Tools for Thought

Realizing the life we want to live requires action. Discerning that life requires perspective. Action usually requires at least some loss of perspective. It’s hard to drive while reading the map. In a society rich with information, entertainment and commodities, perspective demands that from time to time we enter the devil’s workshop of idleness. An ethic of constant activity is like a car without breaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the initial steps in the GTD in-basket processing:

1. Pick up item from In
2. Ask, “What is it?”
3. Ask, “Is it actionable?”
4. [If yes] Ask, “What’s the successful outcome?”
5. Ask, “What’s the next action?”

In my opinion, there’s a glaring ommission in the algorithm, one that leads to overpopulated project and action lists. After asking, “What’s the next action?”, we should ask, “Do I want or need to act on it?”

Perhaps that’s implied when asking if something is actionable, but that’s hardly a forgone conclusion. The ability to rapidly determine the critical path to an outcome does not automatically endow someone with the ability to decide that the outcome is worth the time and effort necessary to achieve it. The skill of parsing equivocal intentions into clear outcomes and action steps needs to be filtered by good judgement.

In the standard workflow diagram, inputs are only explicitly discarded when they’re not actionable; otherwise they’re delegated or deferred. The Someday/Maybe list becomes a junk drawer for things that could be acted on, but aren’t priorities. We need some point in the decision tree that asks if we need to keep a certain items at all.

Strategic Questioning

The most strategic place to ask “Should I act on this?” is after determining the next action. Then you have enough data to make an informed judgement. If you habitually discard inputs prior to processing them, you risk thinking about them again and again. A moment of processing on the front end can save extra cycles downstream.

For instance, if there’s a piece of software that looks potentially worthwhile, I’ll spend a maximum of two minutes reading a summary of its features and viewing screenshots, then intuitively decide whether or not it’s worth invesigating further. In most cases, I conclude that it the application doesn’t provide enough return on effort, so I drop any further consideration of it — it’s out of my head and out of my system once and for all.

If I do decide that it’s worth further investigation, I’ll print out any reading on it that’s longer than two minutes for my Read/Review folder, or write down “Install X” as a next action. If the installation takes less than two minutes (e.g. Firefox extensions), I’ll install without writing the action down, but I do write “Test X” to prevent downloading things without trying them. I want to either adopt or uninstall it as soon as possible.

The worst thing you can do is respond to an input with “that’s interesting,” without reaching a conclusion on it. Is it interesting enough to spend time on? Does “interesting” mean important? When we allow things that attract our attention hover in our psyche indefinitely, their meaning to us diminishes. It becomes like watching television, where a political candidate and a brand of soap are given equal treatment between shows. Consciously decide on the meaning of everything that enters your life, and it becomes easier to consciously live a meaningful life.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done was one of the first productivity books to openly discuss the use of PDAs and software, so it’s no surprise that many technology enthusiasts latched onto GTD with uncommon zeal. It suddenly became easy to dignify a gadget fetish by invoking work as the rationale.

Newcomers to GTD often purchase new gear to motivate themselves into new behavior. A new pen, labeler or smartphone helps reconfigure the convert’s environment to reaffirm that he or she has, in fact, changed.

But how much is enough? As we gain experience with using the system, we hopefully come to better understand what we need don’t need to actually get things done. Unfortunately for many of us, “gaining experience” means little more than increased exposure to paraphernalia. Deep down we all know that we can’t accessorize our way into greater productivity.

If you suspect that you’re getting caught up with modifying your system instead of using it, it’s time to pause for reflection. Here are some guidelines and considerations.

Are you really unproductive? The truth is that you may be a high performer who’s overly self-conscious. Who worries more about their grades, A students or C students? Having higher standards raises the bar for perceived failure. One of the unique aspects of having a system for explicitly tracking all the widgets you need to crank is that you actually know all of the widgets you haven’t cranked. If you want to know what you haven’t done, just look at your lists. Don’t compare yourself to colleagues who work from the seat of their pants.

At least theoretically, the things on your lists are there because they weren’t priorities compared to the things you’ve taken off the lists that were.

Clearly distinguish between methodology and technology. The essence of GTD is getting any and all things that have your attention out of your head, making clear decisions on them, and putting those decisions into external placeholders that you can review and act from. Everything else is detail.

Whether you supplement your calendar with a tickler file is a detail. Whether you use Outlook or Google Calendar is a detail. Whether you use a PDA or index cards is a detail. Whether you keep your inventory of things to do in your head or outside of your head is of essence.

To quote Bruce Lee for the obligatory martial arts reference: “I hope martial artists are more interested in the root of martial arts and not the different decorative branches, flowers or leaves. It is futile to argue as to which single leaf, which design of branches or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all its blossoming.”

Begin with the end in mind. When you buy a new piece of kit, what are you trying to accomplish with it? What’s the successful outcome? Maybe you’re getting a new smartphone because it takes up less space than a day planner. Maybe you’re getting a Tablet PC because you want a convenient way to read all of your documents in portrait mode.

The key question is: What specific problem are you trying to solve? Don’t let a tool’s features define your problems. Consider your implementation problems, determine if a tool (or lack of one) is actually the impediment, and make the necessary corrections.

Consider the speed of data entry and retrieval. A good tool is one that reduces drag on your system. Don’t expect too much from one tool. A good list manager isn’t necessarily the best medium for rapid collection. I’ve used a Treo (now a Centro) ever since I adopted GTD, but use a low tech notetaker wallet, capturing with pen and paper. I like the Centro for its compactness and desktop integration, but paper for its speed and flexibility. If a gadget or software application isn’t fast and fluid to use after the initial learning curve, dump it and go back to what you were using before until you find something that’s demonstrably superior.

It always warms my heart to see people questioning dominant ideas. Since I’ve been dubbed a “productivity blogger” by Lifehacker, it seems only fitting that I should question my own perceived stock in trade. So here are some ruminations along those lines.

The Alternative Productivity Manifesto. Challenges the sacred cow of productivity as self-development and as the royal road to fulfillment. In a world where increases in worker output in the last half century have not translated to increases in pay or decreases in the workweek, it may be time to pause and reexamine the more-is-better ethos. (The Growing Life)

Why You Should Kick the “Versus” Habit. Life is simpler when values and options are reduced to choices between mutual exclusives, but we all know that reality is more intricate than that. A primer on how to slow down, think more, and question assumed certainties. (Lifehack.org)

Productivity v. Ingenuity. An arguably fruitful application of the “versus” habit and a further critique of productivity — there seems to be a trend emerging here: a movement to put the value of productivity in context. I wonder if productivity has reduced the scope of our current thinking, or if our current thinking has reduced the scope of productivity. (Dumb Little Man)

8 ninja uses for binder clips. Surely there’s only one true ninja use for the binder clip: the Hipster PDA. Apparently there are other ways to repurpose this lowly office supply, like the Hanging Note System. (Cranking Widgets)

While I was in the middle of reordering, revising and adding sections to the Pattern Language for Productivity series for a downloadable version, one of my more saintly readers, D.L. Fuller, preempted me and sent in PDF and RTF versions, which I’m making available now.

I still see errors and omissions in the series, so I’m still editing the content for a later revision, but in the meantime, please feel free to download and distribute the existing copies at will. The PDF is a beautifully formatted 2-column version, and the RTF is equally well formatted, complete with clickable links. Mr. Fuller went above and beyond the call of duty here, and I can thank him enough.

• Download A Pattern Language for Productivity PDF
• Download A Pattern Language for Productivity — RTF

Technorati Tags: Productivity, GTD

The title says it all. LifeDev has graciously posted my guest article here. It deals with explicitly looking for the presuppositions that frame how we view a problem or project. It also contains a few examples for you to run through as a lateral thinking training exercise.

In a reply to my Pattern Language entry on General Reference Files, David Goodger recently commented:

I have never understood the rule to use hangerless file folders. I don’t see how using Pendaflex adds any overhead. The rule seems completely arbitrary, and Allen’s GTD book doesn’t back it up with any arguments or evidence.

Do you agree with the rule, and could you expand on the reasoning behind it?

My logorrheic reply was becoming a de facto post, so I’ve made it an actual post.

I use hanging folders for my tickler file. It’s easier to keep a mere 43 folders upright with Pendaflex than with a follower block, and the even weight distribution makes them easier to bring forward each day.

I started my reference filing system by using Pendaflex. I didn’t realize that my file cabinet had a follower, so Pendaflex was a no-brainer. Over time, however, I noticed that my willingness to file things immediately began to drag. I didn’t like having to assemble the folder, the hanger and the label tab — not to mention labelling the tab insert. So I chucked the tabs, made a preassembled stock of folder/hanger pairs that I kept in the back of the file cabinet, and labelled directly on the folder.

One problem I had with doing this was that the label on the folder tab would only extend halfway above the hanger, making it difficult to read. I also found myself irritated with having to extract the folder from the hanger, since the folder is all I wanted on my desk, and reinsert it when finished.

I was inclined to dump the hangers at that point, but in my experience, any ad-hoc backstops like bookends or magnetic followers inevitably lead to flaccid files unless my file cabinet was filled to the brim. Pendaflex was the lesser evil.

I should point out that I only had a single two-drawer file cabinet, with one drawer allocated as a tickler file and the other for general reference. My workstation’s location made it physically impossible to add another file cabinet. In that context, a folder enclosed in a hanger is wasted space — you might be able to get two or even three naked folders in the same space, depending on their contents.

Then one day I discovered that my file cabinet actually did have a follower in the back. I ditched the hangers and have just used naked folders since. While I still think that Pendaflex hangers are more aesthetic and give better weight distribution, it’s easier for me to retrieve and file things rapidly if I only have to deal with the folder.

The only other component to deal with is the labeler when the file is created. The typical use case for files is a one-to-many ratio for creation-to-retrieval, so the overhead of using a labeler is worth it.

The bottom line for me is that David Allen does, in fact, advocate the hangerless folder tip too strenuously, but I still think it’s the more convenient route unless you:

• Have plenty of space in your file cabinet
• Keep a stock of empty, preassembled folder/hanger pairs close at hand
• Prevent your labels from being obscured or engulfed by the hangers
• Have a file cabinet with no follower block

If you preassemble folders and hanger, you might actually want to keep the plastic tabs and add those onto the hangers. Then when its time to make a file, apply the label to the surface of the plastic tab itself instead of the insert. It doesn’t look as good, but it does save a little extra fiddling.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to idea generation and problem solving is familiarity with our own thought process. A problem, once recognized, evokes a chain of associations drawn from memory, and the strong tendency is to apply a stock solution that worked in the past for a similar situation. The existing ideas or solutions may or may not be sufficient, but in any case we want something more original.

Many people have noticed that after grappling with a problem, a change of context is often all that’s required to evoke new insights: sleep on a problem, take a walk, take a shower. These “brain breaks” can be effective, but the results are haphazard, and the process is inefficient. There must be a more conscious way to disrupt the flow of thought from its usual pathways

Random Stimulation

When a computer program needs to generate a random number, it actually generates a pseudorandom number based on a mathematical formula — computers, after all, aren’t very random by nature. The randomness of the pseudorandom number is increased by modifying or “seeding” it with an externally derived number, like that day’s calendar date.

The human brain can benefit from a similar procedure: taking some external input to disrupt and modify its established thinking patterns. One of the most systematic methods of random stimulation, drawn from the advertising industry, is the random word technique.

The classical implementation of the random word technique is to pose your problem, then open up a book to a random page, and pick the first word on the fifth line down. The word position is arbitrary (it could just as easily be the fourth word on a first line), but the rule helps guard against selection for relevance. The object is to pick a word precisely because it’s not relevant to the problem, forcing the mind to approach the problem from a new angle.

An Example

The owner of a hamburger stand gets a call from one of his three employees. He’s quitting with no advance notice, and there’s no one to cover his shift until a replacement is found. To help the owner solve this problem, I decide to toggle from this document and choose the first noun that appears in the fourth paragraph of a Wikipedia entry I have open. The magic word is “gardens.” Thinking out loud:

• Gardens grow . . . Offer overtime to the remaining two employees to extend (grow) their shifts, minimizing the hours the owner has to cover
• Gardens . . . Plants . . . Plants need pruning . . . Cut (prune) the hours of operation to the most profitable times
• Gardens are beautiful . . . Close for remodeling (beautifying) as a pretext while hiring in the interim
• Gardens . . . Plants . . . Transplant . . . Contact neighboring food establishments to see if staff can be spared (transplanted) in exchange for another resource or favor

Granted, none of the ideas here are sensational, but I should point out that this example is an exercise I just came up with while writing this post. I didn’t pick an existing “best case” to make the exposition more persuasive.

Getting Started

Using random words is difficult at first. It’s extremely tempting to abandon the effort and pick a “better” word. The temptation should be resolutely resisted. Cherry picking randomly generated words is tantamount to choosing the word in the first place. The criterion for choosing will always be relevance, and the provocative effect is lost — there’s no broadening of context.

One allowable modification of the “no selection” rule is to use nouns instead of verbs and adjectives. Nouns tend to have richer networks of associations and are easier to work with. For instance, you might use the magazine in front of you to select a random word, and decide before opening it that you’re going to pick the first noun in the last paragraph.

When training yourself to use random words, use a timer to ensure the you spend sufficient time with each problem-word pair. Set the timer for two to five minutes for each pair, and keep generating associations until the timer goes off. Don’t stop if you get a brilliant idea; keep going until the end of the allocated time. The brilliant idea will still be there (you can and should write it down), but spending the extra time might lead to an even more brilliant one, and for training purposes, the process matters more than the content you generate.

For any task management system to be trustworthy, it has to be realistic. It needs to have as few placeholders as possible, but no fewer. It needs to hold as many projects and actions as we’re genuinely committed to, but no more.

The discipline of rapidly capturing new inputs and processing them into a list or calendar needs to be matched with an equally important discipline: the ability to review and reevaluate whether or not a to-do is worth doing. We need to be willing and able to take things off a list as rapidly as we put them on.

Reviewing projects and actions contains a paradox. To give reviews the full attention they need to get everything off of our minds, we need to be willing to step into the eye of the storm and escape the busy trap. That means sacrificing time that might otherwise be spend doing some of the things we’re reviewing. But it also means that while we’re “idle,” everything seems doable, and it becomes easy to confuse overpopulating an action list with “total capture.”

For most of us, a list of 35 things to do at a computer is not realistic — not in the sense that they can’t be done, but in the sense that it’s unlikely that the entire list will be scanned with full attention. Having an action list with more items than we can practically review defeats the purpose of making it in the first place. If we gloss over half the list every time we look at it, then we’re implicitly keeping half the list in our heads, even if it’s on paper.

An action list should hold commitments, not shoulds. If the list heading indicates that the items on it should be done, but the list contains items that we realistically know won’t be done, we experience cognitive dissonance. We not only become less responsive to those particular items on list, but the integrity of the entire list is nullified, and we grow numb to the list as a whole. At that point, the list is no longer a functional tool, but simply extra work, which is why people become cynical about lists.

The obvious way to reconcile the dissonance is to follow through on actually doing what we’ve written down. There’s no need to labor the point. But sometimes the best way to manage a list is to do what’s on it.

Another way of following through on our commitments is to cancel the commitments that won’t realistically be fulfilled. Only experience and intuition can effectively discern whether or not a commitment is realistic. Managing agreements necessarily requires a level of personal judgment that can’t be systematized, however much productivity geeks would prefer otherwise.

The other option is to put should-be-done and could-be-done items in an appropriately labelled category. In GTD this list is called Someday/Maybe, but whatever it’s called, the point is to put de facto uncommitted actions in a category that matches how the mind actually relates to them rather than how it’s supposed to.

A next actions list is not a capture tool. With some tasks, it’s obvious that they need to get done, so putting those on an action list is more efficient than capturing them on a notepad first. But others require more reflection.

Separating the capturing and organizing phases of task management allows space for more contemplative processing. We can jot a note, throw it in our in-basket, then process it at an appropriate time — which may or may not be at the moment the note was taken. Having a buffer between capturing and organizing (i.e. listing, scheduling, filing) gives us the opportunity to think about whether or not something is worth doing.

Finally, having the habit of regularly reviewing all action lists gives us another opportunity to prune our lists. Just because something seemed like a good idea at the time we put it on a list doesn’t mean it will seem like it’s worth doing 24 hours later — or even an hour later. Review your lists and calendar once a day — before or after processing your email, voice mail and intray — and eliminate or defer any items that don’t mesh with your current reality.

Before we can manage our options, we need to have options. By default, the brain organizes learned experience into stable perceptual frameworks and common response patterns. It needs to do this. We wouldn’t want to consider every possible way of crossing the street; we just look both ways and walk if we see no coming vehicles. When encountering new situations, we usually draw on experience for efficiency’s sake. We do what works: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But sometimes we need to approach a problem or a project in a new way, even at the expense of efficiency. Instead of pursuing the first idea that occurs to us, we need to open up our menu of options.

To brainstorm on a problem, capture the obvious solutions first, then allocate a period of time to think of as many alternative solutions as possible without judging them. Then reexamine all solutions.

A good time period to start with is three minutes. Within the three minutes, continue to generate alternatives, even if — especially if — you come up with a good solution well before the time period ends. Use all of the time you’ve allocated. You can pick shorter periods or longer periods. But shorter periods tend not to be long enough to think of many new approaches. Longer periods, like 30 minutes, will tend to yield mostly minor variations on few fundamentally different approaches.

An Example

Someone want to cancel his cell phone account due to poor coverage and poor customer service, but he’s still under contract and would have to pay an early termination fee. The obvious options would be:

• Cancel and pay the fee
• Wait for the contract to expire

Then he lists some alternatives, without worrying about whether or not they’re usable. They may not be usable in the form they’re first expressed, but might be with some modification. In any case, he forges ahead:

• Demand unlimited roaming, threatening to cancel if not honored
• Downgrade to the carrier’s cheapest plan, porting his main number to a new carrier
• See if the charges can be expensed by his company for the remainder of the contract, using a new phone and carrier for personal calls
• Call CS and answer “no” when asked if he’s satisfied with his service

None of these are particularly sound alternatives, but they may lead to a creative accommodation. Let’s look at the second example: downgrading. He might currently be paying $60 a month on his current plan. He finds that he can get a bare bones plan (100 minutes per month, no text messing, etc.) for $20. Doing some research, he discovers that another carrier is offering a plan for $40 a month that’s nearly identical to the $60 plan he signed up for 10 months ago. So he adds the second carrier, using their line for his primary phone (with or without number portability), then dumps the unwanted carrier when the contract expires. He might even be able to combine that alternative with the third one — getting one of the lines expensed by his company.

In the fourth example, he can either make a call to customer service on some routine pretext, or use the first option, demanding unlimited roaming. At the end of the call, when he’s asked if he’s satisfied with his service, he tells the representive that he’s not. In many cases, negative feedback gets escalated, and someone in management calls back the customer to see if there’s some way to improve the situation.

He may end up opting for the obvious approaches, but by brainstorming he now has three times as many options as before, none of which are exclusive. Any of these approaches can be further examined for improvement opportunities: What would it take to make this solution work?

Brainstorming for Problems

Sometimes the difficulty in solving a problem lies in how we’ve defined “the” problem. Framing a problem a certain way frames the array of potential solutions. Someone wants to reduce her fast food consumption. Alternative problem definitions might be:

• Finding more time to cook at home
• Finding meals that are quick to prepare
• Becoming more proficient at cooking
• Ordering fast food in smaller sizes and quantities
• Transitioning to a diet low in sodium, fat, carbohydrates, etc.
• Minimizing or avoiding exposure to fast food venues

She expands way she defines the problem first, creating alternative problems, then takes each or any one or these and brainstorms alternative solutions.

Just because we think of a problem or solution in a certain way first doesn’t make it the best way. By generating alternatives, we create a broader context for deciding the best course of action. If the first, obvious approach turns out to be the best one, we’ve lost nothing by thinking beyond it.

Free Association

In addition to generating alternatives, we may need to simply capture aspects of a problem to make sure that our attention has covered a sufficiently broad scope. Several diagramming options like mind maps are applicable, but in many cases all that’s required is a simple checklist. Applying checklists to the fast food example:

• saving money
• eating less
• cooking
• health
• meal times
• exercise
• menu options
• convenience
• appetite
• habit

And so on. Any of these considerations can be expanded into its own checklist. An outliner, like OmniOutliner or Microsoft Word’s Outline View, provides a good structure for nested checklists: lists can be expanded, collapsed and reordered. As with brainstorming, define a time interval to generate considerations, and keep free associating until you reach the end of that period.