is up.

• Changing careers
• Beverages
• Improving sleep
• Creating memorable experiences
• Balancing present needs with lifetime goals
• Choosing a pet
• Gifts
• Advice
• Learning a foreign language
• Religion

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