Since all priorities have a personal dimension, it’s healthy to be skeptical of universal formulas for addressing what matters, but one entry point into measuring the impact of activities is the memory trace they leave behind.

What will I remember the day by?

Projecting to the end of the day, looking backward, what tasks, conversations, facts or experiences will you have forgotten? Which ones will linger? The time frame can be expanded or contracted to fit any desired perspective, but a day is concrete enough to make a practical foothold. Long-term perspectives can make planning too abstract if applied as a question on a moment-to-moment basis.

This contrasts with the common time management advice to apply questions like “Will I remember this a year from now?” or “Does this action contribute to the lifestyle I want to have in five years?” to test the worthiness of individual tasks. Many tasks are mundane or routine, but still need to get done. Not every moment can be a milestone. By thinking of those routine tasks as clearing the ground for milestones, you’ll have extra motivation to get them out of the way as soon as possible

Another problem with questioning everything you do in the moment is that it takes you out of the moment, leading to an overly self-conscious relationship with life and work. This is how people come to procrastinate by obsessing over productivity.

Avoid relying on memory for the memorable

To make the legacy question most effective, the answer needs to be parked in some external placeholder rather than held in the mind. When reviewing an action list, you’re doing two things at once: looking for the one item that’s possible to complete (given time, context and energy constraints), and making a judgement about every other action that can wait. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to everything else, and it’s best to do that consciously by acknowledging each item as one that can wait.

The alternative is to rely on memory to prioritize, which typically means ignoring items on a list. I would argue that you’ll have more peace of mind knowing what you’re not doing than wondering what you’re not doing, especially if you live and work in an environment where circumstances change from moment to moment. Take a moment to scan your list to make sure that there’s nothing you won’t have to think about while you’re focusing your attention on what really matters.

Sometimes there’s still a lingering doubt, even after reviewing the list, that there’s something else out there that hasn’t been identified. When in doubt, do a mind sweep: write down everthing that has your attention, even if it’s already down on a list. If an item on the mind sweep is already logged as project or a next action, review those entries to make sure they’re properly defined and current — if an item is already written down but still on your mind, there’s probably some further processing that needs to be done to get it off your mind. If an item on a mind sweep isn’t already entered into your system, process it now, or just do the action if it takes less than two minutes.

Encompass the total quality of experience

What you remember the day by will be more than projects completed and actions checked off. A day should be measured by the total quality of experience, not the volume of work done. It’s possible, and common, for people to put in long hours and work hard, but have no memory of the what they’ve done that day.

One way to correct this is to record and review what’s gotten done, but that narrows the scope of experience to actions, a single dimension of a multifaceted reality. There are other things to remember: friendships formed, conversations had, facts or truths learned, personal insights and realisations, new projects to look into, old projects to let go of, laughs, reminiscences, and anything else that has a way of making itself memorable. Get things done, but keep that doing in perspective.

Technorati Tags: Productivity

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

The converse of this practice is the controversial part: don’t put anything else on your calendar. The idea is to avoid using a calendar as a filtered To Do list. In this scheme, the first priority is to review your calendar to make sure that any items that do have a genuine time dependency take precedence. Next Action lists are reviewed and worked off in the windows between scheduled items.

There are some exceptions. If a task is expected to take about an hour or longer, it’s useful to block the time on the calendar to avoid interruptions. Because of the extended time factor, these tasks can be treated as events. If an item is not an actual commitment, but has a time or date dependency, like a theater event you’re still undecided about attending, entering it on the calendar will allow you to see it on your Weekly Review and make a final decision on it; this is essentially using your calendar as a tickler file.

Hard landscape and time management

Not scheduling or prioritizing next actions runs contrary to generally accepted principles of time management. Having an uncrowded calendar seems to imply a lack of commitment.

In GTD, the calendar is used for information, not motivation. If a task doesn’t actually have to be done today, entering the task on today’s date sends the brain mixed signals. It sees that the task “needs” to be done today, but knows that there’s no actual date dependency beyond arbitrary scheduling. Mixing real date dependencies with fake ones erodes the hard edges between categories, and erodes the calendar’s trustworthiness.

If the mind has to re-sort the day’s calendar to determine which tasks on it genuinely have to be done (to avoid consequences), the purpose of processing on the front end is defeated. When the processing of inputs is done properly, there should be no need to mentally rebuild list and calendar entries during the review phase, unless a new input has suddenly shown up (like the boss asking, “Do you have a minute?”).

What about Parkinson’s Law?

According to the oft-cited Parkinson’s Law, work expands to fill the time allotted to it. If someone is given eight hours to do a five-hour task, it will take eight hours. The corollary usually drawn from this is that shortened deadlines lead to optimized execution. Therefore people will put self-imposed deadlines on their calendars for things that have to real time boundary, in an effort to motivate themselves to work faster.

Just how effective Parkinson’s Law is in practice depends on a number of factors.

Notice that when people cite personal examples of Parkinson’s Law in action, they’re almost always in the context of real emergencies. This is the equivalent of lifting a heavy vehicle to rescue a child trapped underneath it. Both cases draw on reserves available in special circumstances, but are not sustainable. Constantly burning the midnight oil to meet the next morning’s deadline eventually leads to impaired performance, just like running a car at top speed.

Parkinson’s Law is usually ineffective with wage earners, for reasons that should be obvious. If someone is getting paid by the hour, there’s not much reason to expect that worker to optimize while forgoing self-interest.

With teams, Parkinson’s Law is demonstrably ineffective. There are simply too many unknowns and mutual dependencies to ensure that everyone on a team can maintain an accelerated schedule. Since one team member’s output is often another member’s input, all it takes is one person to fall behind for whatever reason, and the entire team is affected.

Parkinson’s Law is more effective the less it’s used

Parkinson’s Law is not sustainable. When someone continuously works with abbreviated deadlines, especially ones that are self-imposed, the anxiety created by manufactured urgency leads to errors and burnout that will typically require more time to compensate for them. Even when people do execute projects on accelerated deadlines, Parkinson’s Law dictates that they will simply fill the gained time with more work.

The use Parkinson Law effectively, it needs to be used occasionally, not continuously. It’s possible to get most of the benefits of Parkinson’s Law just by mentally modeling the course of action you would take if time were restricted: How would I complete this project if I only had one-third of the time?

The only problem with proceeding in this fashion is underlying assumption that things need to be done fast. Before trying to figure out how to do something faster, ask yourself if it actually needs to be done faster. You might just need a clearer next action.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Take a load off, Fanny”

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

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

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

How much work is unpluggable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linguistic overload

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

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

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

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

Limiting the scope of productivity to the practical

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

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

Not usually. But it can still be worthwhile to question that assumption. You can surprise yourself sometimes when you frame alternatives to “What’s the next action?” It’s often the case that “the” next action is really “a” next action, the most obvious one among several options. A different line of questioning can potentially find a new entry point into a project.

One of my favorites is, “What can I do right now?”

Does that @Computer action really need to be done at a computer? Is it possible to get the information by phone? Can the first paragraph or two of your next blog post be drafted on the back of a nearby envelope? If tonight you find out that you need to call someone tomorrow morning, and you don’t have the number, can you at least get the number to have it ready? If there’s something on your mind that’s not getting done, what can you do right now?

If you’re holding back on making a phone call because you don’t know exactly what to say, spend the next few minutes scripting exactly what to say. If you’re not confident that your resume polished enough to email, open it up now and review it to see if there are any edits that need to be made. If you don’t know where to spend the vacation time you’ve accumulated, write a list of potential locations

But what if it takes longer than two minutes?

According to the Two Minute Rule, if an action takes less than two minutes, you should do it right then, even if it’s a low-priority item. Otherwise it would take more time to write it on a list and review it later. The converse of the rule is that if an action takes longer than two minutes, you should write it down to avoid getting lured into an activity whose priority hasn’t been evaluated against other tasks on your list.

That’s good advice if understood in context. When you’re batch processing an in-basket, the best way to avoid getting derailed is by adhering to the guideline that each item should take no longer than two minutes. So if you have 40 items in your intray, it should theoretically take a maximum of 80 minutes to process it to zero. In practice, it should take far less, since many items will be filed or discarded more or less instantly.

But there are times when the two-minute interval should be lenthened, shortened or dispensed with altogether. When I’m doing a weekly review, even doing two-minute actions can pull my attention away from a more appropriate project-level focus. So I write them down with checkmarks denoting them as action items to do immediately after the review.

If the action takes longer than two minutes, and you’re not in processing mode, then it might be more efficient to handle the item in the moment, especially you’re reasonably sure that it will only take a few minutes. If you’re not sure that something else might take precedence, don’t hesitate to review your calendar and action lists.

But the main point is that if there’s something that you need to get done, challenge yourself to see if there’s anything you can do this very moment to carry it forward. What can you do right now?

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

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

Technorati Tags: Thinking operations

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

Output Focused Tools

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

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

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

Batched Output

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

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

@Writing

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

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

An ongoing experiment

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