Some time management system gurus would argue that every task, however big or small, needs to be scheduled. But even critics of time management generally agree that activities requiring higher focus need long blocks of time set aside. But how long is long?

Parkinson’s Law

Even before Cyril Northcote Parkinson first postulated his “law” in an essay for The Economist in 1955, the notion that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion” has long been a popular assumption. It’s accepted as a given that if you give people eight hours to complete a six-hour task, they’ll take eight hours. Over time, Parkinson’s Law has been reformulated in quasi-scientific locutions that sound even more authoritative: “A task will swell in perceived importance and complexity in direct correlation to the time allotted to it.”

Like Murphy’s Law, Parkinson’s Law was coined by a humorist. Parkinson wasn’t in the business of offering time management tips. While all responsible project managers will plan for contingencies, they wouldn’t seriously do so on the basis of Murphy’s Law. Everyone recognizes that Murphy’s Law is observational humor, an exaggeration for comic purposes.

Parkinson’s Law, on the other hand, is often taken quite seriously, sometimes with disastrous effects when managers attempt to increase productivity by shortening deadlines. With supervised manual labor, where wage earners are expected to look busy throughout their shifts, it’s no surprise that workers will pace their work as needed to remain conspicuously active. In those cases, shorter deadlines can actually expedite things if supervisors can tolerate the idleness that follows, which is unlikely. Shortening deadlines usually does little more than increase the display of activity, and often increases errors — which then have to be fixed, pushing completion back beyond the original deadlines.

Knowledge work is fundamentally different from manual work, but not because it carries more perceived importance or complexity. It’s different because people can move faster on demand but cannot think faster. Think rate is fixed, or at least controlled by factors other than willpower or coercion. I recently realized why I enjoy writing longhand over typing. I type much faster than my mental rate of composition, since I frequently deliberate over word choices, but longhand is a perfect match.

Like Murphy’s Law, Parkinson’s Law isn’t a falsehood so much as an exaggeration. We’ve all seen it work from time to time, sometimes on the basis of luck; but there’s a actually a deep principle behind its occasional success: it forces people to think about their process as a whole instead of figuring it out as they’re going along.

You don’t need a boss breathing down your neck to apply the principle. You can simply take any task, pick a shorter time to completion and work backward. If you had to complete your most pressing project in half the time you now have available for it, and you didn’t have the option of taking longer, how would you do it? What would you do differently?

Concentration Threshold

Concentration Threshold is a theory of time allocation expressed by Julie Morgenstern, who states it as an observation rather than a law. If you give yourself too little time to complete a task, you won’t start because you implicitly know the time frame is unrealistic. If you give yourself too much time to complete a task, you won’t start because you implicitly know that your attention won’t last for the allotted block of time.

Concentration Threshold is specific to each individual and each task. We don’t procrastinate in general; we procrastinate on certain things more than others, depending on the level of focus required. Morgenstern describes a couple of examples in her commercial podcast, SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life: The 4-Step Plan for Getting Unstuck:

Most writers that I know can only write for up to four hours a day, and if they give themselves eight hours, they’re going to spend four hours procrastinating until they’re inside that window of “I only have four hours left,” and all of a sudden they buckle down and get it done. And when it comes to paying bills it’s very similar. People procrastinate on that because what I call their concentration threshold for managing their finances is about 20 minutes. So they sit down for an hour and they procrastinate for 40 minutes until they’re up to their concentration threshold, and then they finally engage, because 20 minutes is their maximum time frame for finances.

Leveraging your concentration threshold is a three-step process:

1. Determine what specific activity is evoking procrastination. Resist the temptation to identify yourself as “a procrastinator.” Most people who think they procrastinate all of the time, on further analysis, come to realize that they only procrastinate on a very small, but important, number of things.
2. Determine how long it takes to complete a task including procrastination time. In other words, count the time to completion from the moment your scheduled yourself to start to the time you actually started, then from the time you actually started to the time you finished for the day.
3. The next time you schedule the task, only allot the amount to time that elapsed when you actually engaged from start to finish, which is very likely your concentration threshold.

Parkinson’s Law and Concentration Threshold look similar, since both call for shortening time allocations. But Parkinson’s Law always advocates time reduction, acting as a pressure valve, whereas Concentration Threshold requires sometimes reducing time, sometimes increasing it.

If you work in an environment where you’re required to put in a fixed number of hours, another way to apply the principle is to determine when your attention starts to wane (well, not yours or mine, but our friends and coworkers), then schedule your break periods right before those times. Learn to look for the natural ebbs and flows of your attention and work with them rather than against them.

(Photo credit: sfllaw)

Last week, Engadget asked its readers "How would you change HP’s Mini 1000 Mi?" After the reply I started to post ran into a few paragraphs, I decided to cut and paste my thoughts here instead.

Why a Netbook?

My time logs show that it takes from 8 to 11 minutes for me to start working on the my regular laptop — time spent looking for an electrical outlet and waiting for the boot sequence to complete. Granted, my old laptop only has 1 GB of RAM and the battery is too exhausted to last more than 30 minutes before throwing XP into Hibernate mode. The HP netbook gave me something more agile than a full laptop: small, fast-booting, and with sufficient power to leave the charger at home. But is a netbook computer useful for serious work?

When I first started using the Foleo, I was primarily attracted by how I naturally carried it around: one handed in a neoprene sleeve, instead of a bag that would inevitably get filled things I didn’t need. Frank Lloyd Wright used to design homes with as few cupboards and closets as he could get away with, recognizing that if owners had additional space to fill, they would stockpile possessions rather than use them. I never missed having a laptop bag. Alas, I had to RMA the Foleo back to Palm when the product was canceled. Most of the netbooks released in the interim have either been too small, unergonomic, or otherwise compromised for me to take them seriously — until now.

The HP Mini 1000 Mi

Fast forward 18 months. From the moment I unboxed the Mini 1000, I had most of my Foleo experience back. Of all the netbooks currently on the market, except for a couple of sibling HP products, the Mini 1000 has the best keyboard I’ve tested, with keys that are flush-mounted and untapered. The Mini has a "92 percent," almost full-size keyboard, which is becoming increasingly common on netbooks. I only wish HP would have used a trackpoint (the eraser-like nub) for navigation instead of a trackpad, which would have created enough space to incorporate a full-size keyboard like the Foleo. As with a few other netbooks, like the Acer Aspire One, the trackpad’s buttons flank the sides of the pad rather than the bottom, which my thumbs have yet to get used to.

Software

The "Mi" version of the HP Mini 1000 features Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows XP. I wanted a less commercial operating system that would compel me to use web-based applications rather than native ones. The Mi was clearly designed with the non-geek in mind — there’s no command line console like the Bash shell, for instance. I miss the shell, since I much prefer to write with the classic text editor, vi, than the included text editor, gEdit. Most writers want a full word processor, and would probably be satisfied with OpenOffice, which is also bundled with the Mini. I’ve never been able to get into OpenOffice Writer, since it lacks the Outline View that makes Microsoft Word indispensable.

HP’s Mobile Internet Experience (MIE) user interface is a bit more attractive than a default Ubuntu distribution. The home screen is comprised of three panes. The left pane is for email, using Thunderbird. The center pane is for the web, featuring a search/address bar and bookmarks for launching a customized version of Firefox. The right pane is for music and photo, using HP’s own MediaStyle player and manager.

I set up the Thunderbird panel for my Gmail IMAP account, but after a couple of days I found myself more comfortable with accessing Gmail through the browser again. The Thunderbird interface is superficially attractive, since it displays the headers of your latest messages is soon as the computer is booted. But clicking on one of these headers doesn’t open the message directly. It opens the Thunderbird client in full screen mode, so you have to click on the header again to open the individual email. So the header column on the home screen is essentially a launcher icon for Thunderbird.

The same is true for MediaStyle. When you click on a thumbnail of a photo on the home screen, instead of displaying that photo full-sized, you’re taken to MediaStyle’s photo manager, from which you have to select the thumbnail again. Clicking on the thumbnail cover art for a music file works similarly: the selection launches MediaStyle’s file manager, and the file must be re-selected.

The web pane is better designed. The dropdown bookmarks menu and four Favorite thumbnails launch the browser and go to the selected website directly. The entry bar at the top of the allows you to put in a URL or search term, and the icons for Go and Search are intuitive.

The Linux version of Firefox, though customized, doesn’t seemed optimized for the Mini’s 1024 x 576 screen. The browser frame consumes too much real estate, but I’m still searching for a lightweight Linux Firefox theme — the two that I found wouldn’t install. Most of the extensions I use on the Windows version, on the other hand, did install (I have more compatibility issues with the latest Windows Firefox betas than with the MIE version). Fullscreen Mode (F11) is the best way to use the browser in most cases, especially when using Google Docs and Gmail.

In Daily Use

Switching between several computers nudged me into using the cloud exclusively on the netbook. After a couple of instances of leaving a natively written draft on the Mini, then needing that file later at a different computer, I decided to rule out local computing on the netbook. I use MindManager Web (the web-based version of MindManager, using the Mindjet Connect service) as my digital inbox. If there’s a thought I want to grab while working on something else I toggle over to MMW and drop it there; then process what I’ve collected on that collection map at the end of the day, opening the file from the MindManager 8 desktop version. I also use the "inbox" map on MMW for any collecting any sites, articles or documents I come across when using the Mini. 90 percent of what I need to be productive on the Mini is Gmail, Google Docs, and MindManager Web.

Like the old days of the Foleo, it’s been a relief to carry nothing but the netbook and it’s sleeve instead of additional paraphernalia. Unlike the Foleo, the Mini’s battery life is 2.5 to 3 hours, while the 2-year-old Foleo’s battery lasted nearly 6 hours with WiFi and Bluetooth active. HP sells a separate 6-cell alternative to the included 3-cell battery, but it protrudes from the base of the device at the center, which is neither visually attractive nor lap-friendly.

I’m tempted to replace MIE with Windows 7. Part of the reason for choosing the Linux version was the chance to learn something new. I don’t feel lost in the new environment, but the overall responsiveness is sluggish compared to Windows 7 installations I’ve seen on other netbook computers. I also find MIE’s slate-colored interface a rather cold ("Because modern science was looking for a color more somber than black," Mort Sahl once quipped about charcoal gray suits).

Overall, I like the practicality of the Mini Mi, but I’m still at a point where I feel more comfortable and productive when I’m sitting at a full-size laptop. But the netbook is perfect for taking advantage of smaller windows of time.

I want you or anyone to post in the comments or email me the coolest cloud-based work setup they use on a daily basis, with a least one example of how it allowed you to do something you couldn’t do previously.

I got a bunch of great answers that were informative and inspiring. It’s a platitude to say that I had trouble choosing only one, but that was definitely the case here. But let’s skip the handwringing and get down to brass tacks. Who won?

Congratulations . . .

Kevin A, whose implementation of cloud services struck me the most extensive and integrated setup (if you’re not Kevin but still want second crack at the Matrix, keep reading):

I’ve used various MS technologies to acheive “cloud-like” computing over the past few years. Anything from Live Mesh, Live Mail (to a hotmail-hosted domain), WHS, and various other stuff.

I rarely sync my WM devices to the phone, because Windows Live for Windows Mobile syncs both my e-mail and contacts OTA. In turn, Windows Live Mail syncs contacts back from the hotmail acct back to my desktop, thereby un-neccessitating the requirement that I use Outlook to “back up” my contacts and mail.

On the WHS side, I can not worry about “backing up” computers because WHS does it for both my desktop and laptop. I can tell Vista to redirect Documents, Music, etc. to the WHS side. And once Mesh for WHS plugin is complete, I can tell WHS to handle meshing important documents to MS’s cloud network. So I don’t have to deal with offline files, or synctoy, or other solutions where I need to be necessarily connected to “my” network to get a sync on my files.

I may be a bit MS-centric here, but I’ve beta-tested various MS products over the years, and WHS, Mesh, and WLWM/WLM are three products that stood out because it cuts out the unnecessary middle-men. Why should I be required to be in my network or establish a VPN into my network to make sure my file is up-to-date? WWAN technology are only going to get better, I just have to ensure that I have short bursts of ‘net connectivity (3G or higher) to get up-to-date contents. Same thing with “sync your mail” into Outlook. With apologies to MS, I don’t particularly use Outlook, since it is bloated and tends to get confused occasionally. WLM is all I need, and MS has made it very easy to sync to a hotmail-hosted account, which in turn does the same for the WM5+ devices. I need not to be “at” my computer to get the same effect as an actual sync.

With SSD becoming standard, I may resort backing up my files via Mesh so that I don’t end up losing it. Which in turn would be backed-up via Home Server server backup syncing to the mesh, and folder redirection on the desktop, and Mesh is smart enough (supposedly) to not use the WAN connection. Which in turn would result in less end-user confusion about which “file” residing where is the most up-to-date

As Kevin admits, his solutions are rather MS-centric, using Windows Live services to sync Windows Mobile and Windows Home Server over-the-air (OTA) — but he’s managed to completely bypass Outlook and Exchange ActiveSync in the process. If I were willing to migrate from Gmail to Live Mail, I’d probably install WHS and follow Kevin’s lead. Like the other examples posted by contributors, this isn’t a 100% “Cloud” solution (WHS is doing the heavy lifting until the Mesh plugin is available), but the level of integration demonstrated is closest to the “single distributed computer” ideal I’ve been trying to model for my own setup.

Other Noteworthy Contributions

The most moving post for me was by Brent Johnson, who’s using Twitter to chronicle his mother’s upcoming lung replacement surgery among friends and family, and to organize teams to raise funds for it:

As it stands right now, I’m posting updates through Twitter, and I have them appear on a private WordPress page for family and friends to read.

As the surgery approaches, we’re also putting together a fundraising team to help raise money to cover the estimated $525,000 surgery. The fund raising teams will likely have computer access for many of their tasks, but we plan on implementing Twitter into that as well. During the events themselves, we will be able to coordinate the event (and the site volunteers) through the use of Smartphones and Twitter. That means all we will need are our cell phones, and we will be able to dispatch important announcements to team leaders spread over a large event or venue. It will enable to us communicate walkie-talkie style without having to purchase (or rent) expensive walkie-talkies. Since these are fundraising events, it’s important to us to conserve as much money as possible so it goes towards the fund (and not expenses).

Once the surgery starts, we will be able to post short Twitter updates about my mom’s condition for everyone to read. During the critical surgery, the last thing I will want to do is lug around a computer in order to update a website. Furthermore, I don’t want to have to call dozens and dozens of people to let them know her condition. Utilizing Twitter, I can easily post short updates LIVE, and everyone can either use their favorite Twitter client, the Twitter webpage, or our WordPress blog (with Twitter plugin) to see how well she’s doing. It will simplify everything during a very trying time for us and allow us to keep everyone updates minute by minute.

Girlxoxo had a very extensive setup, and virtually tied with Kevin A’s solution (but Kevin’s seemed more streamlined by a hair):

Google Calendar – all entries are scheduled there for my food reviews website. It’s a private calendar, but all the reviewers have the address so they can see when their review will be published. Also like that they can search by their name and at a glance see the dates for all their reviews.

Google Docs. All food reviews are written & stored there (about 850 and counting) .

Google Spreadsheet. Used to keep track of all income for months and all payments to reviewers.

Leaving Google …
Pixlr.com – Use it to edit images. Works just like Photoshop which I have on my computer, and I love that I can import pictures from a URL. Unfortunately, I still save the edited images to the laptop.

Delicious.com stores links I come across during the day.

Keepm.com. Stores all contacts – phone, gmail, facebook etc. I don’t want all contacts on my phone – some I probably will never use.

Mobile Phone. Use it for blogging also to my mobile phone features related website – using SharpMT, xnViewer and PocketScreen for screenshots (guess that’s not really cloud but I like the all in one – FAST aspect of it).

Dashwire.com – all contacts, texts sync from mobile to Dashwire.

Speaking of sync – Google mobile (and calendar) sync (I know I said I was finished with Google).

Business phone line (for blogging contacts): Google Voice (formerly Grandcentral.com) – rings my cellphone.

Rather than paste the entire comment thread here, check out the great contributions in the last post.

Still Want to Win a Matrix Pro?

Tools for Thought is the first of over two dozen sites that are running contest for the Matrix Pro, courtesy of Pantech. The details of each contest will probably be quite different, but the prize is the same: the Pantech Matrix Pro. Head on over to one of the remaining sites:

Good luck, and thanks for all of your contributions!

First, instead of giving advice in my usual presumptuous fashion, I’m asking for it. I’m radically redesigning my workflow and need a few intrepid readers to share some successful or dramatic examples of how they’re using the cloud. Second, I’m “selling out” by aligning myself with a commercial promotion — cell phone geeks take note. I’ll get to the details in a few paragraphs, but first, an explanation . . .

Cloudsourcing

Just as it’s often said that true writing is rewriting, I believe that true thinking is rethinking — the ability to step back from deeply entrenched assumptions, opinions and perspectives, and actively look for further alternatives. As a mental exercise, I often find it useful to periodically reexamine the assumptions I take for granted and invert them to see what happens.

A recent starting point for that self-examination was 10 Technologies I Resist. I went down the list and see if there were a few of those technologies I could test drive to broaden or reverse my perspective. There more more that a few that I found worth experimenting with: virtual outsourcing, IM, online finance trackers, mobile email and Office 2.0. That last one is the kickoff point of this post. For the next 30 days I’m going to migrate all of my information into the cloud, and chronicle the progress of the project is a series of posts called “Cloud Studies.”

In switching from full self-employment to office work, I’ve had to distribute my personal and professional work across several platforms: a home desktop, a work desktop, a laptop, a netbook and a cell phone. Trying to reconcile my data by copying locally-stored files, or sharing them by email, was getting ridiculously convoluted. So my goal is to design a virtual architecture that integrates my data in the absolute minimum number of buckets.

I recently, painfully migrated from the Palm OS Treo/Palm Desktop combo — that’s been the bedrock of my GTD system since I first implemented it — to the Windows Mobile equivalent: a Treo Pro and Microsoft Outlook. My goal is to sync my phone and various Outlook desktop/OWA clients over the air with a hosted Exchange account, then gradually layer on additional services: Skydrive for mass storage, Live Mesh for file synchronization, Mindjet Connect for mind maps, and possibly My Phone for PIM data. If none of this sounds less convoluted that my previous scheme, I have a pretty good idea that once the infrastructure is set up, my workflow will be dramatically streamlined — essentially accessing one “computer” from any device.

This Is Where You Come In

Here’s what I want. I want you or anyone to post in the comments or email me the coolest cloud-based work setup they use on a daily basis, with a least one example of how it allowed you to do something you couldn’t do previously. “Coolest” here can mean a few things:

• The most efficient: e.g. how you run your life through a personal wiki or WebDAV
• The most dramatic: how you use Backpack and Twitter to dispatch work to a team virtual assistants in St. Croix (real-world examples please, not creative writing)
• The most elegant: how you eliminated your additional computers and run them as virtual images on Amazon EC2 from your netbook
• The most democratic: how you’ve replaced all of the files and applications on your hard drive with free and open source web apps

You have 48 hours from “now,” 12:00 a.m. Thursday, April 16, 2009, until midnight Saturday, April 18.

What’s In It for You

As you’ve no doubt gathered from the post title, the winner scores a brand new Pantech Matrix Pro. The Matrix is a dual-slider Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard (non-touchscreen) smartphone in the form factor of a feature phone. In simpler terms, it’s a phone that slides up vertically for a numeric keypad, and horizontally for a QWERTY keypad. I’ll be posting a review of the phone shortly, but the bottom line is that I would probably make it my default phone if I hadn’t just renewed my Sprint contract (long story). Included with the phone is a $100 gift card that can be applied to any products and services sold through an AT&T store, online or offline.

If you have everything you need in the mobile space, then don’t play to win. Play to share your favorite cloud hacks.

The stress of heavy workloads doesn’t come from having too many things to do. We can all think of infinitely more worthy things to do that we’re not doing than think of the few things we are doing. If that was really the source of anxiety, every person on the planet would be in a permanent existential crisis. On the contrary. At any given moment, we have one of two choices: we can feel bad about all of the tasks we aren’t doing, or we can feel good about having made the right choice of the one task we are doing.

Workload induced stress comes from two sources: blurred priorities and overtaxed memory. The first is obvious. If you’re unclear that what you’re doing at the moment is the best use of your time and energy, you’ll feel anxious about that misuse. But attributing stress to overtaxed memory rather than too much work seems like a bit of a stretch.

The Limits of Mental RAM

Let’s first look at the notion that having too much to do creates stress. Do you get stressed about solving world hunger? Probably not. It’s clear that feeding the world is beyond your means, so you’ve taken that project off the table as a legitimate option. If you really have to much work, you’ll make an executive decision to delete, delegate or defer the excess — but you don’t stress out about it.

Stress comes from either explicitly accepting a commitment that you implicitly know is unrealistic, or implicitly accepting a commitment you haven’t made explicit. Thinking, “I should set up that Roth IRA” is an implicit commitment that will eddy in the psyche indefinitely until the loop is closed with a specific next action that can be viewed objectively and retrieved conveniently. If you’re near a phone and you have a list of calls you have to make, and one of them is “Bank Customer Service: request Roth IRA,” it’s far easier to manifest that intention.

The first step to relieving stress is to capture everything that has your attention. That goes beyond just making a short list of the loudest or most recent claims on your attention; it means everything — big or small, important or unimportant. Most people resist going that far, then in stopping short of everything, they end up with a large but incomplete list that makes them more stressed than an absolutely total inventory of everything that’s on their mind would.

Having everything out in front of you, and knowing that it’s everything creates a sense of relief, even if you haven’t yet made a decision about what to do with anything on the list. A long list that’s finite is much less troubling than an incomplete list for the same reason that knowing you have $15,000 in debt is less troubling than wondering how much you owe.

Working memory can only hold about seven bits of information, give or take a few depending on your source. It’s clear that the mind wasn’t designed to manage a large inventory of commitments. But with tools, we can extend our storage capacity, which is where a system of externalized task management like Getting Things Done (GTD) comes in.

Outboard Memory

Think of GTD as a set of shelves for storing your stuff, rather than trying to carry it all in your arms. If you had to do something with any one thing you were carrying yourself, you would risk dropping the rest of the load. So you spend all of your energy keeping things close to the vest, hesitating to take action.

Without that shelf space available, you’ll resist capturing new items, sometimes making premature judgements about whether or not those items are important enough to capture in the first place. When you give yourself the freedom to capture everything that has your attention, and have a full array of placeholders to shelve it, you give yourself the discretion to evaluate it at a more appropriate time, when you can give it the full, objective attention it requires.

Total capture isn’t enough to keep things off your mind. You still need to process, organize and review what you collect regularly enough to trust that your outboard memory. But total capture is the necessary entry point. Without a good capture protocol, having any systematic approach to task management will seem take more work than it saves, because you’re working to systems in parallel: one of written notes, and another of mental notes. The more you try to remember, the less inclined you’ll be to write things down, and the more you’ll overtax your working memory.

Barriers to Fluid Capturing

If writing things down when they first occur to us is so important, why do so many of us resist the process? A few reasons:

1. Lack of trusted system downstream. If your processing skills are weak, your brain already knows that whatever you capture will just pile up for nought. Being efficiently lazy, the brain will preempt the extra work by gradually short circuiting your motivation to write things down. Likewise, if your habit of regularly looking at your calendar, project and action lists at least weekly loses momentum, the brain will again disengage from the preliminary work of capturing — after all, why create content that won’t be reviewed?

If the problem lies downstream, so does the solution: become diligent about processing, organizing and reviewing what you’ve captured. Many people allocate too little time to processing their in-basket on the grounds that it doesn’t seem to qualify as “real” work. This is one of the areas where GTD contrasts sharply from traditional time management systems: it explicitly acknowledges defining work as an essential phase of work, over and above doing predefined work.

2. Lack of preestablished capture tools. The time you need to capture something is not the time to decide what you’re going to capture it with, or how. In a moment where two decisions have to be made simultaneously — what to collect and how to collect it — the tendency will be to forgo the need to collect, and hope that whatever’s important enough will be remembered.

Capture tools needs to be thought through ahead of time, so that they’re available at a moment’s notice. Think through all situations throughout the day where you need to take notes:

• When you’re at you’re desk
• When you’re in a meeting
• When you wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea
• When you’re on your cell phone

Determine your preferred method and medium for dealing with each of these situations. Would you rather type your notes or jot them down by hand? Do you type notes with a specific application or a generic text editor? Do you handwrite notes better on large or small pads of paper? Where is the most strategic place to put them? Do you carry a ubiquitous capture tool like index cards in the back of your pocket, a Moleskine or a Notetaker Wallet. Five minutes spent on making decisions about how and where you’ll capture notes will save you from those future split seconds of indecision that make the difference between writing things down and hoping you’ll remember them.

3. The seduction of busyness. The act of capturing something demands hitting a pause button on whatever you were doing. In effect, it’s like a moment of instant meditation. For Type-A workers driven by latest-and-loudest, taking a moment to note something that could possibly be more important than whatever they’re doing (though perhaps less urgent), is something to be resolutely resisted. You’re smarter than that. You’d rather be productive than busy. The three seconds it takes to write something down is far more efficient than the 30 seconds it would take to remember what you didn’t capture, assuming it’s remembered at all. As always, the way things get done is one at a time.

4. Excessively formal notetaking. “Notetaking” is probably a misnomer here. Capturing needs to be agile: a few words or a few bullet points necessary to jog your memory when you process them. For instance, when I was driving I came up with the idea for this post; so I grabbed my voice recorder and said “getting things dumped” — and nothing else. I didn’t need to elaborate on the idea, because I knew that I would put the voice recorder in my in-basket later, and figure out the project and next action when I processed the voice note. Almost all of my voice notes last three to five seconds.

There are times when a lengthier capture process is preferable. A few minutes spent creating a mind map or an outline might be necessary to get a project off of your mind to an extent that a few words wouldn’t. But for general purpose capturing, shorter notes encourage more prolific collection.

5. Thinking through projects and next actions rather than capturing stuff. GTD users who get good at processing — looking at a note, deciding whether it’s actionable, and determining the specific project and action — are often tempted to process any new input right on the spot, essentially replacing capturing with collecting and organizing. That’s often more efficient, but it’s better to develop the skill of jotting raw notes rapidly so that you have the choice of whether to process now or later, depending on what’s appropriate give the time and attention you have available. I didn’t realize how much I wasn’t capturing until I got a notetaker wallet. Before that, I spent too much time trying to enter projects and next actions into my organizer instead of just capturing a short representative reminder.

You might, for instance, use a paper planner to manager your tasks. Assuming you don’t carry it with you at all times, it might make more sense to write a note like, “Meeting with Earl 7/12 at 3:00pm” on an index card when Earl first proposes it. Later, when you’re processing the note from the card into your planner, you have the leisure to determine if there’s a larger outcome involved that would go on your project list, any task to prepare for the meeting that would go on your next actions list, or any other considerations that might form a checklist.

It’s generally a good idea to keep capturing and processing as a two-step process, but skip capturing when the project and next action are obvious.

(Photo credit: World Economic Forum)

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)

Since Julie Morgenstern’s book on decluttering, When Organizing Isn’t Enough, was easily the most useful book I read last year, I decided to go back and read some of her material on time management I overlooked in the past. I’ve written about time management in a few times, usually contrasting it to task management, but now that more of my time is externally claimed, I’m more receptive to focusing on ways to master the time that remains under my control.

While Never Check E-Mail in the Morning and especially Time Management from the Inside Out are rewarding reads, it’s clear that studying time management is a like going to church — the people who need to be there the most are the ones who aren’t. Those who most urgently need to manage their time are the ones who (think they) lack the time to read books on the subject. A much faster introduction to Julie’s time management principles can be found in her Time Management for the New Year seminar, recorded last month and hosted on Hay House’s site (the streaming version is $4.95, the downloadable version is $20.00). The two-hour talk covers her six main time management tools, interspersed with insightful listener Q and A.

Organizing Time = Managing Time

Morgenstern began her consulting career as a professional organizer. As she became proficient at organizing physical spaces like living rooms and closets, organizing her time was the last frontier — until she realized that organizing time is exactly like organizing space. A day has so many hours or minutes, just as a closet has so many feet or inches. The trick is knowing what fits. A day crammed with arbitrary activity is as discouraging as fitting clothes into a packed closet.

Here are here six tools for aligning time commitments with time available:

Tool #1: Self-assessment. For anyone frustrated by the inability to get to the most important priorities, the first question to ask is, “What’s keeping me from getting to them?” Julie outlines three kinds of mistakes:

• Technical errors: mismanaged time that can be addressed by simple, mechanical fixes. Tackling high-focus projects too early or late in the day for one’s personal energy cycle, answering the phone before leaving for appointments, and misgauging the time necessary to complete a task can all be resolved by reversing those faulty habits (like ignoring the phone before leaving)
• External realities: disruptive environments, unrealistic schedules, and obligations to others that need to be accounted for consciously. For instance, I’ve been so accustomed to virtual freelance work without commuting that it didn’t occur to me that my new commute consumes 20 percent of my waking hours — obvious in hindsight
• Psychological obstacles: internal resistance or complications. Some people who are chronically late may be (1) calling attending to themselves, (2) avoiding arriving early to avoid having nothing to preoccupy them in the interim, or (3) artificially inducing a crisis situation for them to come to its “rescue” — what Julie calls a “Conquistador of Chaos” complex

Tool #2: Estimating how long a task will take. Julie recounts how she used to constantly procrastinate on washing the dishes, until she decided one day to time herself, only to find that it took seven minutes. From that point forward, washing the dishes was an easy chore, too short to be intimidating.

She notes that over 90 percent of her clients’ To Do lists lack time estimates next to the items. She recommends writing down a time estimate for every task. For the next week, time how long each task takes, or at least the ones you find yourself procrastinating on the most. Some will take surprisingly less time than imagined, while others will take surprisingly more. This one principle made me realize how much of my previous morning and evening routines were unrealistic in light of my new work schedule, mainly due to not factoring in the commute.

Tool #3: The 4 D’s. If you can’t do a task, you have four alternatives, which Morgenstern calls the “4 D’s”:

1. Delete. Just because something isn’t worth doing now doesn’t mean it’s worth doing later. Many things aren’t worth doing at all. Don’t create schedule clutter by postponing unqualified activities. Get rid of them
2. Delay. Consciously deferring lower-priority tasks isn’t procrastination; it’s triage. Procrastination is avoiding making decisions on when or if to do something, where “later” becomes default by definition
3. Delegate. Enlist the help of others: employees, family members or friends. Many hands make light work. Sometimes resistance to delegation stems from an underdeveloped or overdeveloped ego, but often it’s simply the lack of a trusted technique of tracking external dependencies with a Waiting For list.
4. Diminish. Exercise your “enough” muscle, and reexamine the assumption that more is better. A five-sentence email might accomplish 90 percent of what a five-paragraph email would. Shorter meetings might better leverage shorter attention spans. Identify the point of diminishing returns before investing unwarranted time and effort

Tool #4: Develop a big-picture view. So much information and so many opportunities are thrown at us every day that we need a vantage point to see the big picture that throws minutiae into perspective. In GTD these vantage points are life categories — like “Finance,” “Friendship” or “Fitness” — called areas of focus, which we clarify or review as a checklist or a mind map. Julie just calls them categories. Every activity, task and project worth attending to fulfills some meaningful category (even if it’s genuine recreation). Otherwise, it’s clutter that can be pared away.

Developing a big-picture view involves three steps:

1. Define your life categories. Julie recommends no more than six, to avoid diffusing your efforts
2. Ask, “What’s my big-picture goal?” for each category. “Finance” is a category. “Save $1.3 million for retirement” is a goal
3. Decide what two or three activities will get you to these goals — three maximum

Having a big-picture perspective reconnects you to the purpose that drives each activity, giving you the motivation to stay engaged with it. We don’t exercise to exercise, but to achieve or maintain health and fitness.

Tool #5: Time maps. Unlike an actual schedule, a time map is a template of how we generally allocate our time during each day of a normal week. You can see some sample maps Julie created for some of her clients, or check out Lifehacker’s “Map your time” article, which has a downloadable spreadsheet of a time map template.

Where a schedule would have a specific task assigned to a time, like “1:00-3:00 PM: Edit Chapter 6,” a time map would simply denote the more general, regular activity like, “1:00-3:00 pm: Editing.” Identifying and creating spaces for general routines does two things: (1) it allows you to see whether or not you’ve actually made sufficient time available for all categories and (2) it allows you to see the cyclical nature of your time, and realize that it’s much less erratic than you might otherwise assume. For those with more varied schedules, like teachers or consultants, it’s easy to design updated time maps as needed.

Tool #6: Planner. Whether you use a paper or electronic system, your planner is the landscape that holds everything you intend to do, and when you intend to do it. Unlike Dave Allen’s hard landscape approach to getting things done, where only non-discretionary time is scheduled, Julie recommends scheduling every To Do, arguing that tasks not connected to a “when” tend not to get done. As mentioned earlier, she makes no distinction between organizing time and organizing space; so she applies the SPACE method she outlined in Organizing from the Inside Out:

• Sort things and group similar items: also known as batching
• Purge unessentials
• Assign a place for everything
• Containerize: use time maps to define the parameters of each meaningful activity
• Equalize: periodically reassess the effectiveness of your system

Two hours of time well spent

Time Management for the New Year is much more extensive seminar than I would have expected in such a short length. The Q-and-A, which I didn’t cover in the six tools above, goes into advice on how to use commute time more productively, how to stick to taking personal time off, and factoring in daily interruptions when scheduling high-focus projects. After being completely overrun with work for weeks, I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel thanks to much of the material in Time Management.

Neat

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

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

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

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

Organized

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

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

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

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

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

Uncluttered

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

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

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

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

(Photo credit: mizocrazy)

Technorati Tags: Decluttering

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)

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